Capcom’s Midnight Wanderers Is Getting a Neo Geo Version It Never Had, and There’s a Demo
Homebrew dev Domkid is porting Capcom's 1991 arcade gem Midnight Wanderers to the Neo Geo, a system it never officially reached. A free two-stage demo is out now.
Midnight Wanderers was always one of the prettier things Capcom put in an arcade. It shipped in 1991 as one of the three games packed into the Three Wonders cabinet, running on CPS-1, a bright, fast run-and-gun platformer that a lot of people remember more fondly than they can name. It never officially made it to the Neo Geo. Now a homebrew developer is putting it there anyway.
The person doing it goes by Domkid, working as Z-TEAM, and it is built in the Scorpion Engine, Earok’s homebrew toolset. To be clear about what it is: not a one-to-one copy of the CPS-1 original, since that is different hardware doing different things, but a version that stays very close to it. There is a free demo up on itch.io right now with the first two levels finished, and the good part for the hardware crowd is that it is not emulator-only. It runs on a real Neo Geo AES or MVS, or a Neo Geo CD, off a flash cart, as well as in MAME or Raine if you would rather.
This is the homebrew scene at its most satisfying: one person taking a game to a machine it was never on, for no reason other than that it should exist. Midnight Wanderers is exactly the kind of underrated arcade gem worth the effort, and the Neo Geo is exactly the kind of console people keep alive precisely so things like this can happen. Two levels today, the rest to come. Go play it.