I’m building a tabletop/“barcade” style emulation machine as a gift.

It’ll be two players and emulate everything up to the PS1 era (hopefully)

I’d like recommendations on your absolute favorite 2+ player games, with a focus on co-op but versus is fine too.

Ideally games meant for an arcade button/joystick control scheme, too.

Right now I have a couple of the classics in mind, like the Double Dragon games, TMNT arcade game, some Mortal Kombat, those kinds of things, but I’m really out of my depth when it comes to “good arcade/retro coop games”, so please list as many fun multiplayer games as you can think of (up to the PS1 era preferably).

Edit with a little more detail:

Emulator system is a Pi4 running RetroArch. It’s capable of running games up-to the ps1/ n64 era, but that’s where it starts to run into problems with the more demanding, usually 3D games. For a reference example, it can run SM64 smoothly enough, but really struggles with Goldeneye. I know goldeneye is a bit of a special case, but that’s roughly the era I’m looking to stop at with this, if anyone has experience with this kind of emulation I’m all ears!

I’m building a tabletop/“barcade” style emulation machine as a gift.

It’ll be two players and emulate everything up to the PS1 era (hopefully)

I’d like recommendations on your absolute favorite 2+ player games, with a focus on co-op but versus is fine too.

Ideally games meant for an arcade button/joystick control scheme, too.

Right now I have a couple of the classics in mind, like the Double Dragon games, TMNT arcade game, some Mortal Kombat, those kinds of things, but I’m really out of my depth when it comes to “good arcade/retro coop games”, so please list as many fun multiplayer games as you can think of (up to the PS1 era preferably).