Roughly 90 seconds until controllers start getting thrown.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo, in all its superlative glory, was released for Super Nintendo in 1994. I never personally owned a copy, nor did I ever follow the series into its later incarnations. Yet that game made an indelible impression on me during long nights of my childhood I spent in my cozy basement.

The first gaming console I ever claimed any possession of was the SNES. It was a Christmas present in 1993. By then it was already approaching its autumn years, but to me, the wide-eyed four-year-old, it was something brand new and majestic. It was a glorious Christmas Day we spent embarking on the virtual landscape of Super Mario World for the first time. Or at least I assume it was. I really have no recollection of my first experience with the controller in my hands. I suppose that is not important.

If my math serves me correctly, there are some people glancing over this article who were born the same month my brother and I received our SNES, so I should explain that in the mid-90s, there was a different culture to gaming. I like to call it “the basement culture.” This brings me back to Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Every so often, a friend of my brother’s would come over, unveil his SSF2T cartridge and we would take a moment to marvel at this fantastic treasure. Together we would play it, for hours on end, in that basement.

I assume I lost most of the time, but that’s okay because I got to play as Dhalism and Blanka, and when you’re that age, you can’t ask for much more than spitting fireballs and electrocuting people.

And in those carefree days of our youth, that was how things went. We would go down to the Video Network and rent a game, then we would go down to the basement and play the weekend away. Perhaps we didn’t get as much sun as we should have, but nonetheless those were happy times. Then the fateful day came in 1997 when my brother bought a Nintendo 64. That ushered in the pinnacle of the basement culture: a little game called GoldenEye.

We hooked up our boomerang-shaped N64 controllers, armed ourselves to the teeth and set out on a bloody free-for-all. Our 26-inch television screen was quartered into tiny personal sections, so we could hardly make out our pixelated foes at a distance, but we didn’t care. It was the ultimate multiplayer experience — clean, simple and fun. And most of all, we were all there together.

The modern multiplayer culture can probably be traced back to 1999, with the creation of Counter-Strike. Although it started out simply as a mod for Half-Life, it ended up revolutionizing the first-person shooter with its online multiplayer experience. It allowed for massive numbers of people to play simultaneously and engage in a straightforward battle of terrorists versus counter-terrorists. The game got only more popular over the next five years. I remember many days in darkened computer labs over the lunch hour in high school, with a couple dozen people wrapped up in Counter-Strike, hoping a roving teacher did not happen upon us.

By this point, online multiplayer had become entrenched in video games. There was no more split-screen to contend with; one was no longer restricted to a limited pool of gaming buddies and hundreds of people could throw down together, creating team and battle dynamics that had never been seen before. This new multiplayer culture got a substantial boost from the Halo series, and, of course, the juggernaut that is the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise.

But something happened. Online play got too big. It became the focus of everyone’s energies. Games that had traditionally been strictly single-player, like the Grand Theft Auto series, got in on the action and suddenly there were legions of gamers everywhere willing to dismiss a release off-hand if they weren’t satisfied with the online multiplayer it offered. While GoldenEye stood alone on its strong single-player campaign, games like the Modern Warfare titles throw them in as little more than a mere formality.

On one hand, the new culture has allowed unprecedented interaction spanning continents, but on the other hand, it has leached away at the basement culture that was. Increasingly, games only allow multiplayer experience online. The legendary co-op mode in Saints Row 2, for instance, cannot be enjoyed by two people in the same room, which is a shame.

The camaraderie that was once associated with the multiplayer experience has given way in large part to impersonal come-and-go teammates at best and rage-quits, insults and racist vitriol at worst. While we once had to wait patiently on the sidelines for a shot at one of the two controllers, the culture now has become more frantic and impatient.

I don’t want to negatively characterize online gamers, nor do I want to take online gaming away from anyone. It just troubles me that the authentic multiplayer experience, between friends in close quarters, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Whenever I hear about the latest online multiplayer sensation, I can’t help but think back to my evenings with Street Fighter II and feel that something has been lost between then and now.

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Image: Capcom