I've never heard of SNK... but what games did they made then?

man, are you serious? SNK are the masters of those incredible 2D fightings, shmups and several RPGs, mostly known as the developers for arcade units. they created such legendary games as: KoF (King of Fighters 'XX, where XX stands for the year of release) series, Metal Slug series (hopefully you heard at least something about this superior run'n'gun), Samurai Showdown great fighting series and tons, no TONS more of heart-pounding software. now type any of these names into the search field of youtube and make yourself sure those are stunning games!
I strongly recommend that you also check out Crystalis under our beloved emu, JNES, since it's one of the coolest action-RPGs of its time beyond Zelda! now guess who created it. yep, it's those top SNK folks behind the awesome Crystalis!

damn, almost forgot those were SNK blokes who had brought an arcade-perfect experience home by creating NEO-GEO, the most powerful console of its time 'cuz it was capable of running any (!) SNK arcade game in non-compromised way meaning it needed no optimization to convert any game, unlike Genesis or SNES systems which conversions had lots of simplifications since they just couldn't run that software in its original form - leading to poor experience... ah, and NEO-GEO was unpopular because of its initial retail price of 600 bloody bucks! too expensive for everyone to get a hold of it...

I only knew about SEGA, Nintendo, MSX, Atari, Playstation, Xbox, Namco, Konami... can't figure out more names now...

But it sounds great about those SNK games

SNK was legendary in the arcades if you played fighting games,
I played quite a bit of King of Fighers and World Heroes II as I mentioned in the article. If you haven't tried any SNK games give them a spin in MAME some time.

since NEO-GEO utilized the same hardware as its arcade counterparts, it's safe to say that an emulation of that powerhouse could well be almost identical compared to those original arcade cabinets, depending on what games you're willing to see.
personally I used to run Kawaks when playing those fascinating Metal Slug 4, 5 & X blasters along with some less known shmups (Last Resort to name 1). ahh, memories... such a warm feeling spreads all over when launching those titles - like in the long-lost childhood...

I await the next gen remake/sequel of Crystalis like I await a Mets World Series Championship.

Forever waiting, but not very hopeful.

I'm one of the top dogs in Samurai Shodown 4 in my country..Haomaru, Bust, Beginner's Class..lol!

I want a sequel to GAROU MARK OF THE WOLVES so bad.

Man NEO-GEO was simply an awesome system and yes the price of the system and of it's games just killed it and whoever was an arcade junkie or purist in those days I believe in point of view was surely the holy grail of gaming a no compromise experience for sure you got for what you paid for as for example the samurai series you could either block or not block the blood scenes (well sort of the scene was still there just less messy)you had all the switches to play the game as it was meant also another killer was the very little number of publishers that SNK got for system but as for hardware it was superior and professional level tech indeed and the very small games collection it had,well many of those games are still well ranked even as of today those game do never lose their shine