Hi guys,
I've spent a bit of time tonight perusing various hypothetical threads on the forum about NEC's strategy in North America, how they could have opposed the Nintendo/Sega juggernaut, and so on. It got me to thinking: what about NEC vs. SNK?
Now, a bit of backstory: I've loved both of these consoles for a long time. I've had a consolized MVS for quite a while, and a TurboGrafx for quite a while, loved the games on both. Growing up, I was a Sega kid in terms of consoles, but more (most?) of my gaming time at home was spent on the Commodore 64 and Amiga. I played TG-16 games at friends' houses along with other systems I didn't own (like NES and SNES) and the Neo Geo in the arcades. I remember playing games like the Bonk trilogy, Keith Courage, and Silent Debuggers on the turbo and games like Super Baseball 2020, Fatal Fury, and Samurai Shodown II on the MVS. Since then I've played and enjoyed the libraries of each system extensively.
Now, in terms of technical capability, game library, year released, and overall philosophy the two systems are obviously quite different—we're comparing apples and oranges. However, the Turbo/PCE and the Neo Geo share a few things in common: they're both niche systems and underdogs, and their appeal persists to this day because each system has great games that people still enjoy playing.
So, my question is this: which company/system made a greater mark on American gaming culture, and in what way?
I'd note that I'm not speaking only about the US game library, but what a hardcore gamer had access to imports, magazines, and a decent game shop experienced back then. For example, where I lived it was pretty common to find imported games on sale at an average game store, and you could probably special order them and figure out how to play them if you talked to the guy behind the counter, but you didn't know about absolutely everything or probably have interest in games that required extensive Japanese to play.
As for myself, I'm probably partial to SNK—Metal Slug is one of my favorite games of all time and games like KOF'94 lived up to my dreams about fighting games combining characters from many different fighters, and in general I just remember and play the games more, but still the TG-16 just holds this special place in my heart as a system where a lot of creativity flourished, it introduced new things and was (and is) clearly something special unto itself regardless of its commercial success or failure, but if I look at the actual ideas and techniques that each system has produced, I think that I probably see Neo Geo games being emulated and referenced more often than TG-16/PCE ones.
Since I'd imagine that most of you consider both of these consoles to be pretty awesome, I'm curious to hear your opinions about this—which system has a more enduring legacy and why?
