Saturday!
Two-player’s evolution in gaming is yet another study in using the limitations of the medium to the system’s advantage. The first gaming systems, after all, *REQUIRED* two-players.
We all complain about the AI in gaming being bad but Pong Version 1.0 couldn’t play against you. You *NEEDED* someone else to play the game to play the game with you. Without a player 2, there wasn’t a game. It was just a tech demo.
It was the early games like Space Invaders or Asteroids that gave a rudimentary opponent to play against but there was nothing intelligent about the behaviors of the ostensible opponent. You had your collision detection and you had a set of rules that the “enemy” had to follow. 2-player meant switching back and forth between players.
What were the earliest games that let two players play at the same time together? Joust is the first one that I remember. It allowed for the wonderful experience of playing together and helping each other *OR* you could see your opponent as just another enemy. (And, at the price of a quarter, it really meant something when your opponent decided to kill you… they were taking something tangible away from you. AND THOSE WERE REAGAN QUARTERS!)
As time went on, co-op and vs. games evolved and so stuff like Gauntlet allowed somewhat asymmetrical co-op (the elf’s abilities were differently balanced than the barbarian’s after all) and you had stuff like Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
When we moved out of the arcades and into the computer room that things started evolving back. Quake III was the first game (to my memory, anyway… correct me if I’m wrong) that switched back to the thing where they said “Remember Pong? Let’s go back to that” and the only opponents you had were each other. No AI. No list of rules for the “opponent” to follow. Just you running around and some collision detection.
I can’t help but feel nostalgic for the days when freshly married kids would sit on the bed together and play couch co-op, though. It was nice to play Rampage with Maribou.
Which brings me to VR co-op… but I’ll talk about that *NEXT* week.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
It is as good point. So much of the gaming I did as a kid progressing from Atari to 8-bit, 16-bit and so on was to “beat the game” and mostly involved memorizing the patterns of whatever the gameplay was. So it was far more fun usually to play a 2-player game. TMNT was a big one. For some reason I remember a game called Marble Madness that was mostly playing co-op, and my friends we played Rescue Rangers a bunch since you could literally just pick up your buddy and throw them to the bad guys, which had IRL consequences usually. Online will not ever have that same feel of sitting beside someone, and blaming the controller when you lost.Report
Yeah, same room co-op is great. My wife and I still occasionally play Diablo 3 side by side. She doesn’t care about the details and lets me decide which equipment to keep and equip.
I bought a 4TB hard drive on sale, so I was able to reload some games onto my Xbox One. I reinstalled Doom and have been playing it. I enjoy the old-school game play (no regen health, most weapons don’t aim down the sights, etc). There’s also a level-designer, and you can play levels made by others, and there are arcade missions. It’s a cool game; I just got sidetracked when it came out (I switched jobs around then, I think) and only played a few levels.Report