Developed/Published by: SNK
Released:Â 11/1979
Completed:Â 28/03/2026
Completion: Got as far as I could get!
High score: 14150 (I could do better.)
About a week ago SNK and Plaion Replai announced the Neo Geo+, a modern 1:1 recreation of the original AES hardware, and the announcement was quickly followed by many people raising that SNK is 96% owned by the MISK Foundation1, a Saudi Arabian non-profit and non-governmental organization established in 2011 by Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who is prominently featured in the Epstein Files and credibly accused of ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
This has, obviously, come up before, most notably when Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves was announced/released, because the gameâs bizarre inclusion of Cristiano Ronaldo (who plays for Al Nassr FC, owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia) and a DJ with links to Mohammed whose inclusion annoys me so much that I donât actually want to actually name him directly.Â
In that case, I think it was a lot easier for people to hand-wave, because even if it did hurt to see a sequel to a beloved fighting game get gummed up with weird garbage, it was perfectly easy for most people to go âwell, too bad. I can always play something else.â But the Neo Geo AES has an incredible mystique for the millennial âgamerâ: an incredibly expensive, luxury console that at one point offered the only way to play truly âarcade perfectâ games at home. If youâre old enough, you played these games in the arcade; but you likely never ever saw an AES in the flesh, never mind played one (Iâve certainly still never played one.) Itâs a gorgeous bit of kit, a classic piece of design and the games even came in big beautiful clamshell cases.
Itâs understandable why youâd covet it. More than just getting a âperfectâ recreation of the hardware, thereâs an urge I think from many to hope this succeeds so that companies might simply see fit to reissue their own back catalogues. After all, you can go into a record store today and buy a new copy of an album from the 80s; why canât you do it with a Mega Drive game?2
What I canât understand is the people who are so desperate to ignore the reality of what theyâd be supporting. The classic fallacy that âif thereâs no ethical consumption, I can do what I want.â This take, long tedious by this point, is a position only held by people so intellectually incurious they canât see their own ignorance.Â
As Wes Fenlon accepted in his excellent newsletter broaching this topic, people can ultimately do what they like. Of course they can. But to pretend thereâs nothing more in our lives than wanting things and getting things is so⊠diminishing.Â
Rather I exist in a world where I consider values, what I want to represent, what I accept or justify, what I canât. To see the world as rich and complicated and to exist in it, not simply consume.
As a result of this entire discussion, itâs made me consider my own planned coverage of SNK. Iâve mentioned before that a lot of my writing here comes from my own urge to play through the many, many games I own, and from my own personal interest in game history. I played through Ozma Wars because itâs the first game on the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, which I own, and which was originally published in 2018 (two years before the Misk Foundation would purchase its first shares in SNK.) Ozma Wars came out in 1979.
These early SNK games have nothing to do with the companyâs current ownership. But itâs not quite that clean. In writing about them, I give coverage to the SNK brand. Iâll admit that until the recent announcement itâs likely I wouldnât have even thought about the ownership issues. Itâs be easier not to! As a signee of No Games for Genocide, Iâm committed to not covering Microsoft-published games, and Iâve struggled with what that means for my game history coverage. Iâm eager, for example, to play through Rareâs back catalogue, but can I? Theyâre owned by Microsoft now, but they werenât then?
There isnât an easy answer here, even if you can play all these games without ever giving anyone a penny after a quick internet search and a couple of downloads.
Obviously, I wonât be covering the Neo Geo+ and I wonât be covering any modern SNK games. And I donât have any games from the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection on my to-play list any time soon. I think Ozma Wars is an interesting piece of history, and loathe to discard this piece of writing, Iâm going to share it. But Iâll have to consider if Iâll write any more. Perhaps thatâs frustratingly inconclusive. But at least Iâve made it clear here that the company Iâm writing about is a very different one now than it was then.
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