Lucas Assislar has a bone to pick with the Halo series. A software developer from São Paulo whose projects include retro VR homage Pixel Ripped 1989, Assislar grew up playing Microsoft’s flagship shooter, but has since fallen out of love with it thanks to Halo 5: Guardians’ lack of offline co-op support. “[My friend and I] played through the entire series together, like, oh my god, Halo 1, Halo 2, Halo 3, ODST – it was an amazing experience,” Assislar says. “When Halo 5 released without splitscreen, that was like a smack in the face.”
This shift is indicative of the current fortunes of splitscreen multiplayer. Once all but expected of any massmarket release, it has been wiped from the feature sheets of all but a handful of blockbuster games – an entire way of playing that is dying a long, slow death. Assislar is part of a small but resourceful group of indie coders trying to keep it alive. “In 2012 I got a new gaming PC, and it was bundled with Borderlands 2 [but] I couldn’t play with my friend because he didn’t have a PC. So I found a guide on the Gearbox forums and it was like 30 minutes of setup – it was way too hard. So I was like, ‘I’m a programmer –I can make this go way easier’.”
Thus the almost-accidental birth of Nucleus Co-op, a free open-source splitscreen tool that is now compatible with hundreds of PC games, even ones not designed for splitscreen, including the likes of and Nucleus functions by launching the game twice or more and assigning each instance a window and controller input, using ‘symlinks’ to connect them. “Borderlands was actually one of the easiest to work on, because they had a command where I could say, ‘expect input from gamepad
