The History of Co-Op Games

Cooperative games are experiences in which all players share a common goal and win or lose together as a single team, rather than competing to defeat one another.² The framework applies across mediums, encompassing both tabletop and video games, and in digital and non-digital form it commonly pits the players collectively against computer-controlled opponents or against the game system itself.² In video games the mode is usually abbreviated “co-op,” and is distinguished from competitive multiplayer such as player-versus-player or deathmatch by the way players assist one another — passing weapons or items, healing, providing covering fire, and performing joint maneuvers.¹² Because victory must be reached together, players share resources through pooled economies, discovery of in-game items, and other components applied toward a shared win state.²

Origins in tabletop play

The earliest recorded cooperative board games date to the 1930s, when the British writer Dennis Wheatley designed “realistic document games” such as Murder Off Miami and The Malinsay Massacre, which functioned essentially as interactive stories.¹ According to one account, some early cooperative designs were used by educators to model collaboration, and the forerunner of Monopoly? — The Landlord’s Game — existed in an early cooperative format that sharply contrasts with the competitive game it became.²

For decades genuinely cooperative titles were scarce. A handful appeared in the 1960s, including 1967’s Configurations, billed more as a puzzle than a game, and the Captain Scarlet Game of the same year, which described itself as “a unique type of team game”.¹ No pre-1980 game ranks within the top 1,000 cooperative games on BoardGameGeek?; the first two to do so are Intruder, a solitaire game supporting up to three players, and Citadel of Blood, a role-playing game requiring no game master.¹ That absence of a referee proved a recurring pattern: cooperative games are widely understood to descend from role-playing games with the game master removed or streamlined so that the rules themselves fill that role.¹¹

The first enduring cooperative board game was 1982’s Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective?, in which players form a team of investigators solving mysteries by reading witness and suspect interviews, consulting newspaper entries, and studying a map of London.¹ It mirrored the “realistic documents” of the earliest designs, has been repeatedly reprinted with new stories, and set a nonlinear storytelling mold that later titles such as Chronicles of Crime and Detective inherited.¹

Growth remained slow from 1983 to 1999.¹ In 1987 Arkham Horror? arrived as a board adaptation of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.¹ Some games, like 1989’s Advanced HeroQuest, gained cooperative reputations only through house rules that adapted their solitaire play, a system 1995’s Warhammer Quest carried into the Games Workshop setting.¹ The Canadian firm Family Pastimes?, founded by Jim Deacove, helped establish a formal cooperative board game genre through its sales and designs from the 1970s onward.²

The 21st century opened with Reiner Knizia?’s 2000 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which condensed the trilogy into a roughly 90-minute cooperative game and received a special award in the 2001 Spiel des Jahres.¹ Many enthusiasts locate the beginnings of the modern cooperative genre in the successes of Arkham Horror and Knizia’s Lord of the Rings.¹⁰ Yet Knizia’s design did not immediately transform the hobby, its influence limited mainly to role-playing spinoffs and children’s games.¹ The decisive shift came in 2008 with Pandemic?, the first major design by Matt Leacock, who had earlier self-published Borderlands (1995) and Lunatix Loop (2000).¹ In 2021 its publisher, Z-Man Games?, reported that over 5 million copies had been sold worldwide, and a clear surge in cooperative releases followed 2008.¹

Cooperative video games

In video games, cooperative play was introduced partly as a feature to extend a title’s longevity and partly to convert the “game-watching” crowds that gathered around arcade cabinets and living-room screens into paying players.⁴ Early arcade titles of the 1970s and 1980s pioneered cooperative multiplayer that encouraged players to spend money simultaneously on the same machine, a lineage that evolved into the beat ‘em up? genre.² Much early implementation was superficial — adding a second player and inflating enemy health, damage, or numbers to compensate — producing what one account calls “linear” co-op that dominated the 8- to 64-bit era.⁴

Two forms emerged. Contra exemplified the “player two enters and it gets easier” school, and was notable for offering multiple vertical planes that decluttered the screen for two players.⁴ Titles including Final Fight, Rampage, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games followed this pattern.⁴ A second form built around friendly fire — Double Dragon, Joe & Mac, and later Streets of Rage, Battletoads, and Golden Axe — required players to be mindful of one another.⁴ Secret of Mana popularized drop-in, drop-out co-op, letting a second player join and leave freely.⁴

The Nintendo 64 delivered Donkey Kong Country and Perfect Dark, the latter released in 2000 with split-screen and remembered as an early truly cooperative first-person experience.⁴⁶ Halo: Combat Evolved, launched with the Xbox in 2001, let two friends play through the campaign together, an uncommon feature at the time executed well enough that co-op could surpass the solo experience.⁶ Later Halo games expanded to four-player and online co-op before controversially dropping split-screen in Halo 5: Guardians (2015) and launching Halo Infinite without co-op at all, adding it a year later.⁶

A transition away from linear co-op followed. Guitar Hero on the PlayStation 2 introduced asymmetry, giving each instrument its own contribution.⁴ Portal, released on PC in 2007, made cooperative puzzle-solving mandatory rather than optional, with each player’s space and actions affecting the other.⁴ Left 4 Dead provided a toolbox approach to zombie-survival shooting in which players could synergize strategically.⁴ Diablo standardized class-based cooperative role-playing — a structure the video traces to early character-based RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate — rewarding parties that stacked complementary skills.⁴

Later landmark cooperative titles include A Way Out, It Takes Two, and Split Fiction, alongside Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Castle Crashers, Borderlands 2, Sea of Thieves, and Baldur’s Gate 3.⁶ Hazelight’s It Takes Two is a strictly two-player game in which a single copy suffices, the second player using a free friend’s pass, and Split Fiction — released in 2025 — follows the same one-copy model with a roughly 14-hour main story.⁷ IGN’s list of the ten best cooperative games places Overcooked 2, Streets of Rage 4, Divinity: Original Sin 2 — explicitly compared to Dungeons & Dragons — Monster Hunter: World, and Splinter Cell: Conviction among the genre’s finest, excluding MMOs, MOBAs, and purely competitive team games.⁹

Commercial rise

By the 2020s cooperative games had become disproportionately successful on Steam: only about 6% of games released on the platform in 2023 were co-op, yet they accounted for roughly 36% of units sold.⁵ Annual co-op releases on Steam rose from 383 in 2018 to 799 in 2023.⁵ The COVID-19 lockdowns further boosted the category by providing a social outlet, and 2024 bucked the post-pandemic normalization with unexpected hits.⁵ Among 2024 releases, Palworld sold 19 million copies and Helldivers 2 11 million, with Palworld alone accounting for nearly half of the roughly 40.8 million co-op units sold that year through June 2024.⁵ A typical co-op game sold about 40,000 units on Steam versus 5,000 for a non-co-op game, and 106 co-op titles had sold over 5 million lifetime copies as of the report’s 2024 data.⁵ Analysts attribute the pattern to co-op games being sharable, memeable, streamable, and highly replayable, driving organic word-of-mouth.⁵

Beyond commerce, cooperative games have been credited with building soft skills such as teamwork that carry over into schools and workplaces, offering a low-stakes way to practice real-world behavior.⁸

the glory days of co-op games…Rocket Sloth