Here’s a curious artifact from my archives– a large advertisement for the Neo Geo game system entitled “Neo Geo: Bigger Badder Better”. I have seen the cover image around the internet but I can’t find all the scans. So I guess it falls to me to make sure that the specimen is preserved for all time online. Here is the document in convenient PDF form:
Neo Geo: Bigger Better Badder advertisement in PDF format (~15MB)
This advertisement takes the form of a small magazine. I’m not sure how it was originally distributed. I remember receiving it from this weird kid at the local video arcade (PlayAmerica video arcade in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA; I know I have some readers who remember it). This would have been circa 1993-1994. The kid in question actually owned a Neo Geo. I was a real tech spec fiend back in those days, always quoting the MHz speed of the CPUs and the total palette each console was capable. This kid produced this Neo Geo ad which was right up my ally. He let me keep it and now here we are.
The advertising material is far more aggressive than anything Sega ever produced. But selling a $650 video game console (this was the early 1990s) was the toughest of sells. The magazine purports to be written by an entity known as The Game Lord who is here to school you on why all other consoles suck compared to the Neo Geo. Actually, I doubt that even the most ardent Sega or Nintendo fanboy from the period would even attempt to argue that their favorite consoles were technically superior to the Neo Geo. But there was the issue of initial capital investment for the console, plus $200 video games.
I did, however, like the copy’s tackling of the CD-ROM issue, citing that gamers should be worried about the time it takes to develop a game to fill a 650 MB optical disc when it already takes a long time to develop one that just fits on a few megabytes worth of ROM. It’s a curious assumption, to be sure, that development time is linearly proportional to the size of the end product deliverable. Of course, they were 100% correct about early CD-ROM games; see my interactive games category for more hard data on this matter.
Here are the individual page scans; click for larger images:
Front cover with the pit bull — I think this might have been the closest the Neo Geo came to having a mascot
Hardware overview
Technical comparison against its contemporaries
The Game Lord begins his treatise
This page explains how you could link up 2 different Neo Geo consoles, in case you A) owned a console; and B) actually knew someone within a reasonable distance who also owned one
Game library, possibly the entire library when the copy was published
Game library, continued
Upcoming games
Arcade charts, demonstrating that Neo Geo even rules at the arcades
A page dedicated to Crossed Swords
More on Crossed Swords
Detailing the original Fatal Fury
Fatal Fury, continued
Neo Geo accessories
Neo Geo advertisement, within the larger Neo Geo advertisement
Where you can buy a Neo Geo
See Also: