SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color

The Neo Geo Pocket Color was SNK's valiant, ultimately tragic attempt to carve out a place in a handheld market Nintendo owned outright. Arriving in 1999 as a color upgrade to the earlier monochrome Neo Geo Pocket, it was a compact, thoughtfully designed machine that punched far above its commercial weight and earned a devotion that endures decades later.

Its signature feature was its controls. In place of the usual mushy directional pad, the Neo Geo Pocket Color offered a small, clicky microswitched thumbstick that snapped crisply into eight directions, a joy for the fighting and action games that were SNK's specialty. Combined with a long battery life and a bright color screen, it was a genuinely pleasant machine to hold and play.

Unsurprisingly for the arcade titan behind the King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown, its library leaned into fighters and quirky action. SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium remains a legendary handheld fighting game, distilling two arcade empires into a pocket package, while the Metal Slug, King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown ports, along with charming originals like Sonic Pocket Adventure and Card Fighters Clash, gave the system a distinctive, quality-over-quantity identity.

But SNK was in dire financial trouble. The company went bankrupt shortly after the handheld's launch, and the machine was starved of support and marketing at the worst possible moment. Squeezed between the Game Boy Color's dominance and the incoming Game Boy Advance, and abandoned by its own maker, the Neo Geo Pocket Color sold only around two million units and was pulled from Western markets with brutal speed.

Its legacy, though, is outsized and affectionate. Collectors and fighting-game enthusiasts prize it as one of the great cult handhelds, a machine whose excellent controls, focused library, and underdog story have only grown more beloved. Modern re-releases of its games have introduced new generations to a system that, in a fairer world with a healthier company behind it, might have been a serious contender rather than a cherished footnote.