If you haven't read the NG history, I was obsessed with the Neo Geo. My youth had been plagued by imperfect arcade ports, one of my big memories being the NES port of Double Dragon, which departed drastically from the arcade version and didn't even include two player co-op.
There were a lot of disappointments. The Sears Christmas catalog teased the upcoming Bionic Commando with a screenshot from the arcade version, which simply wasn't possible to reproduce on the NES.
Data East had a questionable habit of showing arcade screenshots on the back of the box, resulting games like Karnov and Kid Niki looking nothing like what you saw in the store.
Then along came the Neo Geo, a system where the games you played in the arcade were the same games you played at home. After dropping a bunch of quarters on Sengoku, it became my mission to have one and I eventually did get one used. As sad as it probably sounds, this was a defining accomplishment in my life.
One thing a lot of Neo Geo fans dreamed about was the potential for other arcade games to be ported to the Neo Geo, as it was powerful enough to run a lot of them. Rumors swirled on Prodigy of games like these existing, for example one friend told me that in Taiwan you could get a bootleg arcade-perfect Mortal Kombat for the Neo Geo. In retrospect that likely wasn't true, regardless the thought tantalized.
More than 30 years later, some of these dreams are actually becoming reality! A dude named Hoffman has recently ported the arcade version of Shinobi to the Neo Geo and is in the process of porting Golden Axe.
Even more wild, there's a remake of the original Double Dragon coming to the Neo Geo but with new "Neo Geo style" art.
People are still making entirely new games for the Neo Geo, too!
Ports go in other directions, too. Neo Geo classic Magician Lord is being ported to the SuperGrafx, another elusive console I always wanted but never obtained.
Meanwhile that Mortal Kombat port finally happened... On the 3DO!
The Neo Geo remains a magical console to me, full of wonder. I aspire for Newgrounds to fill people with this same sense of wonder!
Osaka
My personal favorites from the NeoGeo were Puzzle Bobble, Magician Lord, Cyber Lip, and of course Big Tournament Golf. It's cool that there's a mini-cabinet console available nowadays for the newer generations of gamers, or those that don't have the OG console and cartridges.