We did - I remember playing Doom with my friend as a kid - one of us would do the walking, another would do the shooting, on different peripherals. The idea is pretty fresh on the consoles, however.
That reminds me that when USB came out (or came to our, my parents' computer) I thought if only we got a new mouse, I'd be able to plug both in, getting two cursors, and be able to cheat at solitaire. Heh.
One game I particularly remember is Super Mario Galaxy 3D on the Wii. It had a two player mode where the second player didn't control Mario, but instead had the ability so interact with the environment and player in limited ways to help. I wonder why there aren't a lot of other games that do that.
Game design is hard and asymmetrical game design is incredibly hard. Game developers can hardly make symmetrical cooperative systems that properly take advantage of the multiplayer aspect. Borderlands, for example, doesn't add unique systems that take advantage of the fact that there are multiple players. There's no unique mechanics to bosses or enemies. There's not really interesting synergies that you can take advantage of by the different classes.
When games do coop well, it's usually an inherent part of the game. If you can make the assumption that there is at least two players playing together, you can create unique and interesting ways for the two players to interact on screen. "It Takes Two" is a recent game that was designed explicitly for two players and you can immediately tell the difference from it to a game that cooperative modes were an afterthought to the solo mode.
Games requiring more than one player immediately alienates a lot of players and limits your audience a lot, so that's probably why pure coop titles are extremely rare.
As for asymmetric titles like Mario Galaxy where the second player is not essential, it's pretty hard to make the gameplay satisfying for the secondary player while not impeding the first player or making it feel essential to the gameplay. The "little brother" mode costs a lot with little perceived benefit for the developers.
> As for asymmetric titles like Mario Galaxy where the second player is not essential, it's pretty hard to make the gameplay satisfying for the secondary player while not impeding the first player or making it feel essential to the gameplay. The "little brother" mode costs a lot with little perceived benefit for the developers.
I'm not sure how frequent this is, but when I was little we (me and my brothers) had limited time to play, so we would play our time and watch each others, sometimes completing long missions in Ground Control by playing one after the other. When you look at it this way, having something to do instead of just looking at the screen (which was already plenty of fun) is huge.