Multiplayer Modes That Ended up More Popular Than the Main Game
GoldenEye 007
The Nintendo 64 was no slouch when it came to local multiplayer experiences —and GoldenEye 007 was the king. It couldn’t even be dethroned by juggernauts Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros., and Mario Party. Everyone was playing GoldenEye and for good reason: the game practically invented console first-person shooters. It’s a genre that is still incredibly popular today, and it owes a lot of what it has to GoldenEye.
When people think of GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, they think of multiplayer. That doesn’t mean that the single-player wasn’t good. Rare implemented moments from the Pierce Brosnan flick worked really well. The game even had the cool feature of giving the player more objectives and longer levels on harder difficulties. But, it was simply overshadowed by the game’s multiplayer, which is extraordinary considering that it was added last minute.
Multiplayer Modes That Ended up More Popular Than the Main Game
Halo 2
While the second Halo game innovated on the original’s multiplayer with new weapons, better maps, and dual-wielding, the fundamentals were not too dissimilar to what had preceded it. The major difference was the introduction of Xbox Live. Gone were the days of daisy-chaining multiple Xbox’s with LAN cables; Halo could now be played with anyone around the world at any time.
Like GoldenEye, Halo 2’s campaign was pretty good. It was the first time players could walk in the shoes of The Arbiter. Alas, the campaign mode just wasn’t as revolutionary as the online multiplayer was. Even after multiple new Halo games were released, many fans would go back and jump into the servers on Halo 2, and a few managed to hold on for dear life even after Microsoft shut down the servers.
Multiplayer Modes That Ended up More Popular Than the Main Game
Fortnite
Fun fact: Did you know that Battle Royale isn’t the main mode in Fortnite? The idea of Fortnite: Save the World came from blending the construction mechanics of games like Minecraft with the shooter genre. Save the World is a sandbox survival game where players can complete missions and spend experience points on upgrades. It’s quite a bit different to the immensely popular Battle Royale portion of Fortnite.
Chances are you’ll never actually touch this part of Fortnite, the reason being that it is only available in the paid version of Fortnite. The free version of Fortnite only gets you the Battle Royale mode, so it’s a no-brainer that that mode is vastly more popular than the main game. Most people who end up putting money into Fortnite are more than likely spending it on the battle passes for the Battle Royale mode rather than purchasing the Save the World mode.
Multiplayer Modes That Ended up More Popular Than the Main Game
Call of Duty: World at War
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare had both an excellent single-player campaign and online multiplayer mode, but it wasn’t until World at War that the multiplayer all but devoured the campaign mode. Not only did Treyarch build on the excellent groundwork built by Infinity Ward for the game’s competitive multiplayer, they also introduced the popular Nazi Zombies mode. Co-op survival modes were fairly new for shooter games at the time, and Treyarch seemed to nail it on their first attempt. It didn’t take long for the tension to build in that mode, and lasting just 15 minutes felt like a triumph.
Unlike Modern Warfare, however, World at War’s campaign was nothing to write home about. Being able to play it in co-op was nice, but overall, it was a fairly standard World War II story that had been seen several times before.
Multiplayer Modes That Ended up More Popular Than the Main Game
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 shares a similar story to Call of Duty: World at War in terms of how its multiplayer fared compared to its campaign mode. The multiplayer was amazing, but there was really nothing to the campaign at all. Tell me, can you remember the name of the main character from Battlefield 3’s story without looking it up?
The competitive multiplayer was basically more of the same that we got in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but that’s certainly not a bad thing —that game’s competitive multiplayer was downright excellent. It’s just a shame that Battlefield 3 didn’t follow in the footsteps of that game’s campaign mode. Battlefield 3 really doubled down on the multiplayer aspect, and it’s hard to argue with the results. What we got was a multiplayer mode with a great focus on teamwork, a varied class system, and great vehicular combat, too. It begs the question why the lackluster single-player mode was even included.
Multiplayer Modes That Ended up More Popular Than the Main Game
Street Fighter II
One of the most important, revered and re-released fighting games of all time: Street Fighter II. Pretty much every aspect of the game, from the controls to the combos, standardized how fighting games are made to this day. Now, the fighting genre is among the most competitive genres out there, and that pretty much began with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. In the top left sat the words “Insert Coin,” which was just asking for a second player to come along and show off their Street Fighter chops. Once the game came to consoles, you were no longer confined by the amount of quarters you had in your pocket; you could hurricane kick your friends’ asses to your heart’s content.
Multiplayer Modes That Ended up More Popular Than the Main Game
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Fighting games are usually developed with multiplayer being a top-of-the-list priority, but Super Smash Bros. Melee has a surprisingly meaty single-player component. One of the game’s coolest and most nostalgia-inducing modes is the Adventure mode. Players could traverse through several famous Nintendo locales, such as the Mushroom Kingdom, Hyrule Castle, and Dream Land. There were plenty more single-player modes where that came from and over 200 trophies to collect.
No matter how much effort the devs put in to the single-player portion though, it all comes back to the multiplayer. In Melee’s case, it goes way beyond just smashing it out with your friends at home; competitive Melee is quite the phenomenon. The game is still played at EVO, the biggest fighting game tournament, to this day. For a game that was released in 2001, that’s very impressive, especially considering that there has been three Smash Bros. games released since.
Multiplayer Modes That Ended up More Popular Than the Main Game
Arma 2 DayZ Mod
It’s not often that a mod for a game is more influential than the game itself, but that is certainly the case with Arma 2 and DayZ. Arma 2 is a tactical open world shooter and is pretty decent in its own right. But chances are that if you were purchasing Arma 2 back in 2012, you weren’t getting it for the game itself, but the mod DayZ.
DayZ completely changed Arma 2 from a purely action game into a multiplayer survival game where you had to supply up and defend yourself against zombies and hostile players. The mod was so popular that it spun off into its own game. DayZ pretty much created the modern survival genre, and its influence can be seen in games such as H1Z1, Scum, and Rust. You can even see traces of DayZ in games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite. It’s crazy to think that this Arma 2 mod would be so impactful and completely overshadow the game that it was based on.
