At E3 in May, SNK will officially return to the American games industry, under the name SNK NEOGEO USA Consumer Corp. If you're attending the show this year, watch out for booth #3008 (West Hall), as playable versions of Metal Slug Advance and King of Fighters 2001 will be available, as well as video footage of SNK vs. Capcom.
The company's president will be Ben Herman, who has served as vice-president of SNK Entertainment (a relatively unsuccessful reincarnation of SNK) so the man should know his company well and good. At this very moment Ben's working for Nintendo as an eastern sales manager, but will cease his operations there and return to SNK. There will be no hardware released from SNK this time, but Ben's got plenty to offer as far as software goes. "We have not released any games in the U.S. since King of Fighters '99. I've got a backlog of games from 2000, 2001 and 2002," he explained recently in an interview with Game Daily. "Down the road we will have Samurai Showdown coming and a Metal Slug 3D game will also come out eventually."
That's Metal Slug 3D, folks. I'll repeat it. METAL SLUG 3D. Uh-oh, drool buckets out. Baseball Stars is another series he wants to release titles from. "I'm not going to stop until we get Baseball Stars." Not only that, he wants any future installment of the series to include an online feature.
SNK NEOGEO USA Consumer (the consumer side of the business, based in New Jersey and established as a separate entity) has already settled a deal with Nintendo allowing them to release games for the Game Boy Advance system. Next-gen console deals (including PSOne) are being considered and worked on as we speak.
"Whether it's the current generation (of consoles) that we develop for, or its new platforms in 2004 or 2005, we are going to develop for them. We make games in Japan for PS2, and we plan to convert them—and make others—for play here in the states."
We do not know at this point if SNK have plans of releasing their products in PAL-areas - more on that as we get it.
Loading...
