Best cooperative retro games

June 17, 2018 9:13 AM

Tell me about great co-op games that my family can play on a Retropie!

I'm building a Retropie game system on a new 3B+. My kids (10 & 7) can be hyper-competitive, and our younger will often refuse to play a game at all if there's a chance that he'll lose to his brother -- and with the age difference that's basically a given. So I'm looking for games that minimize direct competition.

My gaming experience topped out at the Atari 2600, so I'm pretty clueless about what games are out there, so feel free to suggest things that might seem obvious. Constraints would be general kid-friendliness (nothing gory, nothing too obviously warlike, etc) and likely to run well on the Pi.

It would be extra great if more than 2 players could play at once.

posted by rouftop to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (8 answers total)

Space Invaders on Atari 2600 has a whole pile of fun co-op options! Up in the higher 'Game Select' numbers. Look here in the manual under "ONE-PLAYER/TWO-PLAYER OPTIONS" for more detail. Some of them are still partly competitive for score while shooting at the invaders simultaneously, others are entirely cooperative while taking turns shooting, or even jointly controlling one common cannon, a whole array of variations. I think it's one of the most fun things on the Atari.
posted by tomboko at 9:44 AM on June 17, 2018

Bubble Bobbles on the NES is a lot of fun with two players!
posted by steinwald at 10:36 AM on June 17, 2018 [5 favorites]

MAME: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons are both four-player beat-'em-up games--there's violence, but, as you might guess, it's pretty cartoon-y.
posted by box at 11:32 AM on June 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and 3 feature co-op. If you're emulating Genesis.
posted by hiteleven at 12:39 PM on June 17, 2018

List of supported systems for anyone else wondering.

Possibly less retro than you're aiming for, but on Gamecube Mario Kart Double Dash is great as 2 players can team up in a cart (one driving and the other using items and knocking out nearby drivers). Gauntlet Dark Legacy was fun too, but that might lose on the kid-friendliness side, it's mostly hack-and-slash monster killing. Also possibly Lego Star Wars? (I know co-op is a thing in at least some of the Lego games, not 100% sure it was in the early GC games.)
posted by gennessee at 2:21 PM on June 17, 2018

If you can get MAME ROMs - yeah, the TMNT and The Simpsons beat-em-up games are a blast. The violence is cartoonized, moreso for Simpsons.

Other classic cooperative side scroller beat-em-ups are Double Dragon and Golden Axe franchises.
posted by porpoise at 5:14 PM on June 17, 2018

All the Bubble Bobble games are kid-friendly and 2-player fun. Going up the age scale, Gauntlet, Smash TV and Total Carnage are great for older kids.
posted by sydnius at 6:10 PM on June 17, 2018

Mega Drive / Genesis: Zombies/ate My Neighbours, Toe Jam and Earl, Streets of Rage 1/2/3 (I'd go with 2), Bonanza Bros (also on arcades), Columns has a doubles co-op mode (where each players controls the falling piece alternatively, and while it does keep track of individual score, it's not competitive because it's the same playing field for both) and Gauntlet IV also accepts up to 4 players. For the 32X (emulation might be a bit patchier) and on arcade, there's also Star Wars Arcade.

A lot (if not most) sports games allow 2 player co-op, some allow 4 players. Something like Pete Sampras Tennis or EA's NHL games are the most fun.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:25 AM on June 18, 2018