12 Co-op Games for the N64 to Play using Rollback
Specifically non-competitive games to play together!
If you’re looking for the best Romhack’s for Rollback, I’ve written about a few here!
5 Multiplayer Romhacks You Should Play Using N64 Rollback
Want to face off against your buddies with some hidden gems? I gotchu!
10 Great Versus-Multiplayer Games to Play on N64 Rollback
1. Goemon’s Great Adventure (aka Mystic Ninja 2)
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon completely skips any bloated overworld filler and just locks you into tight, side-scrolling stages packed with bizarre Japanese folklore monsters and brutal arcade difficulty. Playing this in splitscreen introduces a ton of hilarious friction because you and a friend are trapped on the exact same screen, meaning if one of you falls behind, the camera will straight-up drag you to your death. The game doubles down on this cooperative chaos with some genuinely wild mechanics—you can actually hop right onto your partner’s back to let them carry you through tough platforming rooms, or frantically toss a baton back and forth to swap who is steering the cockpit during those massive, first-person giant robot boss battles.
2. Diddy Kong Racing (using the JOINTVENTURE cheat)
Diddy Kong Racing is so much more than a standard arcade racer, turning the entire genre into a massive adventure game packed with hidden collectibles, boss fights, and three entirely separate vehicle styles—karts for land, high-drift hovercrafts for water, and free-flying planes for the sky. Punching in the legendary “JOINTVENTURE” cheat code unlocks the full campaign for two players, creating a genius division of labor where you can work together to conquer the overworld. Since only one of you actually needs to secure first place to unlock the next challenge, you can completely break the game’s routing—allowing one player to lock down the optimal racing line to guarantee a win while the partner purposefully veers off into branching paths to hunt down hidden balloons and secrets.
3. Sin & Punishment
Sin and Punishment is a spectacular, high-octane rail shooter set in a dystopian future where a genetically engineered food source mutates into a ravenous alien threat called Ruffians. The actual gameplay feels like an aggressive, infantry-focused Star Fox 64 on steroids, forcing you to navigate your character’s actual physical body through dense, screen-filling bullet hell scenarios. Because trying to dodge incoming fire and aim at the exact same time can completely short-circuit your brain, the brilliant two-player co-op mode splits the controls entirely: one player assumes total responsibility for movement and dodge rolls, while the second pilot strictly handles the aiming crosshair to clear the screen. This shared-brain setup completely shifts the dynamic into an intense test of real-time communication, turning chaotic alien waves into a hilarious, high-stakes test of how well you and a friend can stay in sync.
4. Perfect Dark
Perfect Dark is an absolute masterpiece, and it basically ruined other shooters for me as a kid because of how insanely ahead of its time it was. Instead of just letting you mindlessly sprint down corridors blasting everything that moves, the missions actually force you to think—you’re dropping into a dense cyberpunk atmosphere where you have to juggle stealth, specialized gadgets, and a massive arsenal of weapons that all have ridiculous secondary firing modes (like a laptop that folds up into an autonomous gun turret).
The splitscreen stuff is completely legendary. You get the standard co-op campaign, but the real star of the show is “Counter-Op” mode. It is beautifully toxic: one player tries to finish the actual story mission while the second player actively spawns into the bodies of random enemy guards across the map, weaponizing the facility’s security systems to hunt their friend down. On top of that, the multiplayer let you stack matches with highly customizable AI “simulants”—ranging from pacifists to absolute terminators—turning a casual couch session into a chaotic, full-scale battlefield where you can customize enemy behaviors down to the pixel.
5. Gauntlet Legends
Gauntlet Legends is the ultimate arcade hack-and-slash, and honestly, it’s responsible for eating an embarrassing amount of my allowance as a kid. I used to dump endless quarters into the arcade cabinet, famously making it all the way to the final world before running completely out of money. Finding out this thing actually got a home console port blew my absolute mind. It instantly became a game I constantly rented from the local video store, but it came with a brutal catch: back then, you needed an N64 Controller Pak to actually save your data. Since I didn’t own one, every single weekend rental turned into a frantic, non-stop marathon to see how far my friends and I could get before we inevitably had to shut the console off and lose everything.
The whole game is built entirely for chaotic couch co-op, locking everyone onto a single shared screen so you’re forced to stick together. You choose from those classic fantasy archetypes—like the Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard, or Elf—and try to balance your abilities to survive the endless waves of monsters. But the real magic is the beautiful, toxic greed it feeds into. You’re supposed to be working as a team, but the second a piece of gold, a potion, or a rare food drop hits the floor, all teamwork goes out the window as you frantically race your buddies to steal the loot right out from under them.
6. Duke Nukem 3D
Duke Nukem 3D on the N64 is easily one of my favorite versions to go back to. It actually strips out a lot of the edgy themes that were in the original PC release—but honestly, all of that stripper-room stuff feels so corny today anyway that you really aren’t missing out on anything unless you’re thirteen years old.
Instead, what makes this version so great is that you can play the entire ridiculous campaign side-by-side with a buddy in splitscreen. It completely changes the vibe of the game; instead of a tense, lonely survival crawl, it turns into a chaotic, buddy-cop demolition derby where the two of you are just tearing through city streets and blowing up alien pigs together. And if you get tired of working as a team, you can instantly flip the script, drop into the multiplayer mode, and use those exact same highly interactive city maps to blow each other up with pipe bombs and shrink rays. It’s just pure, low-stakes arcade chaos on a shared couch.
7. Rampage (World Tour and Universal Tour)
I had a buddy tell me they once beat the entire campaign of Rampage with a friend in a single night while tripping on acid, and honestly, that story completely recontextualizes the whole game for me. Because on the surface, you’re just some beefy ass dudes smashing things up. But when you think about it... wait, we are literally giant, mutated monsters terrorizing entire populations! It is simultaneously the coolest thing ever and also kind of gut-wrenching if you actually pause to imagine the sheer cosmic horror and ruined lives you’re inflicting on these poor citizens—right before you punch a massive skyscraper into dust in five seconds flat.
The game completely skips any complex mechanics and just hands you a pure, brainless arcade sandbox. You and a friend drop onto a flat side-scrolling screen and just go to town: you punch buildings until they crumble, swat annoying military helicopters out of the sky, and literally eat screaming people off the street to keep your health up. It’s just a high-energy, totally stress-free smash-fest where the only goal is to see how fast you and a buddy can level a city block. It’s the ultimate game to just turn your brain completely off and watch the world burn on a Friday night.
8. Battletanx (and it’s sequel, Global Assault)
BattleTanx looks like just another generic tank game on the surface, but the story is absolutely unhinged. In short: a virus instantly kills 99% of the women on the planet, so the collapsing governments round up the survivors and lock them away in sterile labs. Naturally, heavily armed male gangs immediately form to break them out, deifying them as “QueenLords” to rule over their wasteland turf. The main character’s wife happens to be one of the women taken, and since the guy literally just wants his marriage back, he hops into a massive tank to go rescue her. That is genuinely the entire plot.
The actual gameplay completely matches that crazy B-movie energy. You and a buddy get dropped into completely destructible versions of a ruined New York or San Francisco, and you just blow up everything in sight. You’re trading heavy explosive shells, dropping automated gun turrets on street corners, and literally firing guided nuclear missiles across the screen that turn entire city blocks into smoking craters. It’s fast, chaotic, and just pure arcade fun on a shared couch.
9. Hexen
Hexen is such a cool N64 port because it’s basically Doom re-skinned as a dark fantasy game, letting you and a buddy choose between a Warrior, a Cleric, or a Mage to completely shake up how you play. One of you can swing a massive axe on the front lines while the other stands back casting lightning spells, which you'll desperately need because the level design completely swaps out Doom’s straightforward halls for massive, interconnected hub worlds filled with cryptic puzzles. It takes serious communication on a shared couch because you'll literally have to hunt down a hidden switch on one map just to open a giant iron gate on an entirely separate level, turning your standard splitscreen shooter into a moody, punishing dungeon crawl where you're constantly mapping out pathways together and covering each other’s backs from hordes of centaurs.
10. Starcraft 64
StarCraft 64 is an absolute mad-science experiment of a console port, and trying to manage a massive real-time strategy economy on a standard controller is a brutal, finger-cramping hurdle when the game was so clearly built for a mouse. But wrestling with the clunky shortcut menus is totally worth it just to play the exclusive splitscreen co-op mode, where you and a buddy get to control the exact same faction side-by-side on a single TV screen. It sets up an awesome division of labor where one of you can focus entirely on base building, supply lines, and resource management while the other micro-manages frantic Zerg rushes or drops troops directly into enemy territory. It completely flips a notoriously stressful PC click-fest into a hilarious, chaotic team effort where you’re constantly shouting at each other across the couch to build more supply depots.
11. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M.
Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. was made by Acclaim Studios Austin—the exact same team behind N64 heavy-hitters like Turok—and you can instantly feel that sci-fi shooter DNA the second you pick up the controller. It’s definitely a flawed game that doesn’t quite hit those legendary Turok heights thanks to some clunky platforming and aggressive fog, but it carries a ton of late-90s charm if you just want to shoot giant insects. Heavily inspired by the vibe of Starship Troopers, the game drops you and a buddy into high-tech exosuits to wage a frantic, first-person war against endless waves of extraterrestrial bugs. The splitscreen co-op completely saves the experience, turning a somewhat repetitive campaign into a fun, low-stakes arcade blast where you’re constantly covering each other’s backs and watching alien bugs explode into colorful goo across a shared screen.
12. Vigilante 8 (and it’s sequel, 2nd Offense)
Vigilante 8 dropped right when the vehicular combat genre was at its absolute peak, and while it was on multiple systems, the N64 version is easily the best one to go back to. It completely captures that late-90s alternative energy, letting you and a friend choose from a roster of eccentric, fully voiced drivers—like renegade truckers and disco-obsessed vigilantes—and drop them into massive, fully destructible 1970s sandboxes. The actual gameplay is incredibly satisfying because you’re not just racing; you’re drifting around ruined oil refineries and desert canyons while managing wild weapon pickups like homing missiles and mortar shells. Plus, you can input fighting-game-style button combos to unleash devastating hidden special attacks, which turns standard splitscreen couch deathmatches into a chaotic, high-octane war of attrition where you’re constantly blowing up the environment just to trap your buddy.