Oh man, as a guy who grew up being best buds with my brother (two years my elder ). I have to say, good couch co-op is probably the thing I miss most about the world let alone gaming. Probably 80% of all my fondest childood memories where of me and my brother and a split-screen.
We didn't have a tone of money growing up but we'd always get atleats one new game for Christmas and for each of our birthdays, but no matter who's name was on the package the day would always be spent, with us either playing split-screen or taking turns beating missions in a campaign.
We had several consoles throughout our time gaming together starting with a Nintendo64 ( wasnt new at the time but an older boy on our block gave it to us when he went off to university). After that we where hooked, and would save up our allowances and paychecks to split on new consoles and our parents would buy is games on special occasions. (Once we started makimg more money we would also buy our own). By the time we stopped gaming together we had literally everything from a supernintendo to an xbox1 and a ps3 and everthing inbetween (including a pc).Oh ya, and probably afew hundred games.
We had some great memories: Halo and battlefront where probably our favorites, and we would literally spend most of our weekends with one of these games, maybe 1 or 2 of our friends, and some snacks, just gamming talking and laughing. I can also remember when we got our sisters and parents to play mariocart with us for nearly 8 hours straight one christmas; everyone had a blast! And i still can remember when we fist baught diablo 2. Our parents didn't want us to play it, but the pc we played it on was in the basement so we could get away with it if we were careful. Unfortunatly, we where both pretty young at the time and our basement was pretty dark and scary to a 10 year old, so we where both to nervous to play the game (especially with the sound on) by ourselfs. So we would play together, with one person being the "pilot" and the other sitting next to him with pen, paper, calculator and the worldbook: acting as "co-pilot".
Ya whenever someone brings up couch-coop or just gaming with friends physically present, it always hits me right here. points to nostalgia gland