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SNK in the United States
Part 2
By
Matt Leone - 02/18/00
None
of the systems would have mattered if the games were
not any good, but luckily for players, there were many
high quality titles. In the early years, some of the
best games were Magician Lord, Ninja Combat,
Sengoku, Baseball Stars Professional, Nam
’75 and King of the Monsters. Sengoku,
Baseball Stars Professional and King of the
Monsters received sequels, all of which were
quality games as well.
Magician
Lord
is particularly notable because not only was it one of
the best games that the system would ever see, but it
was also SNK’s marquee title in the beginning. This
side scrolling action/platform game allowed players to
morph the main magician character into other
creatures. An upcoming Neo Geo Pocket Color Magician
Lord title has been mentioned by SNK of America,
although no details have been released. [Go to the
unreleased game section on page three for details on Magician
Lord 2]
Like
many early NEO-GEO titles, Baseball Stars
Professional was not successful despite its
quality. Chad Okada responds to the rumors that a
third baseball game was in development: "Baseball
Stars Professional 3 was never a legitimate idea
for the NEO-GEO System. Both Baseball Stars
Professional 1 and 2 for the NEO-GEO were
flops, and by this time SNK was already thinking about
releasing it to mainstream systems since its original Baseball
Stars for Nintendo had a big following...SNK still
holds the rights and they are going to be releasing
software for the new systems including Dreamcast and
PSX2, so they may release Baseball Stars [on
one of these platforms]" [The idea of a next
generation Baseball Stars is pure speculation
by Chad, so please do not take this as a fact]. Some
web sites claim that Baseball Stars 3 is an
actual game, but these reports are false.
Despite
a number of good titles, SNK’s popularity did not
really take off until their NEO-GEO fighting games
came out. The first versus fighting game, Fatal
Fury, was very successful and it spawned a series
of different fighting game titles such as Art of
Fighting, Samurai Shodown and The Last
Blade. These are just a small number of the
fighting games that the NEO-GEO has seen over the past
ten years, and as a result of this, SNK and other
NEO-GEO developers have been criticized by the media
for recycling the same ideas. Despite the lack of
originality, fans still love most new fighting games.
The
original Fatal Fury was released shortly after
Capcom’s Street Fighter 2 had taken off in
popularity. One arcade even made a fake marquee for Fatal
Fury that called the game Street Fighter 3.
SNK’s game was successful enough to warrant numerous
sequels, with Fatal Fury Special (the third
game in the series) and the new Garou: Mark Of The
Wolves being considered the best two games in the
series. The Fatal Fury series has contained one
three dimensional game, Wild Ambition, which
was initially released (in limited numbers in the
United States) on the Hyper Neo Geo 64 hardware, and
then it was converted to the PlayStation home system.
Halfway through the Fatal Fury series, the
title was changed to Real Bout Fatal Fury. Chad
Okada explains: "Fatal Fury was originally
named "Real Bout," but no one in our
office liked the name. Ami Blaire of SNK Home
Entertainment, Inc. came up with the name "Fatal
Fury," which is, of course, the name that we
used for several sequels. However, Japan's marketing
finally changed it back to their name in the game "Real
Bout Fatal Fury."" On the Neo Geo Pocket
Color, Fatal Fury: First Contact has been released to
little fanfare.
The
first video game to ever contain more than 100 megs of
memory (102 to be exact) was Art of Fighting
and SNK used this as a selling point for the game. All
that space allowed the developers to put extremely
large (for the time) characters on the screen and the
view even zoomed in when the characters moved close
together. Following Art of Fighting, SNK labeled all
100+ meg games the Mega Shock series. This label ended
soon enough, and NEO-GEO games these days have more
than five times that amount of memory. Art of
Fighting 2 was a fan favorite, but these days the Art
of Fighting series seems to be finished. There has
not been a real sequel to Art of Fighting since
the third game in the series, although some of the
characters have gone on to star in other games such as
The King of Fighters’ and Buriki One
(a three dimensional wrestling/fighting game on the
Hyper Neo Geo 64 hardware).
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Click
on either picture for a large, readable
version of either side of this Samurai
Shodown flyer |
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One
of SNK’s biggest successes was a game called Samurai
Shodown (Samurai Spirits in Japan). The two
elements that made this game stand out were the use of
weapons and the extremely Japanese style. Samurai
Shodown 1 was a fantastic game and was very
successful, partially due to a great amount of support
from game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly (who
rarely gave NEO-GEO games much coverage until Samurai
Shodown came out). One subject that received a lot
of media coverage was the censorship of the home
cartridge version of Samurai Shodown. The red
blood from the arcade game had been altered and many
fans of the game were upset. Chad Okada tells the
story in-depth: "Yes, the Samurai Shodown
debacle…that was the most painful time in my career
at SNK. I had worked through all of the bad times and
taken all of my lumps because I believed in SNK.
Finally, SNK had a product worthy of its price tag and
I, personally, had loved this game from the very
start. Like many things, I had not known that they had
decided to "censor" the home version. In
fact, I could not even dream that this could happen.
When I received the Samurai Shodown and found
out it had been censored, it was like a knife had been
rammed into my back. My whole world went into a
downward spiral because I loved games and we had
finally had something great. I remember immediately
talking to the President, Marty Kitazawa, at the time
about this fiasco to try to find out what happened and
what they were thinking. The only thing he told me
was, "Yes, the home version is censored." I
had also asked him what we wanted to tell everyone the
reason was that we had censored Samurai Shodown,
and to that, I received no answer. I was to be a good
PR guy and make something up. Many different reasons
for the "censorship" came out of SNK America
and none of them actually became SNK's official word
on this situation. I do remember the Beast Busters
excuse and that was widely used. However, I later
found out the truth for the censorship and although
this was never used as SNK's official word, this was
the truth; SNK, like many companies, were facing many
lawsuits at the time. They were paranoid about being
sued because they could not afford it financially. SNK
started putting epilepsy warnings in the cartridges
because Nintendo lost a big lawsuit over a case. At
this time, there was much negative publicity for
violence in video games and it eventually went to
congress. One of the Mortal Kombat [games] at the time
(I can't remember if it was Nintendo's or Sega's) was
censored [It was the Super Nintendo version]. SNK was
worried about a lawsuit or future lawsuit and decided
to play it safe, because it could not afford not
to." The series continued with three other two
dimensional fighting games, a role playing game, and
two polygon fighting games (three if you count the
PlayStation translation as a different game than the
arcade game Warriors Rage). A new 2D game is
rumored to be coming soon and it is highly
anticipated. On the portable side of things, there
have been two Samurai Shodown games (one for
the black and white Neo Geo Pocket and a sequel for
the color system).
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On
the left is a poorly scanned Japanese magazine
advertisement for Samurai Spiris RPG; On the
right is a postcard for Art of Fighting 2
(click on it to enlarge the picture) |
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After
the Fatal Fury and Art Of Fighting
series’ had a few games under their belts’, SNK
decided to combine the titles into one big fighting
game. Initial rumors reported the title of this game
as The Survivor, but according to Chad Okada,
that was never the real name: "The only name King
of Fighters' ever had, development or otherwise,
was King of Fighters'. The marketing people in
Japan loved to use this phrase or name. Even in the
original Fatal Fury, they used this name to
name the tournament that the game was based on. The
marketing team [in] Japan had certain names that they
loved."
Early
rumors also had characters from the Samurai Shodown
and World Heroes games participating in the
game. Even the early U.S. advertisement for The
King Of Fighters’ 94 had World Heroes (a
NEO-GEO fighting game by developer ADK) mentioned.
Chad Okada explains: "We were initially told that
World Heroes characters would be in the King
of Fighters'. We then found out that they were not
going to be in the game and had to pull or change any
marketing that had World Heroes listed.
Although the full story was never clear to me, there
seemed to be some creative differences on how the
World Heroes characters would look and feel in the
game." The game was released without any World
Heroes or Samurai Shodown fighters,
although some characters from SNK’s older action
game Ikari Warriors were put into the series.
The King Of Fighters’ series has become one
of SNK’s most important titles and the annual
updates will continue with a 2000 version soon. Two
Neo Geo Pocket King of Fighters’ games have
been released ("Round-1" for the black and
white Neo Geo Pocket and "Round-2" for the
color system).
Before
becoming a fighting game system, the other genre that
the NEO-GEO was known for was side scrolling shooting
games. Games like Ghost Pilots, Alpha
Mission 2, Blazing Star, Viewpoint
and Pulstar were very well respected by shooter
fans, with Viewpoint and Pulstar being
especially popular. Unfortunately, there were a few
low quality shooters such as the pathetic Zed Blade.
One
of the most respected series’ on the NEO-GEO system
is that of the Metal Slug games (made by
developer Nazca). When Metal Slug 1 was
announced and the first pictures were shown, it was
hard to really understand what kind of game it would
turn out to be, but the detail and number of different
objects in each screen shot was stunning. The game
turned out to be a character based side scrolling
shooting game and it immediately earned a strong cult
following. Arcades took notice of this and soon Metal
Slug was the first NEO-GEO non-fighting game
success in a long time (with the exception of the Bust-A-Move
series, which has been producing sequel after sequel).
Pretty much the only complaint of the first game in
the series was the excessive slowdown when many
objects came on the screen. Metal Slug 2 did
not eliminate the slowdown issue, but the gameplay was
even more intense and the game was very well respected
by fans. Unfortunately, the third game, Metal Slug
X, was basically the same exact game as number two
with a few minor changes like the time of day in the
backgrounds. Overall, Metal Slug X is
considered to be the best game in the series so far
and most fans love it despite the recycled nature. Metal
Slug: 1st Mission has been released on
the Neo Geo Pocket Color, and the "2nd
Mission" sequel is scheduled to be released soon.
According to SNK of America’s web site, a new Metal
Slug arcade game (Metal Slug 4) is
scheduled to come out in 2000 as well.
Back
to part 1
Coming
Monday: Unreleased games, U.S development, third
party development, SNK vs. Capcom, links and the
conclusion.
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