Most ridiculous game purchases: Neo Geo

I'm not talking about now where you can acquire every single game that Neo Geo ever made on an emulator. I'm talking early 90's when if you ever saw one of these things for sale it was in a catalogue and there wasn't much chance you were going to be interested in buying it.

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I'm talking about this beast. The machine whose cartridges were the size of other guys' consoles. I'm talking about a system so advanced for the time-period that it cost a thousand dollars for the basic console, another $100 for a 2nd controller, and the games were 2-4 hundred dollars each. Needless to say not many people bough this thing because no matter how much you love games, you gotta be in a very special category to be willing to spend that kind of money on them, espcially when you consider that the Neo Geo wasn't capable of doing anything other than play it's own enormous cartridges.

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According to a friend of mine that worked in arcades as a pinball repairman (yes, that is a real job) Neo Geo's were popular among arcade owners because unlike their competitors, the cabinets could host multiple games and when the owner wanted to change up said games, he merely needed to order another cartridge, rather than an entire cabinet with new hardware. Neo Geo managed to make some pretty great games back in the day even though a lot of them were considered clones of more popular games such as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat arcade games which were making huge money at the time.

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Almost all of the games on the Neo Geo were fighting or shooter games and this is because nearly every game that SNK produces was meant to be a quarter muncher at the arcade and not necessarily be something that you would play at home. I think that Neo Geo realized that at such a high price point, not many people were going to be purchasing this machine for home use. But if you did get one of them you would be in possession of the ONLY game system whose games were exactly the same as their arcade counterparts. This was a big problem with home consoles prior to say the end of the 90's: the Arcade version of the games were so much better than the home version that the home versions were often very disappointing.

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There were some really solid titles on the SNK arcade machines like Metal Slug that everyone loved but nobody really ever completed because it was just a bit strange to be playing a side-scrolling shooter at an arcade for an hour trying to get to the end of the game. There was very little chance that you were goin to get one of these things at home...... unless, your super-nerdy neighborhood friend with really rich parents who spoil him rotten ends up getting one... and that is exactly how I got to play a few of these arcade gems on an unlimited scale.

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This this was an absolute monster and unlike all of the other systems at the time the default controller was a gigantic joystick that emulated the look of the arcades themselves. The idea for my untra nerdy friend was that he would get super good at the fighting games at home and then go to the arcade and dominate much to the delight and awe of other nerds. I guess you could say it worked, because it wasn't possible for anyone to practice as much as he did but looking back both of us, who are now in our 40's, look back on the fact that this situation happened at all with a little bit of shame and a lot of laughter. This is something crazy like $2500 in today's money and to spend that on a console is just insane, even if it was your parents' money.

So in that regard I considered the Neo Geo an absolutely silly home console purchase decision and I cant believe that he actually did it. He likely ended up giving the machine away at some point the same way that I offloaded all of my own systems. I suppose it is worth something to a collector but I would imagine it is no where near as much as it cost to buy it new back in 1992.