You've probably heard of the SNK Neo Geo and its various iterations from the early '90s, but you've likely never heard of the SNK Millennium. That's because it was a home console and arcade board designed in the late '90s but never left the prototype stage. There are no pictures of this rumored console and no hardware to prove it ever existed.
Now, however, there is one piece of hardware that might very well have been part of the SNK Millennium's development. This prototype motherboard acquired by Video Game Esoterica is likely to be all that is left of SNK's failed console.
According to Eurogamer, this motherboard came from a video game auction in Japan 15 years ago. It then changed hands once before landing on Anthony Bacon's desk where he decided to turn it into a video for his YouTube channel, Video Game Esoterica.
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And it doesn't get more esoteric than a prototype motherboard for a failed SNK console from the late '90s. The SNK Millennium would have competed with the Sega Dreamcast and the Sony PlayStation 2 as SNK's follow-up to the Hyper Neo Geo 64, but rumors of the console's impending introduction in the year 2000 never materialized. Instead, SNK went bankrupt in 2001 and didn't produce any new hardware at all until more recently with the Neo Geo Mini.
Bacon can’t be sure that this is the SNK Millennium in its very earliest forms, but the hardware configuration makes it extremely likely. The CPU used is the Hitachi SH-4, which is the same as found on the Dreamcast, but none of the other components line up with Dreamcast test kits from the era (that and there’s very obvious SNK lettering across the top of the board). Bacon believes this board was used by SNK to test the capabilities of the SH-4 CPU in preparation for its own console to compete with the Dreamcast.
You can watch a more detailed explanation in Video Game Esoterica’s video above. As for SNK's latest console ambitions, the company announced a new home console would be coming in 2021, but we haven't seen anything about that in some time.
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