Split-Screen Simultaneous
Split-screen play divides one display into separate viewports, so players sharing a room can occupy different parts of the same world, each seeing only what their own character sees.
Rendering happens twice. Each viewport runs its own camera over shared world state, which roughly doubles drawing cost and forces compromises in resolution, draw distance and effects. Design gains what rendering loses, because players can now separate, hide, ambush and lie when information is no longer shared. Looking at the other half of the screen is cheating that nobody can prevent and everybody does.
First Star Software released Spy vs Spy in 1984 with a split display that let two players sabotage each other inside the same building without knowing where the other one was. Its comic-strip premise depended on hidden traps, which is impossible when both players share a camera. Doubling the rendering load was affordable precisely because the graphics were simple, a trade every split-screen game has repeated since.
Asymmetric information between people in the same room is a specific social pleasure, and it carried console multiplayer for two decades. Technical cost eventually killed it, since rendering four views became expensive as fidelity rose and online play removed the need. Its disappearance is a recurring complaint from players, and several studios have restored split-screen as a deliberate feature rather than an assumed default.
Lineage — traced back to a root
Every mechanic in this dataset resolves to an ancestral chain. This one is 4 steps deep, beginning with Object Collision As Verb in 1962.
Descends directly from
Forked into
GoldenEye 007 made four-player deathmatch a living-room fixture, Halo: Combat Evolved carried its campaign into it, and Mario Kart 64 used it to make racing sociable.
Carried forward by 11 later games
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Also called: split screen, local co-op