Hey y'all. It's been a while since I've updated this here website, huh? Doing the guide for The Super Spy was clearly my magnum opus, something I was not looking to try to ever top, so why even bother trying. But maybe I don't need to "top" it per se, maybe I just need to do more writing every now and then, to get things off my chest before these things get entirely lost to time. Because researching this quick little article (well, it was little originally but then I went on some tangents and now it too has gotten way longer than I expected it to be) sent me on a fun trip down memory lane, and while my first instinct was to do a Twitter thread about this, that was a bad idea for at least a couple reasons - 1. the thread would be quite unwieldy to actually read, and 2. I have no idea how long Twitter will even continue to exist in this world as it implodes under its moronic new management. Also I suppose these things are easier to find on the internet than ancient Twitter threads. So here we are, actually doing the old website thing again. How about that.

So..... I've always wanted to bring up a subject that very few people would ever give a rat's ass about, but it's one that's annoyed me for almost 25 years (!) at this point. It's time to set the record straight as to how and why this ever happened in the first place, and the ramifications that ensued (and can still be seen to this day on the internet) because of one person's innocent little typo about a game nobody respects enough to get the correct title of.

Let's talk about "Operation Ragnagard".

For everyone else, it might not ring a bell. So let's start with the actual game at the center of all this dumb shit. So........ have you at least heard of this video game called Ragnagard? Also known in Japan as Shin Oh Ken?

Maybe you have, if you're a Neo-Geo fan, or you happen to know some things about kusoge fighting games. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people out there have no idea, so don't feel bad if you fall into this category! But this was kinda one of the factors that led to this whole incident in the first place.

Ragnagard was primarily designed by System Vision, a small company that also made Power Athlete/Power Moves/Deadly Moves and Battle Master, two rather lackluster fighting games on the SNES and Genesis (and Battle Master didn't even get an international release outside of Japan). For the development of Ragnagard, System Vision was assisted by a second-party division of SNK called Saurus (who ended up programming and releasing a number of games on the Neo-Geo, most notably a little game called Shock Troopers, which is one of my favorite games of all time). Since it was 1996, Ragnagard / Shin Oh Ken was a fighting game, because of fucking course it was. More and more of the new releases that were appearing on the Neo-Geo hardware were fighting games, because they were the most likely genre to make money, and would end up keeping the system afloat in arcades for 14 years, even after the hardware had started to look outdated compared to what else was being released in arcades into the 2000's. But let's get back to 1996. At this point, the fighting game market in arcades was getting a wee bit oversaturated, so just releasing any fighting game into the arcades was not a guarantee that you'd have players lining up to play a new release, because there was so much competition that you needed to make something that really stood out. What did some of the higher-ups believe would be the thing that would draw people to Ragnagard? Why, prerendered graphics of course.

Killer Instinct was a massive success in North American arcades when it dropped in late 1994, sporting these new-fangled pre-rendered graphics (and also ridiculous combos and a splash of those finishing moves that western gamers were crazy for). Donkey Kong Country was by far the hottest game to get on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System during Christmas 1994. Surely these prerendered graphics were the future for those systems that couldn't do fully 3D polygonal models! So a handful of companies started investing heavily in this idea, Saurus included (I highly recommend everyone watch the fantastically jaw-dropping intro to their Neo-Geo soccer game Pleasure Goal / Futsal if you're not familiar). How did this pan out for Ragnagard?

I mean, the characters look better than they did in something like, say, Pleasure Goal. But it still looks very bizarre. A lot of things are animated very smoothly, but there's something that just feels very "off" about everything. The extra animation brings it to a point where moves come out slower just because they wanted to show off more frames of animation - think Elena from Street Fighter III. It's kinda strange to look at in motion, and from still screenshots I think it's pretty safe to say that this is not the most appealing thing to look at.

Forget how it looks though, how does it play? Well, that too is something that I can only assume felt very foreign to players at the time. There is some depth to the engine, as you have extra movement options like air-dashes and the ability to jump cancel out of some normal moves, making it possible to launch your opponent and go into an air combo, Marvel Super Heroes style. You can charge up your super meter and fire off different elemental attacks depending on which buttons you used to charge it up. And you have the ability to guard cancel out of blockstun at any time by simply tapping towards the opponent when blocking. At no point during the game's How To Play demo after you put in a credit and press Start does it explain how to do any of this, except for the super charge mechanic, although they don't explain that it can be charged with either ABC or BCD to build up different elements. Yeah.

Fighting games usually have a lot of hidden depth that is up to the players to discover, but to me this game always felt completely unnatural in how it plays, how it moves, how combos work. And if you're not playing against another human opponent, the CPU mode will let you mess around for a couple stages and not kill you off immediately, but as you get farther into the game, it assumes you know everything about the engine and it abuses the hell out of the guard cancel mechanic. By the time you reach the bosses, expect any blocked move of yours to be guard cancelled and lead into a huge combo for the CPU. It's a very unfriendly experience for the player unless you take the time to dig in and fully explore the mechanics of the game... and why would you want to do that, when the arcade also has a Street Fighter Alpha 2 cabinet with much more sensible gameplay? Or heck, getting back to the point that the Neo-Geo had so much competition within itself for fighting games... this was around the time that the King of Fighters series was becoming extremely popular in Japan, and KOF '96 was released around the same time, sporting new pixel art for all 27+ characters and was generally a lot nicer to look at... which do you think players would flock to? (Also, SNK actually delayed the release of Ragnagard from its original posted release date because they decided that it was more important that the priority be placed on using all their rom chips to produce KOF '96 cartridges first, since they figured it was more likely that it was going to make more money. They were 100% right)

Now, I know there are some folks out there that enjoy the game, to which I will say I'm sorry (for multiple reasons). Don't let my bashing of the game stop you from having a good time if you like the insane air combos and whatnot. My point is that the game has always been extremely unpopular ever since it was released. I don't really want to do a full breakdown of the game like I usually do on this site, but one more thing before we move on - DevilREI of gaming.moe did a fantastic interview with Akihiro Takanami, who had a lot of stories to tell about the development of System Vision's fighting games, including Ragnagard. So go check that out too if you haven't already. If you enjoy these stories of 90's arcade gaming, it's well worth the read. (there Heidi, you knew I'd give your site a plug. smooch)

Alright. So now you at least have some base knowledge of what Ragnagard is. Suffice it to say, if you lived in the West and didn't really follow the Neo-Geo, you might not have known anything about Ragnagard, or even that the game existed at all, especially around... say, the year 1998 (two years after it was released). You probably didn't see it at your local arcade, you probably didn't import the game on Saturn. How would one ever end up coming across this game when it was this obscure?

https://web.archive.org/web/19980129080453/http://www.davesclassics.com/

1998 was a memorable year to me, for many reasons... but one that really sticks out in my mind was being around to see the emulation scene continue to grow and mature. In the previous year (1997) I'd discovered the world of emulation through a site called Atmospherical Heights, and my free time would never be the same again. Of course I was most interested in arcade emulation, which was still in its infancy and not many games were playable at all yet. This was before MAME became the de-facto arcade emulator in encompassing just about everything. Before everything was mostly unified into MAME, you had a lot of authors doing their own things, often writing single-game emulators that only played one game, sometimes emulators encompassing multiple games on the same hardware. I was especially ecstatic to see these standalone emulators for games like Black Tiger and Rygar, games I had such fond memories of playing in the late 80's and could no longer experience due to all the cabinets being taken out of arcades where I lived. The concept of having these games that were previously only playable in arcades, being made accessible once again, without even having to put in a quarter to play them... it was a dream come true. I would check sites like Atmospherical Heights and Dave's Video Game Classics every day to see what was new in the world of emulation, eager to see more and more arcade games playable on my PC. It was a very exciting time.

Neo-Geo emulation was not yet a thing when I originally discovered these emulators, but in 1998, breakthroughs started to happen. It began with a man named Johan Kohler who wrote an emulator called "Gekko", which had a "Teaser" version released first on April 29th 1998, with promise of a full version to come. The Teaser release only supported NAM-1975, it had no joystick/pad support, no sound, no savestates, or any of the other amenities we take for granted with emulators these days. But here it was, NAM-1975 being playable from start to finish. I took this opportunity to actually figure out what to do against the last boss, since I'd never seen the ending due to it cutting off continues when you reach the last boss, giving you a unique bad ending. Anyway, a full version of Gekko never materialized - the webpage up there doesn't work unfortunately to explain what happened, but according to a site called The Dump (teehee), apparently he wasn't prepared for the popularity of the emulator, he wasn't happy that people were able to "trick" the emulator into loading games other than NAM-1975 by renaming rom files (I sure do remember this part), and he was also worried about possible legal trouble. Johan left the emulation scene entirely after this (AFAIK), which was certainly a huge disappointment for everyone wanting to see Neo-Geo emulation get fleshed out... but luckily others were able to take up the challenge now that the blueprints had been laid down.

https://web.archive.org/web/19981205080858/http://home5.swipnet.se/%7Ew-50884/emulator/rage.htm

It was up to Anders Nilsson and Janne Korpela, two programmers from Sweden, who unleashed a new emulator on May 17th, 1998 called NeoRAGE. This wasn't their first emulator work, they had previously released an emulator called "RAGE" that supported a handful of Irem games like Gunforce, Undercover Cops, and In The Hunt. No, I don't know why either of these projects had "RAGE" in the title, but I guess you need something cool sounding to stand out. Anyway, the initial version of NeoRAGE was also very preliminary, but it did officially support other games besides NAM-1975. And luckily NeoRAGE was here to stay, getting updated several times over the next few months, eventually adding things like pad/joystick support and savestates (it's hard to even think about using an emulator these days that doesn't have support for something other than keyboard), but sound support was the big one they just couldn't crack. MAME would end up beating them to the punch eventually, but before MAME had their Neo-Geo drivers in place, NeoRAGE was the only option at the time in the summer of 1998. And I'd like to point out that I'm referring to the DOS version of NeoRAGE, which is pretty damn hard to find on the internet nowadays, but luckily archive.org has a working download link to it if you want it for whatever reason. When people think of NeoRAGE, they generally think of NeoRAGEx, which was a much more feature complete emulator with a GUI and... yes, sound support. But that came in 1999, which was later. We'll get to that.

Of course, NeoRAGE only supported so many games when it launched because not every game had been dumped yet. People would have to acquire and dump the games for them to be playable at all by emulators, and this kinda opened up a weird legal quandary... is it right to be dumping and supporting brand new games for hardware that was still being sold in arcades? Remember, the Neo-Geo was still going strong and seeing brand new game releases in 1998. Having games made available that were less than a year old for free on emulators was definitely opening up a can of worms, and people worried about "WaReZ" scene kiddies and the like being attracted to emulation, or make them belligerent and demanding for other arcade games. Which was at least partially true. Nonetheless, some groups actually met that demand and did start releasing newer Neo-Geo games. But there were still a lot of gaps that needed to be filled in, older games that hadn't been dumped yet. Enter ROMList.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990117012739/http://romlist.com/

ROMList were a couple guys from Sweden named Aracorn and ORG who had access to a lot of arcade PCB's, and decided to take full advantage of it to help out the budding arcade emulation scene. With NeoRAGE in full swing, they focused almost entirely on acquiring and dumping Neo-Geo games during the summer of 1998. It seemed like every few days they were releasing something new - King of Fighters '95, Samurai Shodown, Windjammers, Neo Drift Out, Top Hunter, Aero Fighters 2, etc etc. In August of 1998 they even dumped and released the ROMs to Shock Troopers - a game I had become hooked on and was eager to play on the next release of NeoRAGE, even if it did feel weird getting to play a game that was less than a year old at that point. And of course it didn't have sound yet, which was an important part of the Shock Troopers experience to me... but at least it was playable. ROMList had been doing important work in helping get more and more Neo-Geo games playable, and as a Neo-Geo fan I was always excited to see what had been released every time there was an update.

Then on September 30th, 1998 (or October 1st, 1998 depending on where you lived in the world), ROMList did yet another of their ROM release updates. The new ROM of the day was something called "Operation Ragnagard / Shin-Oh-Ken".

Now... I wish I had a screenshot of ROMList's webpage from this day, because this has been my white whale in putting all this together. The Wayback Machine sadly does not have any captures of ROMList's website in October 1998, nor do they have any working links to pages with old update information that would cover it. But I *KNOW* for a fact it was ROMList that released the rom dump, with the title "Operation Ragnagard". I had driven myself nuts trying to find an archive of this page, or any of the other emulation sites that reported on news at the time, just so I had some visible proof other than my memory. Finally I managed to find a couple pages that gave me exactly what I needed to see....

This is a Taiwanese page called "Game Elysium", that appears to be the homepage for a program called NCC, which was a graphical frontend that was designed for the original commandline DOS NeoRAGE (in other words there was zero demand for this after NeoRAGE-X came out). But the webpage also had a bunch of emulation-related news updates from May 1998 to October 1998, with the final update to the site happening on December 2nd, 1998. How this site still exists on the internet in the year 2023 is beyond me, but I am delighted to see that it is somehow still up (and I have since saved all the HTML files should it disappear). Their emulation news updates made mention of whenever ROMList released a new ROM dump since they obviously had a vested interest in the Neo-Geo, which is exactly what I needed for this article. Scroll down to October 1st, and there it is.

Now, this still isn't as good as a screenshot of ROMList's own update page, but since they credit this "Operation Ragnagard" game to ROMList, that's all I really needed to see to confirm that my memory had not gone bad. For a while this was the only site I could find to prove it was them, but after another deep search of crawling through links on the Wayback Archive, I did manage to find one site in English that also covered it way back then: a site called SYS2064 that was primarily focused on arcade emulation. I don't really remember frequenting that site back in the day because I probably got my news from either Dave's Classics or Retrogames, but I was relieved to see their old news updates were caught by the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990128011503if_/http://www.classicgaming.com/sys2064/news/okt98.htm

And yup, there it is again... wait. Did they just call it "Operation Ragnagrad"??? Well at least we know they didn't copy-paste the title, but... god, it's even funnier when sites can't even get the incorrect fake name of the game right. Even better, they repeated this error on another section of their website. Beautiful. This game just continues to get zero respect from everyone after it was dumped. I still wish I had a capture of what ROMList's website looked like when they actually released "Operation Ragnagard", but these two sites at least prove it was them.

So now that we know it was ROMList who was responsible for the incorrect game title "Operation Ragnagard". There is no Neo-Geo game with that exact title, but obviously, this is the aforementioned 1996 fighting game from System Vision / Saurus, as they also made mention of Shin-Oh-Ken, which was the Japanese title. But now we must also answer the question...... why "Operation" Ragnagard? Where did this additional word even come from in the first place, since that's a little more than just a misspelled typo? As luck would have it, that's part's actually very easy to explain.

I'm 100% sure that when they were making that update on ROMList, they got confused with a different Neo-Geo game! Operation Ragnarok, or as it was known outside of Japan, Zed Blade. Operation Ragnarok / Zed Blade was NMK's only release on the Neo-Geo, not a very graphically impressive game but still a pretty fun shoot-em-up, containing some wicked tunes from a young Manabu Namiki, who's gone on to have a pretty storied career producing music for shmups. Just don't play it for score, because otherwise you spend the entire game leeching points by shooting the ground or shooting the non-destructible parts of bosses. Oof. But yeah... Ragnarok, Ragnagard. It makes sense, right? See, that wasn't too hard to figure out. There was never really a mystery as to why this typo happened, but that's not the point of this page. We just needed to get this out of the way, since I gotta be as thorough as possible about this.

Anyway. Since ROMList decreed that the game was called "Operation Ragnagard", every other internet emulation site reporting on these things took this name to be the proper name for the game, because nobody really knew any better about poor Ragnagard. I've only got two archives to prove it now, but I'm sure there were more (please let me know if you manage to find anything else on the Wayback Machine, it would be most appreciated).

But this was only the beginning! It didn't stop at websites making up a fake name for this game, emulator authors themselves used this fake name without even taking a little time to verify the name of the fucking game in their emulators! And those can easily be screenshotted! This is where the REAL damage has been done over the years in misleading people into what the actual name of Ragnagard was.

(Warning: image dump incoming)

Remember the aforementioned NeoRAGE? In April 1999 they released NeoRAGEX, which included a GUI with a gamelist, and it ended up being pretty damn popular when it came out, a lot of people preferred it for their Neo-Geo needs over MAME. It even had the ability to "detect" games that weren't already in the gamelist, so new ROM dumps could be played without requiring a new version to officially add support for the game. (the version in this screenshot is a later revision somebody slapped their name on to hack it to work on modern versions of Windows, although it still insists on full-screening)

As for the games that were already there in the initial release of NeoRAGEX... yup, you guessed it. "Operation Ragnagard" is there, and it would never get corrected.

But hey, speaking of MAME. As mentioned earlier, MAME was the first emulator to get sound working in Neo-Geo games, which was the big thing everybody was waiting for after a few months of no sound in DOS NeoRAGE. "Operation Ragnagard" made its debut in MAME 0.34 beta 6 on October 28th, 1998, and remained under that title through many, many releases of MAME, up until version 0.69 (nice) on May 24th 2003, at which point somebody finally fucking noticed there was no Operation on the title screen, I guess. 4 1/2 years of the wrong fucking name, in an emulator that's often prided itself for caring about the proper documentation of these games. At least they finally got there in the end, which is more than I can say for other emulators like...

An emulator called Nebula was a popular emulator for playing Neo-Geo games, in addition to things like Capcom CPS-2 and CPS-2 games. It supported netplay over Kaillera servers, a lot laggier and more delay-based than what would end up being come available on GGPO/Fightcade, but it was the original way to play a lot of these games over the internet with another person. Nebula's history text file doesn't include dates but I was able to eventually track down that Neo-Geo support was added in version 1.8, released on August 29th, 2001. Its final official update was in 2007. "Operation Ragnagard" still exists on its gamelist in this final version, of course.

(For the record, Nebula did always have a cool "Shots Factory" feature which was very nice for ripping graphics from Neo-Geo games. Perfect for ripping every frame of World's victory bounce animation from Magical Drop 3, so you can remove her third eye and then slap a "Ford" logo on her top. Or whatever.)

Kawaks was another popular emulator that also arrived on the scene in 2001. I'm surprised to see it has still received updates up to the year 2016, because I figured it had stopped in the 2000's as well, when most of the Neo-Geo library plus CPS1/CPS2/CPS3 games had been dumped and supported. Despite it receiving all these updates over the years, the problem still remains that if you have a hankering to play Ragnagard on Kawaks for whatever reason, you better look in the O's in the gamelist instead of the R's.

Final Burn Alpha, which was the emulator that was used for defunct fighting game netplay services GGPO, 2DF, and Supercade, as well as older releases of Fightcade, has always called it "Operation Ragnagard". Development on Final Burn Alpha ceased in 2018 after one of the devs allowed Capcom to use FBA on their goofy joystick shaped like a Capcom logo, which pissed off all the other devs and they rebranded the project (without the sellout traitor) as Final Burn Neo.

I'd like to point out that Final Burn Neo is still under active development at the time of this writing and is still seeing new versions get released, AND YET "Operation Ragnagard" IS STILL THERE AS OF 2022. Jesus titty fucking Christ. What can I say, nobody cares...

(Fightcade has at least gotten the title right in the client's game search and lobby. But guess what shows up in the emulator's title bar if you're running the game in a window, since it's using a version of Final Burn Neo where the name hasn't been corrected....)

Because of all these emulators that spread this misinformation, "Operation Ragnagard" continues to persist across the internet.

And then there's all the mislabeled videos you can find on YouTube. Hooooo boy.

I even got personally pinged on Twitter about it once. It wasn't a joke, either.

It keeps going and going like this. I think you get the point. I do want to bring up a couple more things about the ROM dumpers though...

https://web.archive.org/web/19991013112709/http://romlist.com/rl_neogeo.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/19990225164952if_/http://www.classicgaming.com/sys2064/news/aug98.htm

(it's also worth pointing out that, as archived on both Game Elysium and SYS2064, there was also a news update that says that ROMList was responsible for the release of "Blazing Stars (Pulstar 2)". StarS? Plural? The game is never officially called Pulstar 2 either, even if it's by a lot of the same developers, so this could have possibly led to some similar disinformation getting spread. MAME 0.34 Beta 5 added it and called it "Pulstar 2 - Blazing Star", kept that name for 0.34 Beta 6, then finally fixed it to just "Blazing Star" in 0.34 Beta 7. I can't provide screenshots of this at the moment because I'm currently unable to find the old romset needed to run the game in this ancient version of MAME, I just found the name by printing the gamelist through DOSBox. This was AFAIK the last time that Blazing Star would end up being mislabeled in emulators, so it thankfully avoided Ragnagard's fate, probably by virtue of it being a pretty fun game that people actually want to play.)

https://web.archive.org/web/19991012225339/http://www.romlist.com/

Also, maybe I feel some extra sympathy for ROMList because in combing through these archived websites, I discovered something I had completely forgotten about (at least, I assume I saw this update back in the day but I had no recollection of it now). When ROMList sort of "retired" from releasing ROMs in 1999 for a little bit, there was a good reason for that - Aracorn had some sort of arcade-affiliated job, which certainly explained how they had access to all these arcade boards for the purpose of dumping. Apparently the management didn't approve of what he was doing, and he got fired. He actually lost his job from making sure all these Neo-Geo got games dumped and preserved. That's... wow, that's harsh. He apparently got a new job shortly thereafter, so all's well that ends well. And ROMList ended up releasing some more arcade dumps later in 1999 that weren't Neo-Geo related. But still... wow.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990430000607/http://neocharity.retrogames.com/

Oh hey, one last important thing about the history of Neo-Geo emulation. I would also like to point out that, going back to late 1998 and into the year 1999 (and beyond?), ROMList would also have some "competition" of sorts with another page called NeoCharity, formed to help fill the frothing demand for more Neo-Geo rom dumps. NeoCharity took crowdfunded donations from the internet to buy and dump the remaining games, and I suppose there was sort of a friendly rivalry between NeoCharity and ROMList to get these games out. Eventually ROMList sort of stopped with the new Neo-Geo releases in 1999, so it was even more important for NeoCharity to dump these games. And when Neo-Geo sound emulation became a reality in MAME in late 1998, it was discovered that ROMList had somehow incorrectly dumped the sound roms for a lot of their releases, and so the cartridges had to be acquired again to actually get proper data from the sound roms so the games would actually sound correct. Whoops! So NeoCharity also handled the redumps for a lot of that stuff. I'm bringing this up for 3 reasons.

1. It felt very nostalgic reminiscing about the early days of Neo-Geo emulation so I needed to give them a shoutout as well. NeoCharity and ROMList definitely had a bit of a friendly rivalry going, or at least I assume there weren't any hostile intentions behind any shots they took at one another.

2. The sidebar on the archived pages lists one of NeoCharity's rom releases as "Spin Masters". God DAMMIT. That title is NOT supposed to be plural! People have probably made that mistake on their own so I'm not going to get into blaming them for this, because AFAIK all the emulators out there have always called the game Spin Master. The title screen always looked like it stylized the title as "Spinmaster" or even "Spin master" though? Whatever, I'm not getting into this shit over another one of these typos right now.

3. Ah, shit. Wanna guess what one of those Neo-Geo games with bad sound ROM dumps was? You guessed it, "Operation Ragnagard"... or as NeoCharity wanted to call it when they redumped the sound ROMs, "Operation Ragnacrap"!!! Ohoho, take THAT, Saurus / System Vision!!!!!! Maybe that burn would have been harsher had they actually gotten the name of the game right, but it's arguably more of an insult to call it a fake name, I suppose. "Worst fighting game ever" though? Come on now, it's not even the worst fighting game on the Neo-Geo (that would be Fight Fever), and is at least way more playable than garbage like Tao Taido or Holosseum.

Don't ask me why I'm getting so heated about this news blurb from 1999 on a website that no longer exists and has long since been forgotten by most people. The time has probably come to wrap this up...

So there you have it. Maybe you never knew (or cared) about the internet fallout from one person's innocent typo from the last millennium, but now you know the full story. Perhaps this isn't interesting to everyone, but it reminded me of an exciting time where I got to watch the progression of Neo-Geo emulation, so it was important to me to get this all written down and out there. These things get forgotten as time goes on and websites disappear from the internet, but something tells me the "Operation Ragnagard" title will still live on in people's YouTube videos and social media posts for years to come. And I'll continue to get pissed off about it.

As to when this website will get updated again? Who knows, hopefully it won't take 10 years again for that. If you feel the need to bully me into trying to finish some of the ideas I had for this site, stop by my stream sometime and let me know you read this!