Gaming History You Should Know – NEO-GEO Land September 4, 2023

Okay, I know its not a Sunday, but the US is currently celebrating a three-day holiday weekend, so for a lot of people in my home country it might as well be a Sunday. Here at GameXcess.net, we miss the classic arcade. The lights, the sounds, and the cyberpunk aesthetic was a great way to kill time on a boring day. Arcades featured games that either could not be played at home or feature the best looking versions of the games that COULD be played at home. Today, we’re going to be talking about a chain of arcades you may not be familiar with.

Did you know that SEGA was not the only company to open a chain of successful arcades in their home nation of Japan? Many of you fans of the King of Fighters franchise will remember an in-game location called NEO-GEO Land. It was a sprawling arcade, the perfect background for a one-on-one street match. You may have played the original assumed it was just a cool-looking callback to the game’s developers, SNK, and their arcade machine the NEO-GEO. Today, I’m here to tell you that it wasn’t just a callback, it was real.

Welcome back to Gaming History You Should Know, where we highlight some of the best independently produced content on the history of gaming. Today, we’ll be talking about NEO-GEO Land, an arcade franchise most gamers may have assumed only existed in a video game, but was indeed very very real.

We’re going to take a look at the YouTube Channel NeoGeoNow, which has made INCREDIBLE videos about the history of SNK. In this video, he takes a LITERAL trip down memory lane where he highlights the past locations of SNK’s headquarters, and the special businesses that opened across the street. King of Fighters fans will be VERY familiar with this area. Let’s take a look!

Over the years there have been many attempts to resurrect NEO-GEO Land in Japan. Some of it may have been due to Japan’s nostalgia for SNK, or it may have just been an attempt for the current owners of SNK to meet the country’s heavy demand for SNK merchandise. Let’s take a look at a video done by Mad Panic Gaming, where he visits one of these pop up shops.

Seriously, can one of these open up in the US? Please? Heck, you don’t even have to open up a physical shop, just open a website with shipping to the US, it’ll make a killing among the SNK fans here.