GoKawiilBack in April of this year, SNK announced the Neo Geo AES+ home console, reviving a legend for the modern era. It was priced at $250 for the base system with a controller, with a release date set for November 12, 2026. Fast forward to today, and you can now pre-order the AES+ on Amazon, along with all ten games launching for it. These games are recreations of the original cartridges, just like the console itself is a 1:1 revival of the OG hardware.
The Neo Geo was an icon of its era, responsible for bringing arcade gaming to the couch without compromise. At the time, all the home consoles relied on cut-down silicon from arcade machines, and even their games were highly compressed to save manufacturing costs. SNK and the Neo Geo did things differently. Its games had 300-700 megabit file sizes compared to just 4-16MB the competitors were limited to.
The Neo Geo also had dedicated Zilog and Yamaha chips for high-resolution audio. It had significantly more power than the Sega Genesis and the SNES, which relied on tilemaps, while the Neo Geo could scale, shrink, and animate massive, multi-layered 2D character sprites with zero flickers. It was also marketed as the first 24-bit console on technicality, even though it was really just a very powerful 16-bit system in reality.
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Because of its $700 price tag, the Neo Geo was limited to a niche audience of enthusiasts who wanted an uncompromising arcade experience. The new Neo Geo AES+ basically takes that experience and repackages it as faithfully as possible, and ends up providing much better value, especially when adjusted for inflation.
The AES+ looks exactly like the original and features silicon-level recreation of the OG architecture thanks to re-engineered ASIC chips; there's no emulation involved here. Any game cartridge from the 90s will work on it just fine. You still get the crisp AV out if you're still nostalgic about CRTs, though HDMI is available for realists, and there are DIP switches onboard to adjust region/language settings or enable a quick overclock.
The $249 base system doesn't come with games, but SNK is re-releasing 10 classics that you can also buy on Amazon. Each of them costs $90, which is more than a PS5 game, and just $10 short of the ultimate edition of GTA VI. Just to be clear, you can emulate all of these games pretty easily, but owning the cartridge physically is a different kind of feeling, especially these days when it's become a dying breed.
The following games are available for the Neo Geo AES+ on Amazon:
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There's a $349 Anniversary Edition, too, that comes in white and includes an exclusive all-white Metal Slug game cartridge in the box. You get a wireless Arcade Stick (instead of wired) and its accessories, along with a memory card. The wireless Arcade Stick costs $120 on its own, while a gamepad is also available for $60.
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