Original Desmond

I remember as a kid salivating at the NEO Geo home console back in the day ! Other home consoles of the time paled in comparison to arcade games but here was a console which had the same quality arcade games ! Only catch was it cost a small fortune, as did the cartridges for it.

I didn't know anyone who had one of these consoles at the time.

Anyone here lucky enough to have rich enough parents who bought one of these for them as a kid ?

PhantomStranger

I didn't know a single person that owned one either, though I remember seeing its price in stores. That taught the videogame companies you can't price hardware that high and expect to become a mass market item. Well, until Sony ruined it all with the PS3's launch price and permanently costing themselves market share.

Why So Blu?

i only knew one person that had one. They were middle class folk. It was a cool system but I never got to play it. i just played whatever games they had at the local arcade. The last one I remember playing was Samurai Showdown.

Original Desmond

I saw them as the 'laserdiscs' of the gaming world at the time. A niche market only afforded by a few but you got the quality that you paid for. I could imagine putting direct arcade ports onto a home console couldn't have been cheap back then, hence the high prices.

We are pretty lucky nowadays with the cost of technology being so affordable.

foxdvd

My first year in college I bought one. I still have the system, and the last time I checked it it worked perfect...

I never paid full price for games, you could get them usually under 200, but I did pay 249 bucks in 1993 for Samurai Shodown. It was one of the most amazing games to play with a group of drunk friends. (edit to add I think I also paid 249 for fatal fury)

james2025a

I had a friend who was always trying to keep one step ahead of the game and had a Neo Geo back in the day. Personally i thought it was a little stupid as buying the games cost a small fortune.

A few years after this a different friend asked me to drive him to meet a guy to buy an arcade machine. We ended up in a small building that was crammed with all types of arcade machines. He bought an old basic two player arcade style machine and he had a number of games for it. In fact i still believe he has it in his house. Will be interesting to see when i am back in the UK this Christmas.

edstein

I don't think the price of the console was the deal breaker. The game prices were. I never had one but I sure wanted one.

My Other Self

I didn't know anyone that had one (although I knew someone that had both 3DO and a Turbo Grafx-16), but I remember playing with one at Service Merchandise at some point in the early 90s.

starseed1981

Not a single person. And I think people who are Neo Geo collectors are insane. $200+ per game thats available free via emulation....insanity. But to each his own I guess.

Why So Blu?

I remember that the games also had insane amount of MB's for the time. They started out at 50 or so and when Art of Fighting came out that was the first 100MB game. This was during a time that Super Nintendo and Genesis had games with only 8MB. I think the Street Fighter II ports were the first games to be 16MB and those adaptations of the arcade game were lame.

Damn, what a flashback. Anyone remember Fatal Fury? That was the bomb, yo!

foxdvd

Fatal Fury was amazing...

RichC2

Actually, the largest SNES cartridges only reached around 48 Megabits, or roughly 6MB. Street Fighter II was a whopping 16 megabit cartridge, or, you know, 2 MB.

Neo Geo allowed cartridges up to 768 mbit, or about 90 MB. The absurd cartridge price was actually justified.

fujishig

Right, that's why I never even considered one myself. Heck, I was a gigantic fan of the Phantasy Star series and never got IV for the Genesis because it was a hundred bucks, and that was less than half a Neo Geo game...

tommyp007

One of my friends bought one. I can't remember how much he paid for it, but he saved for quite a while to get it.

wlj

Nobody around me had one. hell i never even saw one in a store

faust69

I still had mine up until last year when I finally donated it to a friend who runs a convention and the system would look great in his video game room. Had the two joystick monstrosities with it, memory card, and 4 games. I originally bought it for $300 around 1997 or so and it came with Fatal Fury 1, World Heroes 1, and Magician Lord. I bought Samurai Shodown 2 for it and the damn catridge cost me about $230. But I'm a big fan of the SS series so I had to have it. Played the hell out of that game for years and barely touched the other 3.

Edison

I don't know anyone that had one, but I remember it and the cartridges on sale at Software Etc. in the mall.

Matt925

I didn't know anyone with it either but I always fantasized about it. Nam 75, samurai showdown, the baseball game and later metal slug were my favorites. Played all the time at 7-11 and the local arcade.

Oh yeah, king of the monsters too! Like rampage on steroids, loved playing that at 7-11