Local multiplayer gaming has a certain unique and irreplaceable charm that’s absent from even the most technologically advanced online play of today. Late into the night of a sleepover, you’re going to play video games with your friends in your proximity, on the same screen. The evening will undoubtedly devolve into a raucous good time, with everyone cramming onto a couch, arbitrarily teaming up or facing off, claiming their fighter, their power-up. And, because you’re all right there next to each other, you’re going to talk ad infinitum about all those serious nothings kids say when they’re up past local quiet time ordinances.
I got my start in local multiplayer gaming with the NES system. My earliest friends and I played an ersatz “tag” version of Super Mario Bros. 3. One of us would have the controller, and when we died, whether from an enemy, a pit trap, or (most commonly) plain old falling into a hole we passed the virtual baton until, at the end of a world, two or three of us had had a hand in gaming victory. I think there’s something primal in the appeal of playing games together in front of a screen. After all, the reason people have been sitting around fireplaces together for millennia is only 40 percent so they wouldn’t freeze themselves and an additional 60 percent because of the sweetness of the shared experience (which, as you might imagine, was lacking in the pre-video game eon if you consider an eon to be a very long time). That’s what makes the game space so interesting: it’s a conditional shared experience. You might think you’re doing the same thing you would do if you were gaming alone, but you’re not; even the same game plays differently when you are playing with (or against) someone else.
The world of multiplayer gaming grew more elaborate and varied alongside the advancing technology of the consoles themselves. We sometimes evince surprise that our gaming forebears, inhabiting the primitive polygonal realms of the Nintendo 64, were able to get any enjoyment out of their consoles. But the Nintendo 64—true to its name—carved out a relatively robust path through the mid-to-late 1990s, and, as with any beloved console, it did so on the back of a clutch of great games—a combination of first-party aces like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and third-party hits like GoldenEye 007.
This era was defined in part by Street Fighter II. My friends and I played this game for hours in my parents’ basement, nervously abiding by the unspoken rule that the loser surrendered the controller after each match. The game was never boring, because each of us played a different character. The seemingly endless variations of play, relying on one kind of move over another, using different characters with different styles, and so on — meant no play was exactly like another. Thus, hours with Street Fighter II didn’t just mean good times with friends; they also meant honing the sort of gaming skills for which this era would become known.
The era that Street Fighter II began doesn’t stop there. The ’90s became the heyday of competition in not just one but many games. Various memorable phases of the series, such as the four-player mayhem of Super Smash Bros. for the N64, the guaranteed return of challenging local multiplayer games in particular, the Mario Kart series drew boisterous groups of friends together. One certain technique, the way a character was drawn to move has a direct relationship to how we remember those games and how well their inclusive design worked.
GoldenEye 007 on the N64 is another one of those games that’s hard to overstate in terms of influence and the sheer amount of time it was played. The split-screen multiplayer mode in GoldenEye was the next level of the couch co-op shooter experience. It was something that, up to that point, you’d really only seen on the PC side of things with games like Doom and Quake. But it was here on a console, and it was very much part of that same Nintendo ethos that led to so many great yet nonviolent cooperative and competitive games. This was a shooter you could play with friends after school, but it was also very much a part of that event.
Local multiplayer thrived during the golden age of 2D gaming. This was a time when if you wanted to get together with your buddies, you actually had to get together under the same roof. There was no Xbox Live. No PlayStation Network. You had to gather around the same television sharing not just the same living room space, but also the same gaming experience. You had to exist not just in the same instance of the game, but also on the same couch. It was a Couch Co-Op Revolution indeed, where local gaming serviced not just the austere competitive atmosphere that grew as things went on, but also the joyously collaborative spirit that worked hand in hand with it.
The first time I remember playing a cooperative game was when my childhood friend and I played “Contra” on the NES. The game featured two soldiers facing what seemed like an eternity of 8-bit enemies. Two neighborhood kids played with the classic Konami code and fought their way through the jungle, energy zone, hangar, etc., to finally defeat the giant alien brain at the end. In a way, Contra taught us the importance of fun, cheese, and perseverance, which is really a microcosm of what life’s all about. These early games were simpler times that are easy to be nostalgic for. Still, what are they really nostalgic of?
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System’s Secret of Mana pushed the limits of what was thought possible for cooperative play in video games. Far from the rudimentary multiplayer modes that one might have experienced on the 8-bit Nintendo, for instance, or in arcade games of the day, the SNES took multiplayer to the next level and made it an essential part of a group gameplay experience. Secret of Mana was by no means the first cooperative-playing game on a console. It merely improved upon that very idea by a quantum leap and utilized the SNES’s power. This was also a fantastic way to use the console’s Four Score-like peripheral because it wasn’t as much fun with just two players compared to playing a three-person communal game.
The Diablo franchise, which started with the first game in 1996, is all about the cooperative experience. Its foreboding world, along with gameplay that revolves around finding better and better loot, was an instant hit with those of us of a certain age. (Not that we’d ever admit liking something because it let us play for hours and still feel like there was a point to our being there.) We’d sit around one PC and strategize. An element of nostalgia no doubt drives a number of the trailer’s YouTube likes. But there’s little reason to suspect the next game in the series won’t continue delivering the same top feel in the way of shared experiences.
The development and sophistication of cooperative video games rose concurrently with the power of the game console itself. “Halo: Combat Evolved,” which came out for the original Xbox in 2001, overhauled the first-person shooter co-op campaign completely. This was a co-op experience specifically designed for a shooting video game with a vast and complex A.I. system. Teams of two to four players spent endless hours battling the Covenant and the Flood. They fought, ran, died, and revived. The players inside the old black box held their controllers and sat there gaming. Meanwhile, the truly cooperative nature of the game radiated outward, creating a space where players could exist within it without causing negative or confrontational events.
As online gaming gained popularity in the mid-2000s, local multiplayer took a hit. The ease of playing not just with friends but also with anyone in the world over the internet became an appealing factor for gamers. Along with that, games themselves were rising in complexity. For game developers, the amount of work required to include both online and local multiplayer in the same title began to seem Herculean, and our lapse into the convenient world of online multiplayer seemed all but inevitable. Then why is it, in the years following, we couch co-op and local multiplayer fans can now reminisce over not just one but a few great local multiplayer games?
Those of us who matured with local multiplayer took the transition to online gaming hard. We used to throw together in makeshift living room arenas for hours on end. Gaming was how we socialized—literally, when you think about it, because we couldn’t just very well throw a sofa and a TV into the online world. So, for us, it was and still is a big deal to be able to play games with friends, to have what felt like a unique experience with them. Unfortunately, couch multiplayer just isn’t the same as it used to be. Even before the pandemic struck, it was a little bit ‘on the way out.’
Even with this change, the call for local multiplayer experiences hasn’t really gone away. A lot of indie game developers, in particular, have gone back to that idea and really run with it— creating some very simple and, to my mind (and to a lot of people’s minds, really), quite awesome games that harken back to this sort of “good ol’ days” idea. TowerFall Ascension, Overcooked, and Nidhogg are some pretty well-known examples of just some of the good round of couch gaming that’s come around again.
Local multiplayer games have been making a comeback, and you can credit a lot of that to the Nintendo Switch. The console sold 18.5 million units in its first 21 months on the U.S. market, and a big reason for that is its heralding return to couch gaming. The Switch has two built-in controllers and allows friends to quickly play with you at home or on the go. Games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Splatoon 2 continue the legacy of local multiplayer, and players can be seen competing in these “let’s play” sessions all over Twitch and YouTube.
The local multiplayer era might have passed us by, but what it left be can never be replaced. Two to four friends hanging out, gaming in the same space sometimes for hours on end tended to create a whole lot of awesome, irreplaceable memories. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, gaming in that pre-online era also produced some of the best friendships and propagated the most genuinely hilarious events gaming had to offer.
The remembrances of those times are what a large number of us hold dearest about the gaming life we’ve lived and loved. Matches that came down to the wire, where we snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, are the stuff of both sublime legend and shared camaraderie. And even now, happening upon someone in the same virtual world can bring a giddy sense of familiarity if we have the recollection of trading words with them in some past after-game showdown.
Today’s games are still being shaped by the good old days of local multiplayer. Modern game design continues to be inspired by the delightful simplicity and no-frills accessibility of bygone local co-op and competitive titles. Classic local multiplayer games are direct, and they’re about people in a room together. Some developers have made indie-game darlings that obviously heed to that couch-gameplay ethos. Others have revived the social design premise that makes the couch co-op and competitive games so “us” in the first place. Truly, local multiplayer has always been special to those who grew up with it. And those who did are now, no doubt, mostly adults. Yet the games that they play and pay for are absolutely still being influenced by what happened in their youths. What’s happening with today’s games is still part of the local multiplayer story, because the things that happened and the games that were played back then are still fresh with current developers, most of whom are, in fact, as young as Nintendo itself, and were around a very long time ago when Nintendo and the whole host of local-multiplayer-design pioneers had enormous hits.
The local multiplayer mode of video games will continue to be important in the future. Global online gaming continues to grow at an astonishing rate and offers undeniable handiness and connectivity, and let’s face it even some fantastic games and game modes that you just couldn’t play with local co-op and couch-based gaming. But as online play has actually become the norm for millions of gamers, and what you play as is now what you often play with, a recent spate of studies has confirmed that those who invest the most time playing online tend to report a lower quality of life. So what am “I” doing, as a roman historian, with all these virtual friends?
To sum up, the heyday of local multiplayer was an era of shared fun, friendship, and new adventures. The incredible collective memories that we old-school gamers made during those gaming moments are particularly sublime, and what’s even better is that they continue to influence the nostalgia-inducing essence of the current thriving world of modern gaming. As a testament to the bygone “good ol’ days” of local multiplayer, we can now experience local multiplayer in so many new creative ways. And even better, those experiences don’t stay confined within a console as they used to. They now get to travel across to PCs and phones thanks to the endlessly expanding world of technological possibilities. We have to thank the memories and the power of games themselves for how far we’ve come in local multiplayer!
