haha for a guy like diun they might as well have announced the price at a jillion gabillion dollars
or twenty bucks, that'd probably be equally out of reach
Since you know your sales, just how well did those $200+ Neo Geo games sell? It always blew my mind that SNK would charge outrageous MSRPs for them.
I have no doubt that the majority of these games sold right out since Neo-Geo AES titles became a total collector's market. We had to special order them for retail sales and brick and mortar stores stopped carrying the games very quickly after the system came out. I only saw used games in Japanese stores back then. Games from certain regions also had more value; U.S. games had way lower print runs even though the only difference was the box art and manual. Euro versions were even rarer. Then you had guys making bootlegs (put MVS cart guts into an AES cart and slap on a fake label!) and/or ruining carts by stamping their names all over them (the infamous "Neo-Geo Freak" duo).
I used to buy and sell AES games for a profit when I was done with them. The "worst" I ever did was break even on a game I'd had for a year and the craziest thing I ever did was buying two games at once (Waku Waku 7 and Kizuna Encounter for $300+ each)...I was a teenager and could barely afford one Neo game 1-2 times a year.
As crazy as it sounds, $275-$325 is also pretty cheap for a relatively-new arcade game. The MVS kits new could cost as much as $1,500....THAT was crazy, especially when MVS cart prices would fall to crazy-low prices after the AES releases hit.
The most insane thing I ever saw was a dude who sold the majority of his Neo MVS collection to buy SNK Vs. Capcom: SvC Chaos NEW. That game did not have an MVS cart release and instead was released as a board. It was $1,500-$2,000 and he sold off so much shit to pay for it....then the game was a huge disappointment and nobody cared about it after a week. SNK released the home AES version and a PS2 version only a few months later, too.
I kept on buying Neo games until 2003. By that point I had a modded XBox and was playing new games on an emulator, with filtering and in 480P, before they even came out on cart.
