The NeoGeo AES+ was meant to be one of the year-end's loveliest surprises for lovers of beautiful consoles and people of good taste generally. Announced with the promise of running original NeoGeo cartridges while modernising the experience, SNK's machine was initially due to arrive in November 2026. But last September, publisher Plaion finally announced an unexpected — and above all substantial — delay, with the console pushed back to September 2027, a full year later. Enough to drive players, and collectors especially, round the bend. Everyone gritted their teeth and waited, but with the NeoGeo AES+ on show at the Tokyo Game Show, plenty of people came away reassured by the quality of the machine and what it really has under the bonnet.
In an interview with VGC, Ben Jones, head of hardware and software at Plaion and the man in charge of the NeoGeo AES+ project, explained that the shortage of certain components had put the project in a particularly tricky spot. So much so that scrapping the console altogether was genuinely on the table.
Thanks for nothing, AI...
If manufacturing the NeoGeo AES+ nearly went pear-shaped, it's down to AI and the resources it demands from all the companies now cannibalising the component market. That said, the NeoGeo AES+'s problem concerns a part that's fairly obscure to the general public but essential to the console's operation: parallel NOR flash memory. After the console's announcement and the opening of pre-orders, Plaion moved into the sourcing phase with its Asian partners. And that's where things got complicated, because according to Ben Jones, it was the first time in nearly 20 years at Plaion that a chip order had simply been turned down. The reason? The massive demand tied to artificial intelligence, which is hogging a hefty chunk of the semiconductor industry's production capacity. « What do you mean, you can't get these chips? Ah, AI », says Jones, summing up his reaction to the situation.
Plaion then tried to find suppliers capable of meeting its needs. Ben Jones even travelled to Taiwan to meet several specialist firms in person. But even that didn't unblock things quickly: it would take six months just to find out whether Plaion's request could be considered at all. Bonkers.
The solution that saved the NeoGeo AES+
At this point, the project was in a decidedly awkward position. Plaion's engineers therefore had to find a technical workaround for the shortage. The answer lay in the cartridges themselves, as the teams had already produced thousands of ASIC chips destined for NeoGeo AES+ cartridges. Among other things, these components handle memory before passing the information on to the console. Plaion then looked into replacing parallel NOR flash memory with serial NOR flash, which is far easier to get hold of. The snag is that the NeoGeo has historically run on parallel memory. So they had to find a way of getting the two technologies to talk to each other.
The engineers eventually decided to modify the cartridge chips to build in technology capable of converting the serial signal into a parallel one. A major change that required fresh design work as well as a whole raft of additional testing. It's precisely this development that accounts for much of the delay announced by Plaion. Without that solution, Ben Jones reckons the NeoGeo AES+ could simply have vanished.
Pre-orders way above expectations
On top of that, there's the strong demand around the NeoGeo AES+, which has comfortably outstripped Plaion's initial forecasts. According to information gathered at the Tokyo Game Show by the channel Life is a Video Game, pre-orders for the console reportedly came in at 30 times the original estimates, while projections for the games were exceeded by similar margins. The component shortage could hardly have come at a worse time for a project that seems to have met with a warmer commercial reception than anticipated. Worse still, one Taiwanese supplier took advantage of the situation and quoted Plaion three times the price when the company asked for a larger manufacturing volume — and delivery couldn't have happened before 2028. That's another reason Plaion chose to go back to the drawing board rather than give up on the machine and disappoint hundreds of thousands of pre-orders.
Five new games announced for the NeoGeo AES+
The delay will have at least one other upside: the launch line-up should keep growing. Plaion used the Tokyo Game Show to announce five more games compatible with the NeoGeo AES+: Zero Wing, Karnov's Revenge, Magical Drop 2 & 3, Spin Master and Street Hoop. They join the 10 titles already announced when the machine was unveiled. And that catalogue could swell further between now and September 2027, since one of the NeoGeo AES+'s big selling points remains its compatibility with original NeoGeo cartridges from the '90s. Every cloud, then?
