SNK was a force to be reckoned with in the arcade market, but when that dried up in the late 90s they were kind of out of luck. Their only customers outside of arcade operators were a small number of wealthy enthusiasts, but not enough people were willing to live in a shed to finance their game hobby so SNK had to try and make something that appealed to broader audiences. All of the company‘s expertise was with 2D titles and while 3D games had taken over the home market, the portable market had stagnated. What resulted was the Neo Geo Pocket Color.
SNK did a great job of adapting to the market with the NGPC. Rather than using the “ultra premium” mentality from the AES, they tried to compete with Nintendo directly. What we ended up with was a system that had a better CPU, better graphics, better controls, and better battery life than the Game Boy Color but still cost around the same price. The question I’d like to ask you guys is, assuming SNK didn‘t get bought by a company that recalled all the systems and games because they thought they made better management devices for pachinko machines than handheld game consoles, do you think this strategy would have worked? Obviously it would have never beaten Nintendo in marketshare, but if they had kept making handhelds to compete with the Game Boy series, would they have been able to keep the company afloat until 2D games gained mainstream popularity again? It’s interesting to think about.
I am personally itchin for a continuation of the Dive Alert series
I love the NGPC but it is such an odd duck.
It is a real nice machine for its original price. But who is it for? The games are rarely the type of thing a kid would get into. So what happens when the GBA arrives? They would get stomped even as the budget alternative without some kind of mascot to hook in kids / their parents on a budget. I know they tried with cardfighters, but the market was all about Pokemon clones, and the NGPC could have done an amazing one. I dunno, make it Magician Lord or Blues Journey themed.
Though maybe if they had their own GBA competitor that could have been a place for say Sega / Microsoft to develop a portable branch.
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@robinhoodie#1712 I dunno, make it Magician Lord
Obligatory *there was a Magician Lord sequel planned for the NGPC and one cartridge exists and somehow these two insane videos have less than 2000 views combined after six years and I think that says everything you need to know about how little the poor NGPC made a mark on gamers* segment of our program.
https://youtu.be/MNyIiSodVwc
https://youtu.be/brbilAPqr-4
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@ndiddy#1709 do you think this strategy would have worked?
No. It was an incredible machine but it did not have the business infrastructure, publisher support and marketing network to compete. It was the Dreamcast of its own weight class (with GBC in the role of PS2 and WonderSwan acting like the GC/Xbox second banana). So, of course, it connected with the Dreamcast.
The only games it had which crossed over with mainstream interest at the time were Densha de Go!2 (but it was not an exclusive), Puyo Puyo 2 (but just at the tail end of the Puyo craze) and the SNK vs Capcom card games.
It definitely lacked a Pokémon-type game (I guess Devil Children could have released there instead). It also lacked a proper Tamagotchi-like game for kids – not something cool and experimental like Neo Poke-kun.
But what truly killed it was the competition of the WonderSwan. It’s possible Squaresoft might have been forced to go to the NGPC had the WonderSwan Color not been a thing around the same time. This would have been the ideal partner at the time.
One of the all time great handhelds imo. Great controls, nice chunky form factor. Honestly it's worth buying one just for Dark Arms Beast Buster.
@chazumaru#1718 I've got both NGPC flash carts and trust me at least twice a year I search to see if that Magician Lord rom has been dumped 
Yeah, unfortunately my answer is also that the NGP/C never had a chance. It‘s extremely cool but was always going to be niche without third parties, and SNK just didn’t have the money to make that happen in 1998. They had a real good sonic for a minute there but every time something good came out it felt like it was already too late. Plus from my conversations the developers really did not enjoy working on it. They were used to the Neo Geo, some of them were working on the HNG64 (they didn‘t like working on that either), and the neo geo pocket was so limited in terms of what it could do. The reason the background sprites are so much more detailed than any animated sprites is because they could only have four colors (if I recall correctly) including transparency (just the thing that allows it to be a foreground layer, not visual transparency) per sprite. Because of that some GBC games looked better than NGPC games when they weren’t moving, despite the NGPC's way superior processor, tools for dealing with animation, etc.
That Square partnership Chaz proposes is pretty much the only kind of thing that could've kept it going. Get Square, get actual capcom, not just the licenses, get Sega to actually release games on it, maybe then there'd be something. Even so it's hard to see the path to success for the NGPC, it just wasn't different enough from its competitor, and as others said, the GBA blew it out of the water visually and didn't come out that much later in the grand scheme of things.
I really wonder how far they got with that Neo Geo Pocket 64 prototype they were making. Maybe some day I'll find out.
I love the Neo Geo Pocket, but it sure was niche right out of the gate, and stayed firmly in there for its entire life. Frankly rather than blaming Aruze for taking it over and turning them into pachinko properties, I think Aruze was the only thing that kept the console alive for a couple more months, because the expense of making and supporting the Neo Geo Pocket was tanking the company. It's also likely because of Aruze that the stock got dumped in those legendary cheap blister packs, which is how a lot of folks wound up playing these games. This is just a guess based on how often SNK will just sit on a warehouse full of unsold stuff, from my research, and then eventually sell it with the warehouse, which will then send everything to the dump ;_;
In addition to magician lord 2, there were a lot of finished and near-finished games by the time the console died. The thing I heard from a guy at Dimps is that Samurai Shodown! 3 was finished but never put into production, and he "remembered seeing it in a drawer somewhere." that's the last I heard of that, back in 2006. Oh well!
@exodus#1724 See but ya just revived that Samurai Shodown Anthology having something special tweet. Stop playing with our hearts!
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@robinhoodie#1720 I’ve got both NGPC flash carts and trust me at least twice a year I search to see if that Magician Lord rom has been dumped
I happen to know the person who has the cart but I think this is going to be difficult to get dumped for plenty of reasons, at least in the near future.
I just recently picked up a NGPC, and while I absolutely adore it, I have to agree that it probably wouldn‘t have been able to carve out a bigger niche. It’s an absolute masterpiece of a handheld, but how forgotten to history it is really says it all - for that window where it was about, it just didn't make an impact.
Now, if there had been something that could interact with Neo Geo arcade cabinets (similar to how the AES memory card could), then we might be talking.
@chazumaru maybe I need to… send someone… to their house…
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@exodus#1724 Plus from my conversations the developers really did not enjoy working on it. They were used to the Neo Geo, some of them were working on the HNG64 (they didn’t like working on that either), and the neo geo pocket was so limited in terms of what it could do. The reason the background sprites are so much more detailed than any animated sprites is because they could only have four colors (if I recall correctly) including transparency (just the thing that allows it to be a foreground layer, not visual transparency) per sprite. Because of that some GBC games looked better than NGPC games when they weren’t moving, despite the NGPC’s way superior processor, tools for dealing with animation, etc.
I'm sorry if I sound like a fanboy console warrior or whatever here, but I've done some hobby NGPC dev work so I figured I'd share some knowledge. Both the GBC and the NGPC have 2bpp tiles for both backgrounds and sprites. The reason why the NGPC backgrounds look more colorful is that it has two background layers and some games positioned the second layer directly over the first instead of using it for parallax or something so that games could have 7 colors per 8x8 tile instead of 4 like usual. I suppose some GBC developers were simply better at using multiple palettes per sprite to hide the 4 color restriction than NGPC developers. Kinda funny that developers didn't like the NGPC, I think the CPU instruction set translates pretty well from the 68000 and the graphics chip adds some nice features over the Neo Geo but it definitely wasn't as powerful.
Thanks for all this clarification stuff! That‘s neat about the backgrounds. I think the NGPC’s generally larger sprites also made you notice the lack of color even more.
@ndiddy#1774 Was there a lower limit on the number of sprites on screen on the NGPC that might have contributed? Can‘t use extra sprites for more colors if you’re all out of sprites, after all…
Yes, it‘s super interesting to hear about the NGPC’s technical aspects. @ndiddy I‘d be interested to hear anything else you’d care to share about the technical aspects.
It also makes me wonder what sorts of innovations and tech workarounds bodges we might have gotten in games for the platform if the NGPC had survived longer!
I really wish I could‘ve explored more of the games for the system, but the Dreamcast filled that space. I got the NGPC at an Electronics Boutique for cheap, IIRC most of the games there were on a big discount at the time, and shoved at the bottom of a shelf in a little corner. First immediate choice was Sonic Pocket Adventure, and then Biomotor Unitron, which I think I only got because it had cool robot designs and the parts swapping sounded fun. That was it, though. Never got another NGPC game after that, since I wasn’t big on fighting or puzzle games at the time, and didn't know of any other action/platformer games on the system.
I loved it, though. The cute form factor (I got the clear version), the very satisfying clicky thumb stick, and the super charming OS with color options and a zodiac fortune teller built in! Why? I love it, and would use that frequently and wished more systems had goofy things like that in them.
Biomotor Unitron was _ok_, and I was admittedly a little disappointed that Sonic Pocket Adventure was a weird remixed Sonic 2 and not something entirely new. Disappointment subsided, though, since it was still a portable Sonic 2 at the end of the day. Eventually I'd experience more of it via emulation and fall in love with Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun. Give me another Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun.
Yeah, talking of minis, I‘ve long held that an NGPC “mini” or redux with neo poke kun built in would be amazing. It’s an alternate universe tamagotchi that plays KOF and SNK vs Capcom.
I would love to see the system as Mini actually. And other than Sonic, Pacman, Cotton, Puzzle Bobble, and Capcom, there wouldn‘t be a rights problem. There’s a lot of pick up and play games for the system. Puzzle Link springs to mind. Really every genre could be represented by SNK stuff. Though I could see trying to at least get Capcom on board as Match of the Millenium is the big game for the system. Also the Rockman game is REALLY good.
I dunno, maybe a Switch collection? The one console two player stuff on Gal Fighters is a game changer in terms of appealing to the fighting game community.
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@James-#1790 Was there a lower limit on the number of sprites on screen on the NGPC that might have contributed?
No, I think it was just lazy developers lol. On the NGPC, sprites could pick from 16 3 color palettes and you could have 64 of them on screen. On the GBC, sprites could pick from 8 3 color palettes and you could have 40 of them onscreen.
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@Karasu#1796 I’d be interested to hear anything else you’d care to share about the technical aspects.
OK
One nice feature the NGPC has is called "sprite chaining". Because each sprite is only 8x8 pixels, if you want to show a character who's more than 8x8 you have to put multiple sprites next to each other. On other systems, this process can take up a bit of CPU time as you have to calculate the position of each 8x8 sprite. On the NGPC, you can turn on the "sprite chaining" feature and instead of telling the graphics chip the absolute x/y position of the sprite like usual, you tell it how many pixels to add to the previous sprite's position. This means that once you set up your sprites, you only have to move one rather than doing each individually.
@ndiddy#1810 I wonder if the sprite chaining made it too easy to not hassle with having two sprites in overlapping space for the sake of extra colours? That is odd that they had so much at their disposal and didn't leverage it.