Neo Geo (system)

Neo Geo (system)

The Neo Geo (ネオジオ, Neo Jio?) is a cartridge-based arcade system board and home video game console released on January 31, 1990 by Japanese game company SNK. Being in the Fourth generation of Gaming, it was the first system in the former Neo Geo family, which only lived through the 1990s. The hardware featured comparatively colourful 2D graphics.

The MVS (Multi Video System), as the Neo Geo was known to the coin-operated arcade game industry, offered arcade operators the ability to put up to six different arcade titles into a single cabinet, a key economic consideration for operators with limited floorspace. With its games stored on self-contained cartridges, a game-cabinet could be exchanged for a different game-title by swapping the game's ROM-cartridge and cabinet artwork. Several popular franchise-series, including Fatal Fury, The King of Fighters, Metal Slug and Samurai Shodown, were released for the platform.

The Neo Geo system was also marketed as a very costly home console, commonly referred to today as the AES (Advanced Entertainment System). The Neo Geo was marketed as 24-bit, though it was technically a parallel processing 16 bit system with an 8-bit Zilog Z80 as coprocessor. The coprocessor was used as a CPU, and for sound processing.

The Neo Geo was ranked 19th out of the 25 best video game consoles of all time by the video game website IGN in 2009. In 2012, SNK Playmore announced the release of the Neo Geo X, a handheld and home console based on the original AES.