10 PS1 Games That Made Couch Co-Op Feel Like an Event

2 hours ago 1

Published Mar 25, 2026, 3:09 PM EDT

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

If the original PlayStation had anything I would realistically call a “weakness,” it’s that it only had two native controller ports, as opposed to the four ports of the N64. This meant that, if you wanted to play any games with more than one friend, you had to buy a multitap, which no one wanted to do. Still, for the right games, anyone could be coaxed into purchasing a debatably necessary peripheral, and the PS1 definitely had the right games.

10 Co-Op Games That Shaped Modern Gaming More Than Players Realized

The current state of co-op would look much different without these games.

In addition to standard multiplayer titles, the PS1 was also home to more than its fair share of native and optional co-op games. From action games to JRPGs, these were the games that had you calling up your best friend on a Saturday morning and saying, “hey, wanna come over and spend all day and night playing this new game?” The answer would be yes. The answer would always be yes.

10 The Firemen 2: Pete & Danny

Have You Ever Seen Backdraft? It’s Like Backdraft

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Media Entertainment

PlayStation

December 1995

Am I nuts, or are there just no games about firefighters at all? The only thing that comes to mind is Burning Rangers, and that’s like, superhero space firefighters. Well, there is one other game about firefighters, specifically a duology that started on the SNES before moving on to the PS1. It’s that second game, The Firemen 2: Pete & Danny, that makes a good addition to the PS1’s co-op selection.

The Firemen 2 is a Japan-exclusive, arcade-style top-down shooter, though instead of shooting dudes with guns, you’re shooting fires with hoses. The titular firefighters, Pete and Danny, respond to a fire outbreak in an amusement park on Christmas Eve caused by the park’s robotic staff running amok, and have to rescue trapped civilians while extinguishing the blaze. It’s like Backdraft, but with less deliberate arson and more silly robots.

It’s a similar kind of game to another co-op classic, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, including the fact that your score and success is heavily dependent on how many civilians you manage to rescue.

9 Loaded

Old-Fashioned Top-Down Action

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Gremlin Interactive

PlayStation, Sega Saturn

December 1995

Speaking of top-down, arcade-style shooters, as the fifth generation consoles came out while arcades were still a big thing, there were lots of arcade-style, co-op games released for the PS1. If you want to do a little less firefighting and a little more shooting stuff, you and your friend would get a hoot out of Loaded.

Heavily inspired by the stylings of DC Comics at the time, Loaded is exactly what it looks like: an edgy, violent, gun-toting romp through a sci-fi world. The core gameplay loop is kind of like a more condensed version of Gauntlet; you traverse large, interconnected dungeons, gunning down everything that looks at you funny, and occasionally taking breaks to loot corpses, solve little environmental puzzles, and uncover the occasional secret.

Like Gauntlet, Loaded lends itself very well to co-op play, even offering several different playable characters with their own unique weapons, so everyone can find a playstyle that meshes with them. Nothing like racking up a high score on a sunny Sunday with your best friend, eh?

8 Future Cop: LAPD

Have You Ever Seen Patlabor? It’s Like Patlabor

I feel like there should be an entire subgenre of speculative fiction called “what if civil servants piloted mechs?” It happens a lot more than you’d expect, especially if the civil servants in question are cops, like in Patlabor or Active Raid. Another example of this weirdly consistent concept comes to us from Future Cop: LAPD.

Future Cop is set in the year 2098, where cops are fighting against escalating gang conflict using massive vehicles that can transform between hovering pursuit cars and bipedal mechs, armed with ballistics and explosives. It’s the kind of high-octane action concept that’s perfect for console multiplayer.

The game’s basic Crime War mode has couch co-op support, with both players seated in separate mechs to assault bases and laboratories occupied by scores of heavily-armed crooks. Both players share a lifebar, so if one of you eats it, you both do, encouraging you to watch each other’s backs. While it’s not co-op, the game does have a second multiplayer mode, Precinct Assault, which actually has some historical value as it’s considered by many to be the prototypical model of the modern MOBA.

7 Herc’s Adventures

No Relation to the Disney One

Whenever you need a quick concept to build a game around, mythology usually provides, and especially Greek mythology. The Greek pantheon is full of gods, monsters, and nonspecific weirdos, and if Disney’s efforts were any indication, it lent itself surprisingly well to comic relief. All of this and more gave shape to 1997’s Herc’s Adventures.

Herc’s Adventures is an exceptionally silly action dungeon-crawler, in which two players can control Hercules, Atlanta, or Jason as they travel the lands of Greece and battle Hades. What’s cool about this game is that the overworld map is one big, seamless setting, with no loading screens interrupting the action. There are also lots of little quips and sight gags all over the place, plus animated cutscenes with purposefully silly delivery.

Besides being fun to play with a buddy in general, Herc’s Adventures had one particularly novel element experienced when you die. Every time you die, up to a max of five times, you have to fight your way out of the underworld to get back to the main map, being pushed further into the depths with each subsequent death. It was a good incentive to keep your friends out of trouble, unless you wanted to get pummeled by the rabid dead again.

6 Chocobo’s Dungeon 2

Dungeoneering is a Team Profession

The idea of playing a turn-based RPG cooperatively must sound a bit strange, and indeed, most games of that nature haven’t really found a good way to make it work. However, there are some that have taken a crack at the concept, and one of them is mildly unexpected: Chocobo’s Dungeon 2, sequel to the Japan-only Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon.

This Final Fantasy spin-off is a part of the IP-spanning Mystery Dungeon series, in which you delve into randomly-generated labyrinths and engage enemies in turn-based, positioning-dependent combat. The twist with Chocobo’s Dungeon 2 is that, while Chocobo is your de facto protagonist, they’re often assisted by a partner character like a Moogle or a White Mage. This partner is usually AI-controlled, but a second player can hop on and assume direct control over them, taking turns in combat alongside Chocobo.

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The dungeons of this game can get quite long, perfect for tackling in a marathon sitting with a friend. It may be turn-based, but that just gives you and your friend greater coordination potential, talking out your moves before you make them like in a tabletop game.

5 Legend of Mana

Join the Battle

If you want to play a JRPG with a friend, but aren’t in the mood for something turn-based, the PS1 offers other options. For example, so long as your friend doesn’t mind keeping their interactions to the fight-y bits, there’s plenty of co-op fun to be had in Legend of Mana.

In Legend of Mana, player one has exclusive control when clicking through cutscenes or navigating the overworld. When a battle starts up, though, player two can hop to take control of your second party member, allowing both of you to take on enemies together instead of leaving things to the CPU. In fact, if your friend has their own memory card with a Legend of Mana save file on it, they can plug it into their controller port and load their particular instance of the support character with their preferred stats and gear.

This feature has a lot of potential to completely break the game, which is amusing in its own right, but it’s also helpful if you’ve got a friend who’s struggling to make progress in a particular section and needs a little boost to keep the story going.

4 Um Jammer Lammy

Harmonizing Guitars

Co-op music games may have been largely popularized in the 2000s with peripheral-based games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but that doesn’t mean those games invented the concept. Even back in 1999, if you wanted to jam with a friend, you could do it in Um Jammer Lammy, at least after you unlocked the stages.

Um Jammer Lammy’s main story mode is single-player only, so you do need to play through all of the stages to unlock them for the multiplayer modes. Once you do, though, you can then replay them in co-op, with player one controlling Lammy and player two playing as her monochrome doppelganger, Rammy. The songs are the same, but you and your partner alternate playing the response lines.

It’s a surprisingly tricky game to play co-op, as both players need to be in sufficient harmony. Even if player one is kicking it live, if player two blows it, your score still goes down. It takes practice and coordination, like any good co-op game should.

3 Crash Bash

Team Up, or Just Annoy Each Other

While the fifth generation console war raged, Nintendo and Sony were always trying to one-up each other in performance or gameplay. For example, in 1998, Nintendo had a surprise hit on its hands in the form of the first couple of Mario Party games. Never one to be outdone, Sony put its own mascot to work in the party games department, resulting in Crash Bash.

Crash Bash is kind of like a diet version of Mario Party, axing the board game aspect to focus exclusively on the minigames. The game features both an adventure mode for progressing through the story (such as it is) and unlocking stuff, and a battle mode for playing freely. Both of these modes can be played co-op with a friend, who joins you in the games. As long as one of you wins, it’s a win for both of you, and that’s nice to have, since this game’s AI can be pretty merciless.

Crash Bash also had multitap support, so you could get up to three friends to play with you and break off into teams. It was a fun way to harass and annoy each other without the probability-induced hostilities of Mario Party’s board game.

2 Diablo

The Diablo series has long been the primary territory of PCs, dating all the way back to the first game. Compared to other dungeon crawlers, Diablo is a more elaborate experience, something that certainly benefited from having a keyboard handy. Even so, the original Diablo did manage to escape confinement a year after its initial release, bringing its co-op stylings to the PS1 in 1998.

While the PS1 version of Diablo lacks the PC version’s online play, it did have shared-screen, two-controller co-op, so you and a buddy could plumb the depths. It was actually nice to have if you and your friend wanted to play Diablo together, but couldn’t be bothered to pick up and drag your boxy computers over to each other’s houses.

Gameplay-wise, it’s more or less the same as the PC version, albeit with the addition of some console-friendly quality-of-life features like auto-aiming for ranged weapons and faster game speed. Remember, the original DualShock controller had only been released a year prior, so if you still had a PS1 controller with just a directional pad, you would be happy to get whatever help you could.

Enjoy the Apocalypse Together

There’s nothing inherently cooperative about the concept of a destruction derby. In fact, I’d go as far as to say destruction derbies actively discourage cooperation. Even so, many things in life can be improved by the presence of a friend, and it turns out the same is true for not just destruction derbies, but apocalyptic ones like Twisted Metal 2.

While Twisted Metal 2’s main story mode is single-player-only, you can get a comparable experience in co-op by playing the separate Tournament mode. Just like in the campaign, you visit a series of large maps, taking on rivals in battles of speed and ballistics, and the last one standing wins. The obvious difference is that, in co-op, you’ve got a buddy in their own separate vehicle backing you up. Twice the firepower for half the price!

Playing Twisted Metal 2 with a friend is not unlike setting up a really elaborate Hot Wheels track in your basement, built with the express purpose of crashing your cars into each other as fast as possible while you watch. Who says wanton destruction can’t serve as a wholesome bonding experience?