In 1990, SNK sold a home console for $649.99 with games priced around $200 each, and people bought it. This episode explores the Neo Geo, a platform whose name means New World in Greek and whose mission was to erase the gap between the arcade and the living room. We look at the broken 1980s arcade business, where operators had to buy 300-pound dedicated cabinets for every new game, and how Street Fighter creator Takashi Nishiyama brought a dual-format strategy to SNK: the MVS cartridge system for arcades and the AES for homes, running identical code.

We dig into the hardware behind the 24-bit marketing claim, including the Motorola 68000 CPU, the Z80 audio coprocessor, the sprite-strip graphics architecture that allowed hardware scaling, the Yamaha YM2610 sound chip, and the bank-switching tricks behind the 100 Mega Shock startup screens. Then we follow the platform through its rental-only Japanese launch, the incompatible cartridge pins that stopped operators from using cheap home carts, the arcade revenue that subsidized the luxury home market, official support lasting until Samurai Shodown V Special in 2004, and the string of modern recreations leading up to the ASIC-based Neo Geo AES Plus LX announced for 2026.

• How the MVS let operators swap VHS-sized cartridges instead of shipping cabinets, and how it fought piracy in emerging markets
• The memory card that let players carry saved progress between a public arcade machine and a home console in 1990
• Why SNK printed 24-bit on the box when the CPU had a 16-bit data bus, and where that number actually came from
• How roughly one million MVS units and 410,000 AES consoles kept a 2D machine alive through the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 era
• The collector market today, including the rare European AES release of Kizuna Encounter, and the mixed record of the Neo Geo X, Neo Geo Mini, and Arcade Stick Pro