Recently, I read this article from @nepd about how he managed to get mad paid hustling Goldeneye games back in college when the 4 player split screen rule the roost.
This reminded me of a recent conversation I had with one of my oldest friends about our own grudge matches we had in high school and early college. I can see now how we were the last generation of couch players. "Party game" wasn't even a term at the time, because every game with multiplayer essentially had to be a party. Those of us over a certain age lived in a world devoid of connectivity. We didn't have search engines or carry supercomputers in our pockets. In the late 90s, we barely had the ability to look at PICTURES of boobs without a 5 minute buffer. You can forget about videos. For those of us that loved video games, specifically console gaming, the idea of playing with people you never knew and would never meet didn't even seem possible, and even when it became so, for me it never seemed practical.
We got wild on Goldeneye, Starfox 64, and Mario Kart of course, but also found ourselves spending countless hours on smaller games and sleeper hits like Trap Gunner, Gauntlet, Psychic Force, Return Fire, Metal Warriors, Puzzle Fighter, WCW Wrestling and Blast Chamber. It was an amazing time to be a more platform and genre agnostic gamer. There was always something new to play, more four player games around than it seemed, and a steady stream of young game hungry dudes to play with. Where it would get weird though, was this idea of being the best.
To Be The Best
No matter who you were or what game you claimed, you wanted to be the best. You only had between 3 and 7 people you knew who would care about your gaming prowess; therefore, destroying them all without mercy, right in their faces was the only way you could truly assert your dominance. Luckily, the games were fun enough and fair enough that even when you didn't win all the time, you could still derive a great deal of pleasure from the gaming and the camaraderie. Plus games were expensive and couldn't get beamed into your house every time you wanted a new one, so we had to make do as best we could.
Like any game whether on a screen, table top, field, or court, playing with the same people meant that you got to learn their tendencies and areas of improvement. You knew how to approach each person in a given situation, which weapons they favored or how they'd react when the time started running out. The competition was local, and in many ways, that's where the fun came from. When you won a game, you didn't just win a round of Goldeneye: Pistols. The Stack. License to Kill Mode (One Shot One Kill). You also beat Shannon, Joe, and John. That felt great! To defeat your nemeses in rousing competition! And when you came out on top more often than not, you knew that you were the best player in your neighborhood, or at least in your friend group.
In fact, it was rare to ever play against someone outside of your group, but every time you did you could be sure that person would come in and talk shit about how he's the best person back where he's from. Naturally, you'd have a grudge match. One on one in one of the secret stages. Something epic to really drive home who's the best, but when it ended that new kid was either awesome and took you to the limit or crushed you, or he was really bad and you felt sorry for him. Not only that, but as a representative of his group, you felt sorry for all of them too. But then you thought about it... If this was the best person they had, and you whooped him like a government mule, then maybe you were one of the best ever to put your hands on a controller. Fortunately, there was no way to find out.
The Last of An Aging Breed
Halo: Combat Evolved exists in my mind as the last great couch game. Like Goldeneye with an actual control scheme and tactics, you could go 4 players on the Xbox and sacrifice an entire day to the gaming gods. This would be the last time a game existed where you could wreck shop in your town or dorm room and feel like a superstar with nobody around to tell you otherwise. You could "bip (melee)", grenade, and snipe your way to local immortality with nary a single person to remove your crown from your head. You'd always wonder if you were the best, and sometimes come across a kid with superhuman sniping or screen watching abilities, but it all felt small. In the background, however, a revolution was well underway.
The internet, big data, file sharing, and Xbox Live would eventually kill the couch age of gaming. It would usher in a new way to digest content and enjoy it with others. Some took to it like fish to water, but for many of us, we feel like we lost something. Granted, those of us that game still love to play online and push ourselves to improve, only now we can never delude ourselves into thinking we're the best. I can see the stats of the best or watch videos of the amazing things they've done that I couldn't have even conceived. I can fire up a game and begin playing online only to find myself completely outclassed by everyone else around me. Hell, in the Battlefield series, I can't even fly a plane without crashing it, let alone lead a successful campaign against another team of 12 players.
Don't get me wrong, it's still fun to play and find a new type of competition, but even now I won't bother playing a multiplayer game unless I have some friends I can guarantee will play with me. I am most interested in recreating the couch gaming experience by playing with friends from real life, but as age sets in, too many of us have less time to play. We have less hours to invest in being great, and even less of a reason to care. We can see the competition know we'll never be good enough to even compete at the level we used to believe we existed in. We can fully see the gulf between the current greats and our current selves as well as the gulf from our current selves to our past selves and it's bitter sweet. Being connected has given us amazing new experiences and game types, but it's disconnected us from the small world that made gaming so satisfying in the pre-digital era.
I'm still gonna keep playing though no matter how old I get.