With these 'premium' prices, though, most gamers weren't able to afford the system, so the console was only accessible to a niche market. NeoGeo AES was launched with the slogan 'Bigger, Badder, Better' and a huge marketing campaign which included ads in many magazines and television commercials on target networks. This package was known as the 'Gold System.' The system was also released in a 'Silver System' package, which included one joystick controller and did not include a game or memory card. However, this plan was quickly scrapped and when the system had its American launch, it debuted at $649.99 USD with two joysticks, a memory card, and a single pack-in game, Magician Lord (the early Neo Geo boxes had a gold sticker announcing the inclusion of Magician Lord over the initially planned choice of two games). In the United States, the console was originally planned to debut at $599 USD and included two joystick controllers and a game (either Baseball Stars or NAM-1975).

However, the screen resolution for the games were slightly lower then comparable games at the time, and the MVS cabinet used in the United States also had unusual video hardware which made the games visuals appear slightly more dark and contrasted then other games. A custom video chipset allowed the system to display 4,096 colors and 380 individual sprites onscreen simultaneously, while the onboard Yamaha 2610 sound chip gave the system 15 channels of sound with seven channels reserved specifically for digital sound effects.

The home system featured two CPUs: a 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 main processor running at 12 MHz and an 8-bit ZiLOG Zilog Z80 coprocessor running at 4 MHz. This likely helped the system to survive the longest life of any fourth-generation video game console, outlasting the popular Super Famicom and Sega Mega Drive. Compared to the other consoles of the time, the Neo Geo had much better graphics and sound. The home system was originally a rental unit, but SNK quickly began selling the system through stores when customer response indicated that people were willing to spend the money. The Neo Geo was announced on January 31st, 1990 in Osaka, Japan and released on April 26th, 1990. The Neo Geo hardware was essentially developed by Alpha Denshi's Eiji Fukatsu, adding sprite scaling through the use of scaling tables stored in ROM as well as support for a much higher amount of data on cartridges and better sound hardware.

Contrary to other popular arcade hardware of the time, the SNK/ Alpha Denshi hardware used sprite strips instead of the more common tilemap based backgrounds. The Neo Geo hardware was an evolution of an older SNK/Alpha Denshi M68000 arcade system board that was used in Time Soldiers in 1987, further developed in the SNK M68000 hardware platform as used for P.O.W.

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