Before games went online, playing together meant sitting together: two, three or four people on a sofa, each with a controller, all watching one television. Console makers had to decide how many people that should be. Most gave their machines two controller ports and sold adapters for more, until Nintendo built four into the Nintendo 64 in 1996 and its games divided the screen into quarters. Mario Kart 64 and GoldenEye 007 are what many people still mean by the phrase. By 2010, with online play the norm, an Edge reader wrote in to say what had been lost, and none of it was on the screen.
Fast facts
- What it is: local multiplayer, competitive or co-operative, on one machine and one screen, often split into halves or quarters.
- Adapters: the NES Four Score (1990), Hudson’s Super Multitap for the Super Nintendo, Sega’s Team Player and EA’s 4-Way Play for the Mega Drive, and Sony’s PlayStation multitap.
- Built in: four controller ports on the Nintendo 64, “for the first time” fast enough to drive four screens, said Shigeru Miyamoto.
- Signature games: Super Bomberman, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Halo.
More players than ports
Arcades had shown what a crowd round one screen could do. Atari Games’ Gauntlet (1985) let four players fight through its dungeons at once. Home consoles were slower to follow, because their controller sockets came in pairs.
Adapters filled the gap. Nintendo Power introduced the NES Four Score in the spring of 1990: plug four controllers into it, and its long cable “gives you enough distance from the TV so that everyone will be able to see the action and get into the fun”. On NEC’s PC Engine, Hudson Soft’s multitap turned Bomberman into a five-player party game, and Hudson brought the idea to the Super Nintendo with its Super Multitap. When Nintendo Power’s readers voted on the games of 1993, Super Bomberman won an award as “the first four-player game for the Super NES”. Sports games used the extra sockets most. An advert in Super Play in 1994 promised “5 Player simultaneous play with Hudsonsoft Super MultiTap”; on the Mega Drive, Electronic Arts sold its own 4-Way Play adapter for $29.95, letting four players compete “2 on 2, 3 on 1 or 4 against the computer”, and Sega’s Team Player made its NBA Action ’94 a five-player cartridge. Sony’s PlayStation multitap, Computer Gaming World noted in 1996, allowed eight controllers to be connected to one console, “though eight can be a crowd around a single TV”.
Four ports and a split screen
The Nintendo 64 made four players standard. Miyamoto told Edge in 1996 that “for the first time we have a machine with a fast enough CPU to handle four independent screens at speed. That’s why we decided to include four joypad ports on the machine itself.” Mario Kart 64’s director, Hideki Konno, put it more simply: “You’ll soon realise why we wanted to give the N64 four controller ports.” With three or four players the race had no computer drivers at all, and the battle mode gave each kart three balloons to burst. Rare’s GoldenEye 007 (1997) added a four-player split-screen mode before release, and Perfect Dark (2000) let four players fight each other and computer-controlled “simulants”. On the Xbox, Halo (2001) offered four-player split screen on one console.
What players said they lost
By the end of 2010 one Edge reader wrote that “it’s no secret that local splitscreen gaming is a dying concept”. Laurie James’s letter blamed the console makers’ wish to show off their graphics, so that “splitscreen is usually dropped in favour of online or system-link play”. What he missed was the room, not the game:
There is no way to replace the magic of having a friend, relative or rival sat on your bed, competing or co-operating with you. No Bluetooth headset can provide the hilarity of your partner-in-game’s involuntary facial expressions and bodily twitches as they tackle large challenges, and the commentary shared that leads to in-jokes brought up for weeks and even years to come.
He gave an example from Resident Evil 5, a co-operative game for two, played online: “my teammate had to leave for about 15 minutes, leaving me to cover his inactive Sheva because you can’t pause online.” Edge agreed that “a tinny voice over a headset is no substitute for a friend in the same room”, but pointed out how much online play had done “for distant friends who’d otherwise share no gaming time at all”. The magazine thought motion-controlled party games were recapturing some of the fun, “albeit not yet with the longevity of, say, a Mario Kart 64”.
Sources
- Nintendo Power issue 11, March/April 1990: the NES Four Score.
- Edge issue 17, February 1995, pp. 46–48: Hudson Soft and the PC Engine multitap, as cited in the Bomberman entry.
- Nintendo Power issue 60, May 1994: Nintendo Power Awards (Super Bomberman).
- Super Play issue 21, July 1994: FIFA International Soccer advertisement (Super MultiTap) and letters page (five-player football games through a multitap).
- Sega Visions, October/November 1993: EA 4-Way Play advertisements ($29.95; “2 on 2, 3 on 1 or 4 against the computer”). February 1994: NBA Action ’94 and the Team Player adapter.
- Computer Gaming World issue 142, May 1996: the PlayStation multitap.
- Edge issue 29, February 1996: interview with Shigeru Miyamoto on the four controller ports; Edge issue 41, January 1997: Hideki Konno on Mario Kart 64, as cited in the Mario Kart 64 entry; Edge issue 47, July 1997: GoldenEye 007’s four-player option.
- Perfect Dark’s multiplayer and Halo’s split screen: see the Perfect Dark and Halo entries and their sources.
- Atari Games’ Gauntlet: see the Gauntlet entry.
- Edge issue 221, December 2010, p. 128: letter from Laurie James and the magazine’s reply.