NeoGeo games coming to US Wii

Earlier this year, Nintendo of Japan signaled its intention to host classic SNK NeoGeo games on the Wii's Virtual Console downloadable gaming service. However, there was no word on whether or not such offerings would be made available internationally until now.

SNK Playmore today announced that it would indeed be bringing NeoGeo games to the North American Virtual Console, beginning with a trio of the system's earliest fighting games. Fatal Fury is the first installment in the brawling Bogard brothers' saga, which has recently seen a rash of rereleases with Fatal Fury Battle Archives on the PlayStation 2 and Fatal Fury Special on the Xbox 360's Live Arcade.

The other two announced games--Art of Fighting and World Heroes--are a little less frequently revisited. Art of Fighting was included in the PS2 Art of Fighting Anthology earlier this year, but apart from that hasn't seen the light of day in more than a decade. World Heroes was included in a similar PS2 collection in Japan, but the franchise has been dormant in North America for about a dozen years.

Tokyo-based D4Enterprise will manage the release of the games onto the Virtual Console, but SNK Playmore said more titles will definitely follow "in the coming months." An SNK Playmore representative told GameSpot the first titles will appear by the end of the year, and they are expected to sell for 900 Wii points ($9) each.