SNK is an arcade machine manufacturer with a large and important history for our scene. It was founded in 1973 under the name Shin Nihon Kikaku Corporation. In 1981 the company started to use the abbreviation SNK. In 1979 SNK created their first game named Ozma Wars. Around 1981 SNK started to get noticed by the public due to the popularity of the release of the game Vanguard. This made it possible for them to open a branche in the United Stated under the name SNK Electronics Corporation. By 1986 SNK had made 23 games by themselves already. The best grossing games in that time were Mad Crasher, Alpha Mission and Athena. SNK’s most popular game in this time was Ikari Warriors. Due to this popularity it was ported to a lot of home consoles such as the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Amiga and many more. In order to survive the video game crash of 1983 they started to support Nintendo in the distribution of the Famicon system and home console products. Around the 1990 there was a home console war going on however SNK remained the focus on the arcades and released 2 games, Baseball Stars and Crystalis. In 1988 SNK came up with the idea to make arcade cabinets modular so that games could be switch instead of whole machines. Normally when an arcade operator wanted to switch a game they had to replace the complete cabinet. The new system of SNK was called MVS which stands for Multi Video System which gave arcade operators a lot of flexibility as they could feature multiple games in a cabinet either by swapping the game or to use the later multi slots in which up to 6 games could be inserted where the player could select the game to play. The system was introduced in 1990 and immediately was a great success. Arcade operators were able to house more games in the same space optimizing revenue and reducing handeling time. At the same time SNK released a home console version of the same system as well which was call AES.
Based on the MVS a lot of games and series have been produced amongst other, The King of Fighters, Super Sidekicks, Art of Fighting, Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury. A total of 148 games were made for the MVS system.
SNK Arcade Candy Cab Machines:
Candy 18
Candy 25
Candy 26
Candy 26 Table
MV19SC-0
MV25TA-0
MV25UP-0
MVS-U1/33
MVS-U2/29
MVS-U2/33
MVS-U4/29
MVS-U4/33
Neo 19
Neo 25
Neo 29
Neo 50
Neo 50 II
Neo 50 III
Neo Candy 25
Neo Candy 29
SC14-2
SC19-4
SC25-4
SCB-U4
Super Neo 29
Super Neo 29 Candy
Super Neo 29 Type II
Video Game (SNK)