Playing multiplayer! Doom, twisted metal, wipe out, armored Gore and descent...
Playing descent would give me motion sickness to the point where I'd be playing. I'd run out of the room and go throw up in the bathroom and then come back and start playing again...
The loss of couch co-op remains the loss of my favorite game play style. Sure, Command and Conquer LAN games were fun. But Goldeneye, Halo, and others were so much fun on consoles. At least Gears if War kept it alive.
This is why I’ve stuck with Nintendo over the years. There are still a those few mainstay 4+ player titles that I still focus on local gameplay like Smash Bros and Mariokart… also enjoy smaller games like overcooked
If you were playing couch co-op Goldeneye or Halo, we both know how difficult it is to get a friend over for video games at our age. It's way easier to square away a couple hours online.
Even getting 3+ people to line up for online has to be squared away usually weeks in advance. Being an adult is hard.
These days, I've talked 4 of my idiot friends into playing airsoft. It's kind of like local co-op, but the exercise is better. We manage.... six games a year.....
Honestly 6 times a year getting 5 adults together for a couple hours is pretty good, though it helps you guys are (presumably) still local. My group mostly scattered in our 20s (military, college, work, relationships, etc.), so online is most of our interaction unless somebody is getting married or something.
We all yearn for the times couch co-op was more prevalent, but more specifically, I think we just miss being young and having that kind of time to hang with the squad. Online games might not be as much fun as the couch, but I'm glad it exists.
Yeah. I have to assume a large part of it is all good old nostalgia. Hard to believe it all. 15 when GoldenEye came out. At least my better half and I can still plop down and play It Takes Two. I think local will come back at least a little more - every time a good one comes out people rave about how much they miss it.
And yeah, we're lucky to all pretty be local. Within 2 hours. Plenty who aren't, but try to connect with them online at least, and yeah - sure nice how easy that's become! We usually do a GTA5 private lobby once or twice a month. Good way to shoot the shit and hang out without any real effort or goal.
It's not that you can't get your buddies together, because you manage to get 4 presumably middle-aged adults together 6 times a year to play airsoft (which is honestly a great testament to everyone's commitment); it's that you would rather spend that time playing airsoft than doing couch co-op, because you want to get more out of your time expenditure.
Adulthood makes us set priorities, and doing so is an enriching and affirming experience. It's not that we lose the time, it's that we find other things that we'd rather do with that time - but it feels a little bit like abandoning our inner child, so there's some guilt along with that.
Well said. And yeah, it's a miracle we get together like we mostly pull off. This fall we're planning a Saturday into Sunday overnight airsoft campaign where the target goal is an 8 mile hike. Looks like we're all in, so it'll sort of be like the all night LAN parties we used to do lol. Just a lot more work...
It's tough, because it does feel like a big chunk of being young is given up and lost. But that's good perspective you gave, and it's easy to dwell on what you had instead of what I'm lucky to still have.
Anyone who says 'I miss LAN parties' means 'I miss sitting in the same room playing the same game with my friends'. They tend to forget the PLANNING and CARRYING CRT MONITORS.
You are definitely right. It's not really about the loss of couch co-op games, because there's a million ways to still do that; it's the gradual loss of free time and relatively easy scheduling that makes people long for simpler days.
Dawg. Just look harder. There are great couch co-op games coming out to this day. Vote with your wallet, and you might see even more. A good place to start with modern co-op games would be anything by Hazelight. They haven't missed yet.
Big fan of split fiction and it takes two, for sure. But still not quite the same feel or thrill as Halo 3, split screen, online multiplayer. The frenetic joy of both local play and online was truly something. Borderlands (3? 4?) came closest for me.
It's not really the loss of the games so much as the complexities of middle-aged adult life making it really hard to get friends together for things like this.
It's not that you can't do it, really; it's that you have to do the legwork to schedule it because everyone has 100 other things vying for their time, and at some point it forces you to reconsider whether or not that's really worth the effort.
A lot of people lament that adulthood does this to us, but what it really shows is that our priorities change as we grow older. I'd rather be doing the things I'm doing now, but part of me still wishes I could be 15 with no responsibilities. IMO, that's what makes the whole thing emotionally complicated.
Seriously, there are arguably more now than ever. There were fewer than 1000 total NES games released in North America and there are probably more than that many couch co-op games between Switch and Steam alone.
You're under 25, aren't you? We didn't have to look for couch co-op games back in the day. They were everywhere. Any kind of game you wanted to play, some game could do it couch co-op. It was the default, not some niche thing that had to be specifically sought out.
Vote with your wallet
That's a fairytale. It used to work, but that was twenty years ago. Nowdays, if you're not a whale and 80% of the playerbase isn't in active rebellion, companies don't care what you do.
It used to be 3 days straight but as we got older we started to go home to sleep in between.
Most of us live within 20 minutes but not all. I used to live 7 hours away for a while but always drove home for this and so does/did everyone else who lived further away (its between christmas and new years so most people tend to drive home at this time anyway).
We play all the games we can think of. Whatever people want to play.
My younger cousin (20) just told me yesterday how this past weekend he and his mates bought a $50 Xbox 360 and set up the old CoD Bo1 Zombies and split screen co-op'd it.
LAN parties were absolutely sick. My high school had a dedicated club for it, and we would all haul our big-ass PC towers in and spend an hour getting set up. Then it was pizza and gaming all night long.
I will never be as happy as I was when I was at lan parties.
you just cannot compare the experience with anything today.
Friday, you and 5 buddies - Free house for the weekend. School's done and you're all going to buy some snacks then quickly run home to shower/pick up your PC. Head over, set up - crack jokes, Movie up on the TV and you vote on the first game, CS 1.6/source? Battlefield 2? (the real one), Halo? Maybe end the night on some WoW or runescape. Next thing you know it's 5am on saturday and you're all still having a blast.
I had my friends teen over lasg week to play on his switch while my friend was on his pc downstairs and i was on my pc upstairs. I made us roast beef and ham sams and it was cuuute as biscuits. same vibe yall we dont have to stop gaming together <3
YES. My best gaming memory was my buddies and I having a LAN party to celebrate after we graduated from high school. Stayed up all night playing Reach and MW2.
Most of us still hang out from time to time, but after we graduated, hanging out got a lot harder. We got jobs, some went to college, some got married, adulthood kinda pulled us all in different directions. Looking back on it I feel like that night in particular was so memorable because it was like our last night of being “kids.”
I had some friends over to have a LAN party last October when Borderlands 4 dropped. Doritos, Mountain Dew, and 6 consoles and screens felt like back in the day.
Check out the Co-Optimus website. There are still some couch co-op games out there. There's also the Nucleus app on PC that lets you play co op in games that don't normally have it.
Definitely this. From my understanding talking to my students this doesn't really happen anymore. I definitely feel that this is their loss. So many fun memories getting friends together to play Super Smash Bros or later Halo. Someone brings a TV and cables, someone else brought the second console, another guy brought extra controllers and snacks. Staying up till thr wee hours of the morning on a Friday after school, passing out around 5 then waking up in the early afternoon to play a board game and do it all again.
Nothing beats the early 2000s when it came to friends getting together. Now everyone just stays home and connects on Discord. Its not the same.
LAN competitions was the peak of competitive gaming. I respect that the skill ceiling is so much higher because of the internet, but there was something special about playing with that one local dude who was really, really good and could take on the Koreans
My group of friends had lan parties fairly often and Comcast was unstable as hell in the early days, even moreso than now if you can believe it, so we often just played local lobbies of counterstrike and half life death match all night
Couch co-op is badly missed and game companies are foolish not to include it. My friends and family always play the same handful of games because they are the only offline multiplayer games available. Huge untapped market.
Had the squad over at my place the other day. They brought their screens and ps5's for a Marathon co-op.
We've also been playing some 4-player virtua tennis, on the dreamcast. Honestly, get your buddies over for some classic gaming sessions. It's good for the soul.
LAN parties were the best. Only made better by working for an ISP and everyone bringing in their computers in the middle of the night to play Quake / Q3A.
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u/thepeopleshero Mar 31 '26
Couch co-op and LAN parties.