"It's one reason why rear-view mirrors may not be shown in local co-op racing games," Roberts notes. The compromises in question varied by the game type. Save up to 52% on gaming magazine subscriptions for the perfect holiday gift And it was just: are people going to spend their time playing this, if there's virtually nothing there, nothing left of the screen, nothing left of the game?" The ups and downs "I remember on Stunt Race, the amount of compromise you had to do to get two screens working – you're basically carving huge amounts out of the game entirely. He found the process to be a mixed experience.
It was a lot nicer doing splitscreen in sprite-based games where you're just sort of changing numbers, rather than rendering an entire world." Goddard worked on several splitscreen titles during his career at Nintendo, including 1080° Snowboarding and Stunt Race FX. You'd have to do so many compromises to get the framerate back up. "So it would basically halve your frame rate, doing a splitscreen game. "All the calculations had to be done twice," Goddard says. There was a tradeoff for this, of course – in 3D, splitscreen meant rendering worlds several times from each player's perspective. Players didn't need to spend time hauling PCs to their friends' houses." "Early splitscreen games removed a lot of the barrier of entry for players who wanted to game with their friends. Games that, as David Roberts, Rockstar Leeds alumnus and creative director of Red Kite Games, points out, offered something akin to the experience of a late '90s PC LAN party, for a fraction of the cost and effort. Paradoxically, though, the advent of 3D also gave rise to many of the most celebrated splitscreen games: the likes of Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye and, a generation on, the aforementioned Halo. "You could basically have different modes at the top and bottom of the screen if you wanted, or reset the settings for the mode at the top or the bottom." "It was actually quite easy to do splitscreen on SNES, because you could change the mode halfway down the screen," Goddard recalls. From both a technical and a business point of view, splitscreen made more sense during the era of sprites and 2D backdrops, he says.
As one of the first westerners to work in-house at Nintendo in Japan, as 16bit gave way to N64, Goddard was at the forefront of this shift. But Giles Goddard suggests its decline goes back further still, to the rise of polygonal 3D worlds. "It's needed because the companies don't care." Why, then, has splitscreen run out of road? The obvious answer is that online multiplayer has stolen its audience – and that is certainly a factor. "We don't want Nucleus to be needed," he points out.
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