Showing posts with label NeoGeo Pocket Color print ad (1999). Show all posts
Showing posts with label NeoGeo Pocket Color print ad (1999). Show all posts

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

NeoGeo Pocket Color (1999)

Original ad published in the August 1999 issue of Tips & Tricks (no. 18)

SNK's cute effort to break Nintendo's portable dominance


Famous for its gargantuan NeoGeo console, SNK sold a diminutive portable system called the NeoGeo Pocket Color at the very end of the 90s and the start of the new millennium. Today, collectors find the little console adorable and quite desirable. 

The NeoGeo Pocket Color was no match for Nintendo’s Game Boy. In fact, no other portable console sold during the entire 90s decade came even close to the big N's gizmo. Only the Game Boy Advance, released in 2001, closed a very profitable and very long chapter for brick-like machine of the house of Mario.  


All in all, the NeoGeo Pocket Color and the "normal" Pocket version sold 2 million units worldwide, a far cry from the 118 million units sold of the original Game Boy. SNK's machine was mired with distribution problems, as well as financial upheaval from Japanese HQ. It was discontinued in the US but sold in various Asian countries after the financial distress of SNK.


SNK's little portable was not a groundbreaking machine, but it did have its curiosities. For starters, the joystick was unlike your regular d-pad. The thing clicked like a professional arcade stick, making it fantastic for fighting games. The display was not bad, at 160 pixels wide by 152 pixels tall. By far its stand-out feature was its uncanny battery life: you could log 40 hours or gameplay with just two AA batteries.


If your patient enough, you can still find some very good games for NeoGeo Pocket Color. The complete list of games is Japanese-centric, of course.

The print ad itself shows the system's more playful style. It's was marketed as a toy. A $70 toy, but still, a companion to your much larger collection of console games. You also see some nice super deformed characters and a very colorful system arrangement where a whole deck of NeoGeo Pocket Color's and some cool games are well displayed. More importantly, on the lower left side you can read two very large URL pointing to both SNKs web site and one important distribution chain.




NeoGeo Pocket Color print ad copy


NeoGeo Pocket Color

Get Pocket Power”


  • 16 bit CPU
  • 146 simultaneos colors
  • Revolving joystick
  • 40 hours of continous play
  • 6 color casings

  • Samurai Showdown 2
  • Fatal Fur- First Contact
  • NeoCup 98
  • Metal Slug-First Mission
  • Crush Roller
  • Baseball Stars


Now available www.snkusa.com and etoys.com


SNK