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This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1]

It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV.

Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-person 3D perspective, rather than top-down.

The ghost that caught Pac-Man would get to take over as Pac-Man (which would inevitably result in a tangled mess of cords by the end).

It was a great couch 3v1 game.

The WiiU had similar mini-games in Nintendo Land [2], with one player operating the Wii U gamepad, while the others played from the TV.

I miss the era of couch multiplayer games.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Land

7 comments

Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.

This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.

I came to mention the same game. I have many fond memories of playing co-op games on the Gamecube with my cousins back in the day (Mario Party, Shrek 2, Lego Star Wars… Pac-Man Fever). But Pac-Man Vs. was possibly my favorite. It had the novelty factor because of the Gameboy link, but it doesn’t feel gimmicky or cheap - it makes a classic game better in such an elegantly simple way.

TIL my favorite Namco game was designed by Miyamato lol. I wonder if the Gameboy link was sort of a pilot program or a seed of the concept of the Wii U. I always wanted to try the Wii U but it never really had a “killer app” and I think the were very few games that took advantage of the gamepad.

It’s a shame that we’ll probably never get a unique console like that again since it was a huge financial failure that almost ruined Nintendo.

Yup - I mentioned it in an earlier comment [1], came out all the way back in 2003.

If you like this kind of "players become hero" mechanic - highly recommend checking out Crawl [2] - a local multiplayer dungeon crawler where the other players possess the monsters, and if you manage to kill the hero, you become the new hero.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524414

[2] - https://www.gog.com/en/game/crawl

That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder.

It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.

I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.

It may not be completely over, but it’s far from the focus of multiplayer gaming.

Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do.

The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did).

I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007).

Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games.

(And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)

It's a past that's readily accessible in the present and has carved out a niche in the gaming scene. Is that really "past"?

I fully intend to delay my kids' introduction to online play in favor of in person multiplayer as long as possible. I have had up to four 6-8 year olds playing Minecraft together on the LAN on my kitchen table already.

It's part and parcel of my whole "good screen time vs bad screen time" beliefs.

Oh, my kids are older now (18 and 21), but when they were younger, we definitely did plenty of LAN-party games like Minecraft, StarCraft (1 and 2), Terraria, Torchlight, and (when they were older) TFC (which we had some hilarious times playing with/against some terrible bots).

My gripe isn’t so much about what we can do, but just the fact that nobody cares as much about it these days (it’s not mainstream and most devs don’t think about it).

So while I agree the era may not be over, it’s mostly forgotten in favor of remote play without needing to be colocated.

That Pac-Man Vs. looks awesome. I'd love to try that with the full setup on GC. Even has Mario as an announcer!

I had a version of this for old Nokia phones (Symbian), playing via blutooth. Really fun

Pac-Man Vs. is also available on the Switch.