I remember when I first heard the legend of the Neo Geo console. I was on a school outing to a nearby park, walking and talking about video games with another kid from my class, the kind of kid who you tolerate because he’s someone to talk to but don’t actually like. I was telling him about my hopes to get a Sega Genesis but how my dad didn’t want to spring for one because we already had an NES and a PC to play games on. The kid told me that the Genesis was fine as far as cheap consumer consoles went but that at a rich friend's house he’d recently seen a console so powerful it could had games that looked as good as actual cartoons on its screen, the true next generation in video game tech. The Neo Geo.

I had no idea what “games that looked as good as cartoons” meant or how you could even play them (since I was imagining a game that looked like an actual cartoon, with off-kilter camera angles and characters who filled the screen) but I had to admit that the name sounded unbelievably cool, and I was intrigued by the idea of this super video game system that made the mighty Genesis look like a pocket calculator by comparison. Then he told me that each game cost $250 and came in a cartridge almost as big as a VCR and I rolled my eyes and attributed the whole thing as a playground story. A video game system whose games looked like actual cartoons and cost 5 times as much as a brand new NES game? Ridiculous. Absurd.

But the Neo Geo was very real.

Of course it didn’t actually have games that looked like cartoons; they looked like arcade games, which is what they were. And if we’re being totally honest most early Neo Geo games (prior to Metal Slug) didn’t look THAT much better than what the Genesis could do. They looked better, sure, but it wasn’t some unbelievable step forwards in graphics like Genesis was over NES. I mean, have you SEEN Sonic the Hedgehog? Have you SEEN that game? It’s pretty frickin’ amazing looking.

Eventually I encountered Neo Geo games like Samurai Shodown and King of Fighters in the arcade and while I was happy to finally get a look at what the kid had been talking about, they just looked like other arcade games. The thought of taking them home unaltered was pretty appealing, but the version of World Heroes for the SNES was actually alright (though the game itself has not held up), and when Doom hit the PC it made arcade games like that a lot less impressive. I mean Samurai Shodown is cool and all, and it even has blood, but Doom is frickin’ 3D and has full on gibs! I would have taken a Neo Geo if you’d offered me one but I didn’t lust after it the way I did a Voodoo card or a SNES.

So it was that the Neo Geo went from a literally unbelievable legend, to a very real arcade platform, to something that was kind of cool but also sort of obsolete in a matter of just a few years. Life moves pretty fast my friends.

The idea of actually going back and playing Neo Geo games never really occurred to me until the Virtual Console on the Wii. Sure I knew about emulation before then, but I have never been a fan of piracy, and besides that I didn’t have a huge amount of nostalgia for a system I had barely played. King of Fighters was always kind of impenetrable to me, with its enormous roster of characters and slightly off from Street Fighter special moves, and Samurai Shodown was cool but a little off-putting with its bladed weapons that didn’t actually cut anyone. As a kid I was always bothered by games where you had a sword but it did no more damage than a punch or kick. Metal Slug was, of course, a beautiful and exciting game, but I never liked to put much money into it because of how hard it was, and because I didn’t like how the POWs all looked the same. What can I say? I was a persnickety lad.

When the Switch launched without a Virtual Console I was disappointed, since I hoped for some small retro games to play on the go, but the emergence of the Arcade Archives Neo Geo ports has helped to ease the pain. It has also resulted in me playing more Neo Geo than I have ever before. Not just the fighting games (which are not great single player experiences at this point) or Metal Slug (which is still gorgeous but not my jam. Also I have bought SO MANY VERSIONS of that game) but shooters like Blazing Star and Alpha Mission II. The games are…fine. They’re 90s arcade games, which is to say that they have very pretty 2D graphics, refined controls, and are a little bit more difficult and cheaper than I prefer my games to be. I can honestly say that exploring some of the TurboGrafx-16 library through the Wii Virtual Console was more of a revelation, since those games were designed and balanced to be played on a home console. Also, Ninja Spirit, which was originally an arcade game, but holy shit Ninja Spirit. Ninja Spirit is fantastic.

But despite the…adequacy…of the games there’s still something a little magical about having a library of Neo Geo games at my disposal. I can’t help but think back to that playground conversation a lifetime ago and the legend of this special console with $250 games and graphics so good they looked like a TV show. There's also the fact that the Neo Geo lasted from 1990, when it was released, to 2005, when the last game was released (though really it lost steam by 2000-2001.) That's an amazing run for an arcade platform, and the advances in the way games looked over that more than a decade were incredible. It was born alongside the Genesis and lived long enough to get ports to the PS2. That's damned impressive, any way you slice it.

The Neo Geo was, for me, something you don’t see a lot in gaming. A wild unbelievable rumor that turned out to be 100% true. Back then, before the Internet, you could have such things and there was no real way to easily confirm or disprove them. Just for representing that time, and for sparking my 8 year old imagination, there will always be something a little magical about Neo Geo games for me.

Except League Bowling. That game’s just lame. Bowling video games in general are lame. Why are there so many bowling video games anyway?

It does always seem to be military / action movie style for SNK. Their games are so of that time! And of course, they have the bright Sega-style HUD elements.

I've appreciated Neo Geo from afar, or on trips where we encountered the arcade machines. Except for Samurai Shodown 1 and 2. We would go to the arcade just to play those games for hours. And mostly with the same characters, my buddy playing Gen-An or Earthquake vs my cheap Charlotte. Ah, back then.

On the Switch, I'm so glad it's having a good launch, even though I'll be waiting till Christmas or longer. With every console it's the same for me - I need an exclusive horror game or RPG. That's just how I make the decision.

It does seem a lot like the holding action that people had to go through for the first year of the 3DS. A lot of silver linings in the downloadables, even if they are mostly old ports.

Well, 3DS faithfuls eventually got those ambassador ports nobody else ever would, so who knows.