Although SNK is best known today for its arcade beat-'em-ups--most notably the King of Fighters series--many people first fell in love with the company back in the mid to late 1980s, when its games began to appear on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Even though SNK had a decent arcade business going all throughout the early and mid 1980s, executives at the company were interested in the profits that could be made through the development and licensing of games for home video game consoles.

Paul Jacobs was the president of SNK Corp. of America between 1986 and 1991. He helped bring the NeoGeo to America.

Unfortunately, the home market was still reeling from the fallout caused by the legendary video game crash of 1983, and major players, such as Atari and Mattel, were more occupied with lawsuits than with the marketing and production needs of their flailing consoles. Nevertheless, one console manufacturer in particular seemed to weather the crash fairly unscathed: Nintendo. SNK signed up to become a third-party licensee for Nintendo's Family Computer (Famicom) system in 1985 and opened a second branch in the United States--this time in Torrance, California (near Los Angeles)--shortly after the Nintendo Entertainment System was introduced. This new branch was called SNK Home Entertainment and would handle the distribution and marketing of the company's products for home consoles, such as the NES. By this time, John Rowe had left the coin-op branch to form his own company--Tradewest, which would later market SNK's Ikari Warriors series in North America. Subsequently, both halves of the company were now being presided over by Paul Jacobs, who is notable primarily for having helped launch the company's innovative NeoGeo hardware in North America during the early 1990s.

SNK flourished as the 1980s drew to a close. The company continued to develop successful arcade games (many of which made it to North America, thanks to Takahito Yasuki's distribution company, Romstar), which it would later port to and publish for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Alpha Mission, Athena, and Ikari Warriors were released for the NES in 1987; Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road and P.O.W. followed in 1988; and Ikari Warriors III wasn't far behind, hitting store shelves in 1989.

Crystalis for the NES captivated players who were looking for something a bit more mature than Nintendo's Legend of Zelda.

Owing to the breakout sales of the company's NES ports, and perhaps as a response to waning arcade receipts, SNK began to dabble in the development of original software designed specifically for the NES console. Two games came out of this effort: 1989's Baseball Stars and 1990's Crystalis (known as God Slayer in Japan). Baseball Stars captivated players with its franchise-style hiring and trade features, which weren't yet common to sports games at that point in time, while Crystalis was the company's answer to Nintendo's Legend of Zelda. It was an adventure-based RPG with a large overworld, tough bosses, and gorgeous cinematic cutscenes.

1989 also marked the release of two new home video game consoles in North America: the 16-bit Sega Genesis and NEC's joint project with Hudson, the TurboGrafx-16. Nintendo followed suit with a new system of its own, the Super NES, in 1991. Rather than choose sides and become embroiled in the so-called system wars, SNK chose once again to refocus its efforts on the arcade market, leaving other third parties, such as Romstar and Takara, to license and port SNK's future properties to the various home consoles of the time. The engineers at SNK had an idea on their hands that would revolutionize the arcade industry and could potentially mean millions upon millions of dollars in revenue for the company. That idea, stated simply, was the NeoGeo.