Multiplayer

In retro-gaming, "multiplayer" is, in fact, extremely rare probably due to the times where consoles or computers either were scarce, cost a lot of money and were not really part of any mainstream. Furthermore, buying yet another controller, seemed for most parents excessive. More than often children used various schemes such as hot-seating in order to "enact" some form of playing together. There were various rules, such as 1 life each, where after one death, the controller was passed to the next player, and so on, with the sense of "multiplayer" being more along the lines of solving a puzzle together rather than "real-time action".

That being said, even if you might have a gargantuan collection of retro-games, pirated or not, spanning up to a terrabyte of storage, statistically almost all of them are just single player games. What makes things worse, is that to this date there has been very little movements towards creating a network protocol to support playing these games over a network, with the "Netplay" protocol being the most widely available to this date. There are some drawbacks to the current solution:

• "Multiplayer" is implemented via saved states (save game files, essentially) that are exchanged over the network between ALL players. Given the resulting network layout this scheme requires a very large amount of traffic. Furthermore, all platforms that exceed the production date of 2D consoles, generate save games that are huge that would also have to be transferred through the network in a matter of milliseconds, making gameplay, especially gameplay that relies on reaction speed impossible. In other words, for network-playing, any 3D console, simply cannot be played in "multiplayer" over the network. Even a console that could by considered "ancient", the "PlayStation 1" cannot be played in multiplayer over the network due to a small "stutter" that takes place every 10 seconds (intuitively, this would be the game clients trying to synchronize save games / snapshot files that are too large to synchronize given the speed or data limitations of the network).
• Interestingly, consoles such as the Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and other similar portables, in spite of their available game repertoire, have never had an emulator that also implemented any sort of network play. For example, the Gameboy DMG does have an interlink cable emulator but it only works for some specific games. The Gameboy Advance, on the other hand, just does not have any emulator that can do multiplayer over the network.

All-in-all, you would be amazed, but the number of games that have "true multiplayer" is extremely small relative to a full collection of ret-games. Our retroarch section contains a series of playlists, for the Arcade and Super Nintendo, that are "true multiplayer" in the sense that all players will have their own controllers, that are compatible with retroarch (an emulator wrapper) but the titles could be lifted because they are mentioned on the lists.

These are the only ones for those consoles that would fall within the definition of "true multiplayer" mentioned above.