How a Fan Found a Neo-Geo Fighting Game Nobody Knew Existed

Credit: Brian Hargrove

We’ve written before about the challenges of preserving rare games for obscure platforms, but what about games that are so obscure that they weren’t even announced to the public before being shelved? Such is the case of this mysterious, incomplete fighting game that was unearthed earlier this April.

SNK’s Neo-Geo console was an oddity of gaming history: a console system designed to be identical to their then high-end arcade hardware. Both the system and the games were premium priced, with cartridges selling for around $200 in 1990s money. The “elite” perception of the console, combined with some fantastic games and a cult of personality around manufacturer SNK, created a fervent Neo-Geo fanbase that thrives to this day. Neo-Geo fans are among the most devoted of game collectors, willing to drop a lot of cash on rare cartridges (some of which, it turns out, have been elaborate forgeries) and constantly scouring all ends of the internet for Neo-related paraphernalia.

Brian Hargrove is one such Neo devotee. He’s been keeping an eagle eye on Japan’s biggest auction site, Yahoo! Japan Auctions, for everything Neo-related, and using a proxy bidding service to purchase things that catch his eye. Hargrove caught a glimpse of one auction that looked like Neo-Geo development hardware and pulled the trigger to the tune of about $750. He’d seen similar boards in years past, so he had a vague idea of what he was getting, though there was still a lot of mystery surrounding the auction.

The board, up and running. Image credit: Brian Hargrove

“I had no idea what [the game data on the board] was,” Hargrove tells us. “There was nothing on the board indicating who had used it or where it came from.”

Hargrove had come across a few early prototypes of Neo-Geo games in his collecting adventures, and most of the data on those games was contained on EPROMs.“The one thing that gave me hope was the fact that this dev board contained flash cards and had a different layout than any other board I have come across… If anything, I assumed I’d have a cool piece of SNK history and possibly an early version of something we already knew about.” In fact, it took him a while before he went about trying to see what was on the boards. “The program EPROMs said that the game was Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, an already known and released game. I assumed I had an early build of VFG and didn’t really put a lot of time into getting it working. I waited about a month before I really sat down with it, but it didn’t take too long once I focused.”

In order to read the flash cards, Hargrove also had to invest in special hardware. “I did a lot of testing on several different flash cards before I dared to try and read the proto’s flash cards. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t damage them.”

There were a few hurdles in the way of getting the data off of the board. Hargrove discovered that two of the memory cards were completely unreadable—they had used batteries that had long since given up the ghost. “One of the cards contained things like font information and overlay graphics like power and super bars. This also may have contained the game’s name and logo. The other card most likely contained the game’s sound effects.” The game wouldn’t load up without the font data, so Hargrove had to whip up a makeshift ROM to use as a replacement. “When I booted the game without a working font ROM, it was completely blank. Mainly because the game boots to a text menu first and you have to select “FIGHT!” to start playing. When I initially loaded the new font ROM the game still didn’t play. It wasn’t until I looked deeper at the graphics ROMs that I realized that the flash cards were mislabeled. So with the graphics cards in the right slots, and the new font rom loaded, I was able to play it.”

Here's the game running at Midwest Gaming Classic convention in Milwaukee.