How gaming together evolved — from two paddles on a screen to split-screen deathmatches
Atari's Pong (1972) was the first commercially successful arcade game to make two-player competition its central attraction, establishing the face-to-face competitive format that would define arcade gaming for a decade.
Atari Games' Gauntlet (1985) introduced simultaneous four-player co-operative play to the arcade, assigning each player a distinct character class and requiring coordination to survive dungeon levels flooded with enemies.
The NES port of Konami's Contra (1988) became the canonical example of two-player co-operative action on the home console: simultaneously demanding and generous, built for two players working in parallel through relentless side-scrolling combat.
Capcom's Street Fighter II (1991) created the competitive one-on-one fighting game genre and established the template — six-button layout, motion-input specials, character-specific matchups — that every subsequent fighting game would follow.
Square's Secret of Mana (1993) supported up to three simultaneous players through the SNES Multitap adapter, making it the first action RPG to allow a full party to be controlled by human players playing together in real time.
Super Bomberman (1993) introduced four-player competitive play to the SNES via the Multitap adapter, turning Hudson Soft's maze-and-bomb formula into the era's definitive party game and anchoring the Battle Mode format that defined the franchise.
id Software's Doom (1993) introduced deathmatch — free-for-all competitive FPS play — and cooperative mode to the first-person shooter genre, creating the vocabulary for networked multiplayer gaming that every subsequent online game inherited.
id Software's Quake (1996) was the first major game designed for internet multiplayer as a primary feature, supporting real-time deathmatch over TCP/IP connections and establishing the online FPS as the definitive competitive PC gaming format.
Blizzard's Diablo (1996) launched alongside Battle.net, the first free online gaming service for consumer internet players, enabling four-player cooperative dungeon crawling over the internet and establishing the action RPG as an online genre.
Mario Kart 64 (1996) expanded the SNES original's two-player format to four simultaneous players in split-screen, creating the defining four-player living room racing experience of the N64 era and establishing Mario Kart's identity as Nintendo's premier social game.
Rare's GoldenEye 007 (1997) brought competitive four-player split-screen first-person shooting to the living room, demonstrating that the FPS genre — previously associated exclusively with PC gaming — could produce compelling console multiplayer.
HAL Laboratory's Kirby Super Star (1996) introduced the Helper system, allowing a second player to join at any moment as a combat ally by summoning a controllable copy ability companion — a novel approach to drop-in co-op that made the game fully playable as a two-player cooperative experience.
Super Mario Kart invented the kart-racing genre around two-player split-screen competition, pairing item-based combat racing with a dedicated Battle Mode that made "pick up and play" multiplayer its entire reason for being.
Midway's NBA Jam turned basketball into over-the-top two-on-two arcade spectacle with four-player simultaneous play, digitised real NBA stars, and the immortal cry of "He's on fire!" — earning a billion dollars and defining social arcade multiplayer.
Codemasters' Micro Machines raced tiny toy cars across breakfast tables and pool tables on a single shared screen, sidestepping the NES's split-screen limits with a clever "force the other player off-screen" design that later evolved into eight-player pad-sharing.
Two men made it as a Half-Life mod in their spare time. It became the most-played competitive shooter on earth, and Valve solved the problem by hiring them.
Origin built a simulated ecology in which plants grew, herbivores ate them, and carnivores ate the herbivores. The players killed everything faster than it could spawn, and the whole system had to be removed.
Sixteen players, four Xboxes, four televisions and a pile of Ethernet cable. Impractical, said the critics — and a generation carried their consoles to each other's houses anyway.