On the indie scene, couch co-op hit Castle Crashers finally came to Windows, but more notably the much-maligned Resident Evil 6 was one of the first big-budget franchises to offer split-screen support on PC.Ĭapcom got a lot of things wrong with the sixth entry in their revered horror franchise, but that didn’t stop Resident Evil 6 from becoming the fastest-selling series game to date, shifting 4.5 million copies in two days (it’s sold between one and two million copies on Steam).
Once HDMI bridged the gap between PC and TV, the next big leap came in 2012. It took four years for co-op beat ‘em up Castle Crashers to make it over from Xbox 360 to PC in 2012, but it signaled a shift in the times. As HDMI became a more standardized feature on PCs and laptops around the end of the decade, it not only allowed for PCs to be more easily connected to TVs, but the average size of PC screens grew too, making the prospect of living-room PC gaming - and sharing a screen - more palatable. Even around 20, HDMI still was far from ubiquitous on PC, while it was widely used on consoles and TVs.
It also took PCs a while to catch up to TV when it came to HDMI support. The PC was still very much seen as a keyboard-and-mouse platform, and its games reflected that. But neither gamers nor game-makers were taking advantage on a big scale. It certainly helped that in 2005, Microsoft introduced the Xinput API, which meant that Xbox 360 controllers got USB plug-and-play support with PC.
While the USB connectivity of PS3 and Xbox 360 gamepads made connecting them to PC that bit easier than in previous generations, you’d still need dongles or dodgy third-party software to get them working wirelessly. No split screen for PCīorderlands was one of the many major releases that featured split-screen on consoles but dropped the feature on PC (Image credit: Gearbox Games) It was the same story with bigger games too, where titles with split-screen support on console - Borderlands, Minecraft, Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty and Resident Evil 5, to name a few - would cut the feature from their PC iterations. In the mid-late 2000s, hits like Bomberman Live, Castle Crashers, even re-releases of the original Dooms and Duke Nukem 3D, all supported local play on consoles, while the PC was being left behind. Xbox Live and PlayStation Network rode this new multiplayer wave more than Steam. Because of their cost-efficiency, pixel and hand-drawn graphics were coming back into fashion, and the low technical demands of these games would eventually make them a great fit for local multiplayer (not to mention the fact it was cheaper to develop local multiplayer modes than online).
Even though these consoles could accommodate more local players than ever thanks to the miracle of wireless Bluetooth controllers, publishers and developers were deprioritizing local play in favor of online.įor a brief moment, it not only looked like local multiplayer wouldn't come to PC, but that it might be ousted from consoles too.īut at the same time that the big publishers had their eyes online, indie developers were taking advantage of the fast-growing digital storefronts - PlayStation Network, Xbox Live and Steam - to release games without the hefty overheads previously required for physical releases. Tentative early efforts on the Sega Dreamcast, PlayStation 2 and Xbox would pave the way for the first fully-fledged online consoles, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 20. online access), it was a no-brainer for developers to explore this mysterious new realm.Īs we tipped into the new millennium, even on consoles the momentum was shifting towards online multiplayer. Online gaming felt like the future, and given that PC came pre-baked with all the requisite hardware for it (i.e. Of course, we know now that online play can’t possibly recreate the joy and immediacy of playing alongside friends, but at the time this was trailblazing stuff. Games like Quake (1996) and Ultima Online (1997) suddenly made the idea of chopping your screen up into quarters to play with a few friends look a little primitive when you could play alongside dozens or even thousands simultaneously. And while there was a cozy kind of fun to playing four-player Liero or two-player Super Street Fighter II Turbo and getting territorial about other players’ pinkies encroaching onto your side of the keyboard, the PC clearly wasn’t fit for multiplayer purpose.Īnd it wouldn’t really need to be, because in the latter half of the 90s the PC pulled off its greatest multiplayer trick - online gaming. Microsoft’s original SideWinder gamepad launched back in 1995 (Image credit: Microsoft)Īlternatively, you could just assign two players to separate corners of the keyboard.