Official: SNK Shutting Down Domestically

Well, if you were in stores today, you probably saw something absent-a NGPC, and various titles for it. Here is the scoop from IGN Pocket:

As of today, the ride is over for the NeoGeo Pocket Color. According to an official release from SNK, “In a move to regroup and reevaluate its worldwide marketing strategy, SNK Entertainment has decided to cease distribution of NeoGeo Pocket Color hardware and software in the US and Canada, effective immediately,” said the statement.

The company will continue to market and distribute the NeoGeo Pocket Color hardware and software in Japan – and if you’re an owner of the system, the Japanese games will work on the US portables. But as of this moment, no new English-territory NeoGeo Pocket Color games will be programmed, manufactured or sold. Games that were all ready to ship — Last Blade, Dynamite Slugger, and Faselei — will not be released in the US. Last Blade and Faselei were released in Europe weeks ago.

We spoke with Ben Herman, vice president of sales at SNK Entertainment USA. The main question on our minds was simply, why? Why is SNK closing its doors? “When Aruze purchased SNK a few months back, they obviously didn’t have any intention of closing the US offices,” said Herman. Aruze is a very successful company in Japan, and felt that the overall sales in the US just wasn’t justification enough to keep the unit going – especially without the quantity of software to sustain it. Some mistakes were made, including not preparing third party developers properly early in the life of the system’s release. Other problems sprout from Japan — when the purchase was in place, several developers felt that the creative control at SNK was lost, and left the company. Some games, like Match of the Millennium 2, were in the works, but without a developer to helm the project those games were lost.

Essentially, Aruze wants to pull out of the US market as a temporary retreat. Herman is confident that though SNK USA is out for now, it will return in the future – and he is doing his best to make sure that the SNK name isn’t tarnished before it makes it’s comeback.

So SNK is recalling all product effective immediately, offering a full reimbursement for any unsold merchandise. Some companies won’t be as quick to pull stock, like Walmart or Toys ‘r Us. Ben Herman told us that he hopes to have all floating merchandise back in SNK headquarters by the last week in July.

“We’re not completely closing up shop, turning off our phones in the middle of the night and leaving town,” said Herman. According to him, the company will stick around for at least three months to fulfill any necessary warrantee agreements (games have a 30 day policy, and systems have 180 day). The months ahead will be spent acquiring merchandise, sending off checks to retailers, and shipping product back to Japan.

But what about the games? Surely SNK is taking a bath on all the English-language cartridges that won’t sell in Japan. Not so, says Herman. All NeoGeo Pocket Color games are written on Flash ROM cartridges. When SNK Japan gets ahold of the English cartridges, they’ll recycle them – erase the game and rewrite them with another game for the Japanese market. Systems are equally recyclable – SNK could essentially strip the US and European systems for their parts and remanufacture them as the smaller, Japanese portables.

The name SNK will still hold some water in the US – the company plans on licensing its properties to US publishers. But the NeoGeo Pocket Color will cease to exist in the US. The only thing gamers can do now is import Japanese games (which will indeed work in US systems).

Well, that’s it. Goodbye to SNK, and to Sonic Pocket Adventure. Soon, we’ll be scouring EBay to see if NGPC consoles are being put up for auction, and at what price they’re going for.