"You could basically have different modes at the top and bottom of the screen if you wanted, or reset the settings for the mode at the top or the bottom." "It was actually quite easy to do splitscreen on SNES, because you could change the mode halfway down the screen," Goddard recalls.
From both a technical and a business point of view, splitscreen made more sense during the era of sprites and 2D backdrops, he says. As one of the first westerners to work in-house at Nintendo in Japan, as 16bit gave way to N64, Goddard was at the forefront of this shift. But Giles Goddard suggests its decline goes back further still, to the rise of polygonal 3D worlds. "It's needed because the companies don't care." Why, then, has splitscreen run out of road? The obvious answer is that online multiplayer has stolen its audience – and that is certainly a factor. "We don't want Nucleus to be needed," he points out.
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