Video game collector believes he's found evidence of unreleased SNK Millennium console

A video game collector has come across what is believed to be evidence of the “SNK Millennium” console – 20 years after it was rumoured to be in the works.

Anthony Bacon, from Chicago (who we’ve featured multiple times on Eurogamer before), was sent a mystery SNK motherboard earlier this year and asked to investigate by its owner.

This board had a long journey to Bacon’s desk. His friend, Brian Hargrove, bought a lot of SNK motherboards from Yahoo Auctions Japan 15 years ago, not having any idea what they were. He sold the board in question to a friend of his called Max, who five months ago contacted Bacon to ask if he could work out what it was.

Bacon, who runs a YouTube channel called Video Game Esoterica, investigated, and believes the find to be a test PC motherboard for a cancelled console meant to be SNK’s successor to the Hyper Neo Geo 64 (the Hyper Neo Geo 64 was meant to herald SNK’s emergence into the new era of 3D gaming that emerged in the mid-’90s, but it failed to find an audience and reached the end of its life just two years later in 1999 with only seven games under its belt). Bacon’s findings are documented in the video below:

Rumours of the “SNK Millennium” first emerged in 1999. It was reportedly meant to be SNK’s next generation Neo Geo console designed to compete with Sega’s Dreamcast (November 1998) and Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 2 (March 2000), with a target September 2000 release. It never came out, and has long since been forgotten by the mainstream video game community.

But now there is evidence to suggest the SNK Millennium was at the least in development.

“It’s definitely extremely significant, just because nothing else has ever shown up before,” Bacon told Eurogamer.

“There’s never been any photographs of a development kit for that platform. The only real instance of it ever being mentioned is the president of SNK at that point in time referenced that they were working on at the SNK Millennium. And magazines had a few rumours saying that it was either going to be a Pentium based motherboard or the SNK was going to potentially license an existing CPU and marry it to a Matrox graphics card.