07/01/00

Finally, after nearly a decade of shamelessly riding the coattails of Capcom’s success in the 2D fighting game genre, SNK is closing up shop and pulling out of the U.S. and Europe. Japanese gamers will still be able to find new SNK rip-off titles for their Neo-Geo Pocket Color, Playstation and Dreamcast systems, and as far as I’m concerned, they can have them.

The part about this sudden withdrawal that really gets my goat is that SNK is recalling all of their merchandise remaining on store shelves, effective immediately (June 13 is the last day you’ll be able to find any SNK stuff in stores, according to ign.com). They don’t even have the decency to go out with a huge closeout sale and let people snap up the system and games for what they’re really worth – about $10 apiece.

I never understood the popularity of SNK games, be they for arcade, Neo-Geo or various consoles. Their fighting games "borrowed" liberally from Capcom’s always-superior titles, and invariably ended up being inferior. Even when SNK innovated with some new feature Capcom hadn’t yet implemented into its games, Capcom would take it and make it better. A good example of this is the tag team matches. SNK’s King of Fighters series never really had tag team play, but they called it that. It wasn’t until Capcom released their first "Vs." game that true tag team action came into play.

Heck, even when SNK stole a perfectly good idea from Capcom, like super attacks, they’d screw it up, by making the commands ridiculously hard to pull off. And who can forget their initial attempt to differentiate themselves from Capcom, in Fatal Fury, when instead of using each button for a different level of attack, they thought it’d be a good idea to hold down the buttons for different attack strengths, something I never, ever understood.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ve never liked SNK… not even a little bit. I only hope they’ll have the decency to admit that the reason they failed was because of an extreme lack of originality and over dependence on stealing ideas from Capcom.

Have an opinion about this? I’ve started a forum debate over in the "Other Stuff" area. Feel free to weigh in with your opinions.

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