That was my experience back in the 2000's; best friend's house was Halo house and mine was Smash Bros house.

But those were the days of splitscreen local multiplayer games. I expect there's much more pressure for a social group to all have the same console now due to the the prevalence of online multiplayer.

Some of my fondest memories involve sitting around a gameboy with a friend and a sibling, trying to beat Super Mario Land. It had no saves, and in the past we had been thwarted by the daily power outages and the fiddly power connector kept in place with a match (no batteries). We also did this with various NES games, which at least made it easier for everyone else to see the screen.

And then there were the arcades. My friend was a local celebrity and so good that some arcades had banned him, or set his favorite games to 'super difficult'. When he played, a crowd would watch, whether it was Dinosaurs VS Cadillacs, TMNT: Manhattan Project, or Street Fighter. Sometimes some clueless new guy would challenge him in the latter, and a significant portion of the arcade users would notice and come see the beatdown.

Sometimes we'd go to a new part of town because they had fancy new games, or because they hadn't banned him yet. We'd play co-op games, and he'd help me stay alive as long as possible.

I haven't thought about this in a long time, but this kind of social gaming was central to my youth, now that I think about it.

(and that's not even getting into the 90s/00s LAN parties!)

> But those were the days of splitscreen local multiplayer games.

Yup. I have fond memories of multiplayer mario kart or goldeneye, or cooperative games e.g. coop Secret of Mana / Seiken Densetsu 2.

> I expect there's much more pressure for a social group to all have the same console now due to the the prevalence of online multiplayer.

So do I, but Nintendo seems to have kept the flame alive, local multiplayer mario kart works fine on the Switch, and the game is playable with solo joy-cons, so a pair of full-size controllers is enough for 4 players (once you find out how to configure the bloody thing).

> local multiplayer mario kart works fine on the Switch

I got Mario Kart 8 for Switch and we tried playing it on one large shared TV screen.

We immediately ran into the problem that it's incredibly difficult to see the track on the split screen. Seems like local multiplayer only works well when everyone involved has memorized all the tracks.

Ah yes, we play using a projector rather than a TV so it wasn't that much of an issue.

We have a Nintendo Switch in my office. 4 player split-screen Mario Kart is a lot of fun.

In poor areas, this was true for games on top of consoles. I might have gotten a game a year or something like that. So, a friend with a newer game got to show out in front of other friends like I did with mine. Then, there were the rare people who had really different consoles. They got to show us a whole, different experience.

Neighborhood I grew up in was like that. I had an Atari 2600, a friend had an Intellivision (with the speech synth module thing), and another had a ColecoVision. I don't remember why, but getting to play on the ColecoVision was a big deal. Parents didn't like him having people over or something.