‘Shared Screen’ and ‘Splitscreen’ are non-network methods that allow multiple people to play a game using one machine, and typically one display. For a long time, these features were mostly exclusively found on home consoles and arcade games, making it nearly impossible to satisfy a niche breed of PC gamers seeking this feature. Today, you can easily find huge catalogs of PC games that include this feature on Steam and GOG. Accessories have also come a long way in the PC gaming market that helps make couch co-op extremely accessible. Although, in today’s market, video games are pretty much a guaranteed success if they include an esports oriented online multiplayer component. Yet we have a dedicated scene of indie developers and sometimes AAA developers that manage to integrate local multiplayer, even though it's a considered a novelty today. I tend to place myself in the spectrum of players who prefer games with LAN and Shared/Splitscreen, as they offer a more personal and tangible experience.
One of the early reasons why Shared/Splitscreen was popular is it allowed convenient head-to-head action in arcades. Arcade games were competitive by nature whether they were single or multiplayer. People would huddle around the big name games like Pac-Man and Galaga to watch players conquer high scores or join their peers in versus and cooperative games such as Street Fighter II and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Consoles had a similar motion of events experienced on PC, where the greater focus was on the single-player experience with few somewhat successful attempts at having more than two players sharing a screen on a single console. Bomberman and several other games contributed to the popularity of local multiplayer with more than two players on the console market but wouldn't make headlining impact until later on. It wasn’t until the 90s and early 2000s that couch gaming sessions really took off in the form that I have come to love. Consoles like the Nintendo 64, GameCube, Xbox and Dreamcast had built-in 4-player ports. PlayStation 1 & 2 had a proper and more refined accessory known as the multitap which enjoyed much more success than previous attempts at external multiplayer adapters. There were so many flavors of games using this combination of accessories and the local multiplayer feature coming from every direction. It went as far as a few games achieving more success on home consoles than the arcades because of this. At this same period in time, the PC gaming market was going through a renaissance of technology making a huge jump in graphical capabilities surpassing consoles and setting the template for arcade hardware, which was just the beginning.
PC Gaming around this time was starting to enter the mainstream market thanks to certain manufacturers offering cheap PCs. LAN gaming sessions were dominating this ecosystem, but we still would not see major efforts for single machine local multiplayer in the majority of commercial games with the exception of emulation and a handful of indie games.
Fast forward to today, you can hook some controllers up to a desktop or laptop and enjoy countless games using Shared/Splitscreen as the main or secondary feature. There is hardboiled evidence that a market exists for the feature on a platform long stigmatized as being a peerless experience unless you were at a LAN event or playing a multiplayer game over the internet. It’s understandable that most PC gaming setups are optimized for individual use and are, therefore, not ideal for clusters of people even if the controller supply meets the demand. Which begs the question: Am I wrong for partaking in a phenomenon that consists of grabbing a few friends, my rig, a power cable, HDMI cable, and the required controllers to play games like Ultimate Chicken Horse, Risk of Rain, Broforce and other amazing games on the living room television?
People have been connecting their computers to huge displays (including projectors) just to play games for a long time. What has really hindered many enthusiasts from using those bigger displays regularly was high input delay and most sets being limited to 60hz. Nvidia has unleashed their BFGD (Big Format Gaming Display) technology into the hands of manufacturers like Asus and HP to produce 65” gaming grade displays offering G-Sync and 4k at 120hz+ all with low input delay and a built-in Nvidia Shield. The effort companies are putting into offering the PC gaming market bigger displays than was previously available makes me think they were also seeking to enhance local multiplayer sessions on PC.
When it comes controllers, we have always had an overwhelming range of options, but the optimal choices today would have to be any controller that supports the XInput API as it has become the standard in modern PC games with native controller support. My current recommendations all support the XInput API and they are as follow. First up is the Brook Mars Wired Controller for its ability to work natively on Sony and Nintendo consoles but also uses XInput when connected to a PC. Regardless of its budget range price, you get solid first-party build quality and my favorite aesthetic aspect is the hybrid shape combining the Switch Pro grip and DualShock layout coated in a beautiful matte red. Second in line is both of Logitech’s F310 and F710 (F510 has been sadly discontinued) which offer DirectInput and XInput APIs making them a versatile choice if you need a controller that has the best compatibility across the PC platform. These also offer the familiar DualShock layout which is trendy amongst controllers aiming to be versatile. There is no third recommendation so I would like to know what you guys use in your sessions and why.
At my local multiplayer parties, we always have a blast no matter what game or platform I load up but it’s hard to ignore the fact that there are many underappreciated reasons (to enjoy this method of playing games on PC than on consoles. I prioritize performance over anything so if I can play the same game on PC, guess what I’m gonna do? There is also the question of mods, not all PC games have official modding tools so there will be games with crude mod implementations. Regardless, in both cases you can expand upon the content you enjoy with your friends beyond what the game shipped with. Serious Sam Fusion is a merge of all the content in the Encounter HD remakes and Serious Sam 3 including DLC. Rolled over from Serious Sam 3 are mod support and splitscreen; which were not available in the official Encounter HD remakes, making it the perfect example of what a great PC game should be that suits our purpose. Following up with a list of amazing games is redundant at this point because I’m sure you understand why this feature is important and needs much more awareness than it probably has right now.
I can go on and on about games that lost plenty of potential by not including our beloved feature but only one game really burned me up to think about. The Mean Greens is a third-person shooter that takes direct inspiration from Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes’ multiplayer. What made the console releases of Army Men immaculate was the splitscreen, even if the series on PlayStation never went beyond 2-players. I almost want to say Warhawk on PS3 was the real spiritual successor to Army Men even though there are no ties between the two series. Comparing both The Mean Greens and Warhawk while bringing up their most immediate differences, Warhawk allowed you to take up to three friends online in Splitscreen while The Mean Greens was stubbornly a ‘one person per account’ ordeal. While you can no longer play Warhawk through PSN, the last time I played there were servers are still getting filled up. The Mean Greens though? I have not launched the game for a while but I haven’t been invited to play since the hype of it died down and I can’t even launch it to play offline locally. Road Redemption is the spiritual successor to Road Rash; easily Road Rash 64 if we get into specifics, and it has fully integrated splitscreen so even when there’s no internet to play online, I have tons of modes to enjoy in my couch coop parties.
Today’s gaming market has seen a push for more online play over local. More and more games are no longer including LAN [unless the community petitions for it, a strife in and of itself], even competitive games where players are at the mercy of their internet connection to make split-second decisions. I treasure games that give some control to the players on how they want to approach their sessions and I have greater respect for a developer that includes local multiplayer if the game has a multiplayer aspect; because not all games require it to provide value. When developers neglect a portion of their potential demographic for the sake of numbers on any one given server, it hurts the product in the long run once the game’s prime is done and over with. What are your favorite local multiplayer games and which games have you wished included Shared/Splitscreen in some form or another?
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