James R. Scott

James R. Scott’s local (offline) cooperative games database can be found here

Cooperative gaming is multiplayer gaming where the players work together to achieve some goals. It’s better than single player gaming because it’s always more fun to play with real people, but it’s also better than competitive multiplayer gaming (where the players play against each other) because everyone comes out happy at the end as no-one is a looser (or everyone is a looser).

Offiline cooperative gaming is better still, because the gamers are all in the same place, which makes it even more of a fun, highly interactive social activity.

Because of this, and because I hadn’t found another good, comprehensive source of information cataloging these games, I have spent a great deal of time looking for cooperative games for my friends and family to play together. Games do not very often advertise the modes in which they can be played in detail (often they just say whether they are multiplayer and how many players can play, with the exception of the Xbox360 which does give some detail on the physical boxes for the games at least) so to collect this info I have had to resort to online forums, wikipedia and other miscellaneous websites.

I hope this is helpful, although note that the information I have gathered is pretty unreliable unfortunately given that there is no central resource for this. Please do help me by sending me an email (address on my CV which can be found elsewhere on this site) or by posting a comment below.

UPDATE:
Interesting Eurogamer article on 3d games conversion, describing how the split-screen mode of games is used to create a 3d mode here.
“First of all we took our split-screen mode… effectively, 3D is very much like making a split-screen game,” Benson reveals. “It’s two views in one world, so let’s just put the two cameras on the one player.”

“Our geometry was already fine and we had lower resolution/lower fidelity models that would render at 30Hz for the split-screen mode, so we started with that,” Benson continues.”

One would infer based on this that the reason so few games are given good split screen modes (in particular, 4 player split screen) is hardware requirements - perhaps as 3d modes become more prevalent in future releases, it would be easier to make cooperative split-screen modes for games also?