Neo Geo Pocket Color
To see the colour, you tilted it toward the window. That was the price, and it bought about forty hours from two AA batteries.
By 1999 the question in a handheld was not whether you could have colour. It was what you were willing to pay for it.
Sega had answered first, in 1990. The Game Gear had colour and a lamp behind the screen, and it drank six AA batteries in three to five hours. Bandai answered in the opposite direction, with Gunpei Yokoi's WonderSwan: no colour at all, and around forty hours from a single AA cell.
SNK answered the same way Nintendo did. The Game Boy Color, out a year earlier, had colour and no backlight. So did the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Both screens are reflective; they borrow the light of whatever room they are in, the way a paperback does. Indoors at night you tilt them toward the lamp. Outside they are beautiful. SNK's ran about forty hours on two AA batteries.
SNK put microswitches under the thumbstick, so a direction is not pushed but clicked, and the machine reports exactly the one you meant. Nothing else in 1999 felt like it.
It reached American shops in August 1999, and whoever picked one up had six games to choose from. Retailers gave it little room, and the year belonged to Pokemon. The Pocket Color left Western shelves in June 2000. SNK itself was declared bankrupt in October 2001.
What outlived both is smaller than either: a click under the thumb, so precise that people are still building controllers trying to get it back.
Neo Geo Pocket Color — at a glance
- Released
- 1998 (monochrome) · 1999 (Color)
- Display
- Reflective TFT colour screen — with no backlight at all
- Power
- Two AA batteries
- Battery life
- About 40 hours in colour · about 20 on the monochrome model
- Library
- The monochrome machine had only nine games. All of them run on the Color.
- Region
- Region-free hardware and cartridges — but the language a game displays in is decided by the game
- Discontinued
- Withdrawn from North America and Europe in June 2000
What actually happened
SNK released the monochrome Neo Geo Pocket in Japan on 28 October 1998, and the Neo Geo Pocket Color on 19 March 1999 in Japan, 6 August 1999 in North America and 1 October 1999 in Europe. The screen shows 146 colours at once from a palette of 4,096. Only nine games were made for the monochrome machine, and all of them run on the Color. The North American launch had six titles. Aruze took control of SNK in January 2000 and withdrew the handheld from North America and Europe in June that year; SNK filed for bankruptcy protection in April 2001 and was declared bankrupt that October, sixteen months after the machine left Western shelves. Its rights later passed to Playmore. Reviewers have praised the microswitched stick for twenty-five years, and it is often described as having been built for fighting games, but no surviving SNK statement says so, and the praise is not unanimous.
The idea behind the machine
SNK chose a reflective screen instead of a lit one, the room's own light rather than a lamp behind the glass, and spent the battery it saved on colour. The thumbstick followed the same logic: microswitches, so the machine could report an exact direction instead of an approximate one. Both choices trade comfort for precision, and both ask something of the person holding it.
Things worth knowing about the Neo Geo Pocket Color
- The monochrome model had exactly nine games. Every one of them runs on the Color, which also ran about twice as long on the same batteries. There is no reason to own the older machine.
- It could be cabled to a Dreamcast. SNK and Sega were allies then, and a fighting game in your hand could talk to a fighting game in your living room.
- The hardware and the cartridges are region-free. A Japanese game will start on any Neo Geo Pocket Color anywhere in the world. Whether you can read it is up to the game, not the machine.
Where this leads
- Game Gear — the machine that made the opposite choice, and paid for its light
- WonderSwan — forty hours from a single AA cell, and Gunpei Yokoi's last machine
- Neo Geo — the arcade machine SNK put in your living room first
- Dreamcast — which this handheld could be plugged into, back when SNK and Sega were allies
Thinking of buying one? What to check before you do →