The PAL PS2 Multitap: Britain’s Forgotten Four-Player Gem

James Hargreaves — Founder & Editor, RetroInHand

Christmas 2001. I’m nineteen years old, sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room in Wolverhampton with three mates, four DualShock 2 controllers, one Multitap plugged into the back of a fat PS2, and a copy of TimeSplitters 2 that we’d pooled together to buy from Game the day it came out. We played until half past three in the morning. Nobody went home. My mum came downstairs at one point, looked at us, shook her head, and went back to bed without saying a word. That’s the night I understood what four-player gaming truly meant on a home console — not the shrunken, compromised split-screen of a SNES with a multitap, but something that felt genuinely cinematic, genuinely alive.

That Multitap — the Sony-made SCPH-10090, a squat little grey block that plugged into the rear expansion bay of the original fat PS2 — is one of the most criminally overlooked peripherals in British gaming history. It enabled experiences that have never been properly replicated on modern hardware. And yet, as we sit here in the mid-2020s, the games it made possible are quietly sliding out of collective memory, out of charity shops, and into the hands of scalpers who don’t even know what they’ve got. Prices are moving. The window is closing. And I want to make absolutely sure that before it shuts, you know exactly what you’re looking for and why it matters.

This isn’t just a buying guide. This is a proper history — of the hardware, the software library, the cultural moment that created it, and the reason PAL-region PS2 Multitap gaming specifically deserves its own chapter in British gaming heritage. Let’s go back to the beginning.

How We Got Here: The History of Console Multitaps

The concept of plugging more than two controllers into a home console didn’t start with Sony. It didn’t even start with Nintendo. The Atari 2600 supported two joystick ports from its launch in 1977, and Atari’s own four-player adaptors were appearing as early as the early 1980s for titles like Warlords. But the modern multitap — as a discrete, manufacturer-supported peripheral sold alongside specific software — really crystallised in the 16-bit era.

Nintendo released the Super Multitap for the SNES in Japan in 1993, timed to coincide with Super Bomberman. Hudson Soft, who developed that game, had essentially pressured the concept into existence, and Nintendo built the hardware to support it. In Britain, the SNES Multitap arrived in 1994, and while it worked brilliantly with Bomberman, the library of genuinely great four-player SNES titles was thin on the ground. Super Bomberman 2, Micro Machines 2 (via a different adapter built into the cartridge itself), and a handful of sports titles were about the sum of it.

Sega took a different approach. The Mega Drive’s own multitap, the Team Player, arrived in 1994 and required games to specifically support it. FIFA International Soccer, NBA Jam, Micro Machines 2 — again, the library was respectable but hardly vast. What both 16-bit multitaps shared was a fundamental limitation: the hardware struggled visually under the burden of four players simultaneously, and most games responded by shrinking the playfield or reducing frame rates. The promise of four-player gaming was never quite matched by the execution.

The PlayStation 1 multitap changed this somewhat. Sony released the SCPH-1070 in Japan in 1996, with European availability following later that year. The PS1 Multitap was a genuine step forward, supporting up to four controllers and two memory cards per unit, and critically, the PS1 was powerful enough that four-player gaming didn’t feel like a technical compromise. Crash Team Racing, Micro Machines V3, Bomberman World — these were proper games that happened to support four players, not four-player experiences that apologised for themselves. Britain took to it enthusiastically. By the time the PS1 was at the height of its powers in 1998-1999, a multitap felt like an essential purchase alongside the console itself.

The PS2 Multitap: A Different Beast Entirely

When the PlayStation 2 launched in Japan on 4th March 2000 and arrived in Europe on 24th November 2000, Sony made an interesting decision. The PS2 launched without multitap support. Not because the hardware couldn’t handle it — the PS2’s Emotion Engine processor was vastly more capable than anything that had come before — but because the launch library simply didn’t need it. Ridge Racer V, SSX, Tekken Tag Tournament: these were one-or-two player experiences. Four-player gaming wasn’t the priority in November 2000.

The PAL PS2 Multitap — properly designated the SCPH-10090 for the original fat PS2 and later the SCPH-70120 for the slim models — launched in 2001, coinciding with the arrival of software that actually demanded it. Unlike the PS1 version, which used the standard controller ports on the front of the machine, the PS2 Multitap plugged into the rear expansion bay on the fat PS2 models, which created a subtly different aesthetic to the whole setup. You’d have your console, your standard two controllers in the front, and this additional block hanging off the back that added two more ports. Some people found it inelegant. I loved it. It looked like the PS2 meant business.

The slim PS2 models — which arrived in PAL territories from September 2004 onwards — required a slightly different multitap (the SCPH-70120), as the expansion bay had been redesigned. This is a crucial distinction for collectors: the two multitap models are not interchangeable between fat and slim PS2 hardware without adaptors, and the slim-compatible version is considerably harder to find today. Bear that in mind when you’re hunting.

The Technical Reality: What the PS2 Multitap Actually Did

Understanding why the PS2 Multitap enabled such different experiences from its predecessors requires a brief look at what was happening under the bonnet of Sony’s second console.

The PS2’s Emotion Engine ran at 294.912 MHz and included a 128-bit MIPS R5900-based CPU alongside a vector unit capable of 6.2 GFLOPS of performance. The Graphics Synthesizer processed at up to 75 million polygons per second in its top configuration. In plain terms, the PS2 was so far ahead of what the SNES or Mega Drive had managed that the four-player gaming compromises that had plagued the 16-bit era simply didn’t apply in the same way.

When TimeSplitters 2 ran four-player split-screen — which it could do on a single Multitap — the visual quality didn’t collapse. The frame rate held up. Character models retained their definition. Each player’s quarter of the screen was still a proper game, not a muddy approximation. This sounds like a small thing if you weren’t there. Trust me, it wasn’t. Coming from N64 four-player GoldenEye, which was a technical miracle but also ran at what felt like twelve frames per second if you were all in the same room, the PS2 four-player experience was a revelation.

The Multitap itself was a passive hub device — it didn’t process data independently, but simply multiplexed the controller inputs through the PS2’s existing port infrastructure. Games required specific software support to recognise and use all four ports. This meant that not every PS2 game could simply be jammed into four-player mode — the developer had to build that support in deliberately. The list of games that did so is shorter than you’d hope, but the quality within that list is extraordinarily high.

Memory Card Compatibility

One underappreciated feature of the PS2 Multitap: it also included memory card slots. Each controller port on the Multitap had a corresponding memory card slot, meaning a fully equipped setup could support four controllers and four memory cards simultaneously. For games like Buzz!, where multiple players might want to save their own progress, or for sports titles that tracked individual statistics, this was genuinely useful. It’s the kind of thoughtful design detail that Sony hardware teams excelled at during this era and that often goes unmentioned when people discuss the peripheral.

The British PS2 Moment: Why PAL Matters Here

Before I get into the software library, I want to address something that gets glossed over in most retro coverage: the PAL PlayStation 2 experience was not identical to the NTSC experience, and in several important ways it was actually better for the kind of social, multiplayer gaming the Multitap enabled.

Britain’s PS2 market was enormous. Sony sold over 155 million PS2 units worldwide across the console’s lifespan — it remains the best-selling home console of all time — and the PAL territories contributed a substantial portion of that. The UK alone accounted for millions of units. By 2002, the PS2 had achieved a cultural penetration in Britain that I’m not sure any single gaming device has matched before or since. It was in student flats, family living rooms, bedsits, and shared houses. It was the default social gaming machine for an entire generation of British young people.

This matters for the Multitap story because the kind of gaming the peripheral enabled — loud, crowded, chaotic, drink-in-hand multiplayer — was exactly the gaming culture that Britain had developed over the preceding decade. From the days of SNES Bomberman in 1994 to N64 GoldenEye in 1997 to PS1 Crash Team Racing in 1999, British gaming culture had always been oriented around the sofa, around groups of people, around shared screens and shared experiences. The PS2 Multitap arrived into a culture that was perfectly primed for it.

Several titles in the Multitap library were also developed with the British and European market specifically in mind. The Buzz! quiz series — created by Relentless Software in Brighton — was designed from the ground up as a PAL-region product. SingStar, developed by London Studio (Sony’s own London-based development team), was built with European musical tastes at its core. These weren’t American games with European stickers on them. They were genuinely British and European products, reflecting British and European culture, and the Multitap was their delivery mechanism.

The Essential Software Library: Games You Need to Own

This is the heart of it. If the Multitap is the hardware story, the software library is the reason it matters. I’m going to be specific and honest: some of these games are already climbing in price, some are still cheaply available, and a handful are genuinely at risk of disappearing from the accessible market altogether. Buy accordingly.

TimeSplitters 2 (2002) — The Crown Jewel

Free Radical Design’s TimeSplitters 2 is, without any exaggeration, one of the finest multiplayer shooters ever made. Released in October 2002, it was the follow-up to the PS2 launch title TimeSplitters and built on everything that had worked while adding depth, variety, and one of the best four-player modes in console history. The mapmaker alone — which let you construct your own arenas and populate them with AI bots — meant the game had essentially infinite longevity.

With the Multitap, TimeSplitters 2 supported up to four players in split-screen, and the range of game modes was extraordinary: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Bag (their version of Capture the Flag), Virus (one infected player tries to pass it to others), Thief, Gladiator — the list goes on. The visual style, cartoonish but detailed, meant the split-screen quarters never felt cramped. The frame rate, while not locked at a constant sixty, was consistently smooth enough that it never became a competitive disadvantage for any player.

I’ve said it before on this site and I’ll say it again: TimeSplitters 2 is better than GoldenEye as a four-player experience. I know that’s a controversial opinion. I stand by it. GoldenEye was a miracle for 1997, but by 2002 Free Radical had thought harder about what four players actually needed from a shooter, and it shows in every design decision. Currently, a PAL PS2 copy of TimeSplitters 2 in good condition will set you back between £15 and £30, depending on completeness. That’s still reasonable. It won’t stay that way.

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect (2005) — The Overlooked Sequel

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect arrived in March 2005, and while critical opinion at the time slightly preferred it to TS2, the multiplayer mode is — and I’ll be honest here — marginally less brilliant than its predecessor. The solo campaign is better. The characters are funnier. But something about the balance of the multiplayer modes feels slightly off compared to TS2’s near-perfect equilibrium. That said, it absolutely supports the Multitap, and for anyone who’s exhausted TS2’s offerings, it’s an essential purchase. Prices are similar to TS2 — around £12-£25 complete in box.

Buzz! The Big Quiz and Its Sequels (2005–2008)

The Buzz! series deserves a feature article of its own, and someday I’ll write it. For now: Relentless Software’s quiz franchise, published by Sony, was released from 2005 onwards and became one of the best-selling PlayStation franchises in European history. The first game, Buzz! The Big Quiz, launched in November 2005 alongside dedicated buzzer controllers that replaced the DualShock 2 entirely. The Multitap was necessary to use all four buzzers simultaneously.

The genius of Buzz! was democratisation. Unlike TimeSplitters, which required genuine gaming skill, Buzz! could be played by absolutely anyone who owned a television and had ever watched a quiz show. That description applied to virtually every British household. The series sold millions of copies across PAL territories and was, for a period between 2005 and 2008, the definitive British party game. Subsequent entries — Buzz! The Music Quiz, Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz, Buzz! The Sports Quiz — varied in quality but all shared the same essential appeal.

Buzz! sets — console, four buzzers, and game — can still be found at car boot sales and charity shops for next to nothing. The buzzers are proprietary USB devices (they work on PS3 as well), and while the games themselves feel dated in their question sets, the fundamental format remains brilliant. I’d argue that buying a complete Buzz! set for £10 from a charity shop is one of the best value propositions in retro gaming today.

Micro Machines v4 (2006) — The Last of a Great Line

The Micro Machines series had been a cornerstone of British multiplayer gaming since the Mega Drive era, and Micro Machines v4 — released in September 2006 by Codemasters — was the last hurrah for the franchise on home consoles. It supported four players via the Multitap, retained the top-down racing format that had made the series famous, and added enough new track types and vehicle classes to feel genuinely fresh. It is, I’d argue, the best Micro Machines game ever made, and I say that as someone who has extremely fond memories of playing Micro Machines 2 on the Mega Drive with my older brother in 1994.

The game’s critical reception at the time was mixed — reviewers found it familiar and unambitious. They weren’t wrong, exactly. But familiarity in a party game series isn’t a flaw when the foundation is this good. Micro Machines v4 is absurdly cheap today — you can pick up PAL copies for under £5 — and it remains one of the most immediately accessible four-player experiences on the PS2. If you buy nothing else from this list, buy this.

Burnout 3: Takedown (2004) — Competitive Carnage

Burnout 3: Takedown is one of the finest racing games ever made, full stop. Released in September 2004 by Criterion Games (a British studio, it’s worth remembering — based in Guildford), it supported four-player via the Multitap and added a competitive depth to the carnage-focused racing that its predecessor had only hinted at. The core Burnout mechanic — deliberately crashing into opponents to destroy them — became something magnificent when all four players were human. The Road Rage mode, in which the goal was purely to crash other cars, became an almost meditative exercise in aggression management.

Unlike Burnout 2, which had been primarily a solo experience with bolted-on multiplayer, Criterion built Takedown with competition in its DNA. The crash junctions, the boost mechanics, the rubber-banding — everything was calibrated for head-to-head play. In four-player via Multitap, this made for some of the most genuinely exciting gaming sessions the PS2 era produced. PAL copies are currently priced around £5-£12, which is frankly a steal.

SingStar (2004) and Its Sequels

I’m including SingStar here because, while it’s not a Multitap game in the traditional sense — you need the bundled microphones rather than DualShock controllers — it represents the broader ecosystem that the PS2’s social gaming infrastructure created in Britain, and the Multitap was frequently in use during sessions that also involved SingStar. London Studio’s karaoke game launched in PAL territories in May 2004 and was an instant phenomenon. It sold over 25 million units across the entire franchise and was the defining party game for a generation of British twenty-somethings in the mid-2000s.

The reason I mention it here specifically is that the SingStar ecosystem — like Buzz! — created a social gaming infrastructure around the PS2 that normalised having multiple peripherals and accessories connected simultaneously. A full party setup in 2006 might involve the Multitap, two sets of SingStar microphones, and four Buzz! buzzers, all managed through a single PS2. That level of social hardware complexity was genuinely remarkable for the time, and it’s a significant part of why the PS2 era feels so distinctive in retrospect.

Pro Evolution Soccer Series (2001–2008)

I cannot write about the PS2 Multitap without addressing Pro Evolution Soccer. Konami’s football series — known in Japan as Winning Eleven — was the dominant football game in Britain for the better part of a decade, and the Multitap transformed it from a brilliant one-on-one experience into an extraordinary social event. PES 3 through PES 6 were all Multitap-compatible, and the combination-versus modes — where two players shared the attacking duties on one side against two defenders — created tactical conversations and arguments that are still being relitigated in various WhatsApp groups I’m part of.

PES 5, released in October 2005, is widely regarded as the high-water mark of the series, and it remains one of the best representations of football in interactive form ever created. Four-player PES 5 on a Multitap is a specific kind of pleasure — tense, argumentative, hilarious, occasionally devastating — that has never been replicated. The EA Sports domination that followed from roughly 2007 onwards means that the PES series carries a nostalgic weight it perhaps didn’t when it was current. These games are cheap today. PES 5 rarely exceeds £8 in complete condition.

Stolen Gems: Lesser-Known Multitap Titles Worth Chasing

The well-known titles get all the attention. Here are five games that supported the Multitap but rarely appear on any best-of lists, all of which are worth your time and money.

• Amplitude (2003) — Harmonix’s rhythm game, the sequel to Frequency, supported four-player simultaneously and was years ahead of Guitar Hero in understanding what competitive music gaming could be. Currently around £10-£20 in PAL form.
• Jak X: Combat Racing (2005) — Naughty Dog’s racing spin-off from the Jak and Daxter series supported four-player via Multitap and was significantly more fun than its reception suggested. Currently under £10.
• Ghost Hunter (2003) — An underrated action game that supported two-player co-op via Multitap. Not strictly a four-player title but worth mentioning as an example of how the peripheral extended co-op gaming beyond the default two-player model.
• Dynasty Warriors series — From Dynasty Warriors 3 onwards, Koei’s hack-and-slash series supported two-player co-op via Multitap. Not four-player in the traditional sense, but the co-op mode transformed a somewhat repetitive solo experience into something genuinely compelling.
• Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 (2006) — Supported four-player tournament mode via Multitap. For fans of the franchise, four-player versus was absolute chaos in the best possible sense. Currently under £15.

The Cultural Legacy: Why This Era Matters Beyond Nostalgia

I want to make an argument that goes beyond “these games were fun.” The PS2 Multitap era — roughly 2001 to 2008 in British gaming culture — represented the last period in which local multiplayer gaming was the default assumption for social play. It was the end of something, even as it felt like a beginning.

Xbox Live launched in Britain in March 2003. PlayStation Network, in a more developed form, arrived with the PS3 in 2007. These services were transformative, obviously. But the transition to online multiplayer that they enabled came at a cost that we didn’t fully appreciate at the time: it dispersed players from the same room to separate rooms, separate houses, separate cities. The conversation, the eye contact, the physical presence of three other people on your sofa — all of that evaporated.

The PS2 Multitap was the last hardware expression of the gathered-together philosophy. It was designed on the assumption that you and your friends would be in the same room, sharing the same screen, arguing about the same match. That philosophy had roots going back to the earliest days of home gaming, but the PS2 Multitap articulated it with more sophistication and more powerful hardware than any previous version had managed.

There’s a reason that TimeSplitters 2 four-player sessions feel more fondly remembered by people who were there than most online gaming experiences from the same period. The memories are richer because the experiences were more embodied. You remember who was in the room. You remember what you were drinking. You remember the specific argument about whether Cortez or Ninja was the better character. Those memories don’t form in the same way when you’re staring at a headset and a gamertag on a monitor.

Modern gaming has partially understood this — the success of Nintendo Switch local multiplayer, the revival of party games on current hardware — but it has never quite recaptured what the PS2 Multitap era offered, which was four-player local gaming at the absolute peak of technical capability before online multiplayer redirected the industry’s creative energy elsewhere.

The Collector’s Perspective: What to Buy and What to Spend

Let me be direct with you about where the market currently sits, because this is changing and you need up-to-date information rather than vague optimism.

The Multitap Itself

The fat PS2 Multitap (SCPH-10090) is, right now, still relatively accessible. Expect to pay between £15 and £35 for a complete unit in working condition. The Sony-branded originals are preferable to third-party alternatives — not because the performance is necessarily better, but because the build quality is more reliable and the connector wear is less pronounced on original hardware. Third-party multitaps exist (Interact, Mad Catz, and others produced them) and some are functional, but I’ve encountered enough dead third-party units that I’d always advise spending the extra few pounds on an official Sony version.

The slim PS2 Multitap (SCPH-70120) is considerably rarer. Expect to pay £30-£60 for a complete, working unit, and be prepared to wait. It appears less frequently on eBay UK and virtually never in charity shops or car boot sales. If you own a slim PS2 and want to run a Multitap, budget accordingly and be patient.

When buying either version, test before you commit if at all possible. The connector pins are small and bend easily. Look for any signs of physical damage to the port connection. A unit that half-works — detecting three controllers but not the fourth, for example — is almost always a connector issue that’s either a tricky repair or effectively irreparable for the casual collector.

Games: Price Trajectories to Watch

The PS2 software market has been in a slow but definite upward trajectory since approximately 2019. The pandemic accelerated this, as retro gaming interest surged across the board. Here’s my honest assessment of where specific Multitap titles sit and where I expect them to go:

• TimeSplitters 2: Currently £15-£30 complete. Will be £40-£60 within three years. Buy now.
• TimeSplitters: Future Perfect: Currently £12-£25 complete. Similar trajectory. Buy now.
• Buzz! The Big Quiz (complete set with buzzers): Still £5-£15 at charity shops and car boots. The bulky nature of buzzer sets keeps prices depressed, but this won’t last as the format becomes nostalgia-focused. Buy anytime.
• Micro Machines v4: Currently under £5. Wildly undervalued. The Codemasters back catalogue is beginning to attract collector attention. Buy immediately.
• Burnout 3: Takedown: Currently £5-£12. The Criterion Games reputation is growing among collectors. Will drift upward.
• Amplitude: Currently £10-£20. Will climb as Harmonix’s legacy is reassessed in the wake of Guitar Hero nostalgia. Buy soon.
• PES 5: Currently under £8. Will likely remain cheap due to the sheer volume of copies printed, but represents exceptional value.

Complete-in-Box vs. Disc-Only

For most PS2 games, a disc-only copy provides the identical gaming experience to a complete-in-box version. The difference is entirely aesthetic and financial. For the Multitap games listed here, I’d suggest a pragmatic approach: buy disc-only for titles you intend to play regularly (they’ll take physical wear), and prioritise complete-in-box copies for anything you’re acquiring partly as a collectible. The manual for TimeSplitters 2, for example, is a lovely artefact in itself — it lists all the characters with their stats and has that early-2000s graphic design energy that I find genuinely charming.

One specific note: several Buzz! game releases came in oversized boxes to accommodate the buzzer controllers. These boxes are fragile and frequently split at the corners. A complete, intact Buzz! box set is considerably rarer than a disc-only copy and commands a significant premium if you find one in excellent condition.

Playing These Games Today: Practical Considerations

Owning the hardware and software is one thing. Actually getting it all running properly in 2024 and beyond involves a few practical considerations that are worth addressing honestly.

Display Compatibility

The PAL PS2 outputs natively at 576i (Standard Definition). If you’re connecting it to a modern flat-panel television, you’ll encounter the usual retro SD challenges: input lag, upscaling artefacts, and occasionally colour issues. The good news is that the PS2 supports component video output (via the Multi AV port on the rear), and a PS2 connected via component to a television with a good upscaler — I use an OSSC with mine — produces a genuinely excellent image on a modern screen. RGB SCART into a RetroTINK 2X is another strong option and more accessible for newcomers to the upscaling world.

For multiplayer gaming specifically, input lag matters less than it would for a precise platformer or fighting game. Split-screen shooters and quiz games are relatively forgiving of a few frames of lag. But if you’re playing Burnout 3 competitively, you’ll notice and care about it. Invest in at least a basic upscaler if you’re serious about getting the most from this hardware.

The FreeMCBoot and OPL Route

Many PS2 enthusiasts today run games via Open PS2 Loader (OPL) on a FreeMCBoot memory card, loading titles either from a USB drive or a network-attached storage device. This is legal if you own the original discs and are loading backups of your own games. I’m not here to morally adjudicate that — it’s a nuanced area and reasonable people disagree.

What I will say is that for Multitap gaming specifically, OPL compatibility is generally excellent. The Multitap functions identically whether you’re booting from disc or via OPL. The main practical consideration is that some games require specific version patches when loaded via OPL to recognise the Multitap correctly. The PS2 modding community has documented these requirements exhaustively, and resources like the PS2 OPL Compatibility List (maintained at psx-place.com) are invaluable guides.

If you’re building a dedicated retro gaming setup and want to play the full Multitap library without hunting for forty individual discs, the FreeMCBoot route is genuinely practical. It doesn’t diminish the physical collection — I still have my original discs, and there’s something that a ripped ISO file simply cannot replicate about sliding TimeSplitters 2 into the tray — but it’s worth knowing the option exists.

Controller Options

Four DualShock 2 controllers is the ideal setup, obviously. But genuine Sony DualShock 2s in good condition are increasingly hard to find cheaply — expect to pay £15-£25 each for originals in solid working order — and the alternative is third-party pads that vary enormously in quality. I’ve used 8BitDo’s wireless adaptor with a PS4 DualShock 4, which works reasonably well but introduces a small amount of wireless latency. For casual multiplayer gaming this is imperceptible. For anything competitive, stick with wired controllers.

One controller note that applies specifically to Multitap setups: the cable length on standard DualShock 2s (approximately 2.4 metres) is occasionally awkward when all four ports are in use and players are spread across a sofa. Third-party extension cables exist and are generally fine for this purpose. Just avoid the very cheapest versions, which can introduce signal degradation that manifests as occasional missed inputs — exactly what you don’t want during a crucial Burnout 3 takedown.

What the Emulation Scene Gets Right (and Wrong)

PCSX2, the PlayStation 2 emulator, has reached a point of maturity that means virtually the entire PS2 library is playable on a modern PC with excellent visual fidelity. You can upscale to 4K, apply widescreen patches, boost texture resolution, and eliminate the original hardware’s occasional frame-rate inconsistencies. In many respects, PCSX2 in 2024 provides a technically superior version of most PS2 games.

For Multitap gaming specifically, PCSX2 supports the Multitap in software, and you can connect multiple USB controllers to a PC and configure them to replicate the four-controller setup perfectly. The compatibility is generally excellent across the Multitap library.

And yet. I’ve sat at a PC running TimeSplitters 2 at 1080p with enhanced textures and four USB controllers plugged in, and it’s not the same. It’s technically superior in almost every measurable way and emotionally inferior in ways I find difficult to fully articulate. Some of it is the muscle memory associated with a DualShock 2. Some of it is the slightly different feel of inputs on a USB pad versus original hardware. Some of it is simply that the experience of gathering four people around a television to play PS2 games is intrinsically tied to the television, the PS2, the slightly scratchy disc reader noise, the memory card save jingle. Emulation gives you the content without the context, and for some games — particularly the social, party-oriented games in the Multitap library — the context is part of what you’re preserving.

I’m not telling you not to emulate. PCSX2 is remarkable and I use it regularly for games I don’t own physically. But as a reason to not build a physical Multitap setup, emulation falls short. The real thing matters here.

The Games That Were Never Made: Missed Opportunities

A shadow hangs over the PS2 Multitap library that I’ve never seen properly addressed: the games that should have existed but didn’t. The Multitap’s potential was never fully realised, partly because of the gaming industry’s rapid pivot toward online multiplayer from 2003 onwards, and partly because of a specific development economics problem that affected local multiplayer titles disproportionately.

Consider: a game that supports online multiplayer can sell to players across the world who never share a physical space. Its network effect is essentially unlimited. A game that requires four players in the same room, with a specific peripheral that a significant percentage of PS2 owners didn’t have, has a fundamentally smaller potential audience. Developers and publishers understood this arithmetic, and it shaped commissioning decisions throughout the PS2 era.

Games that would have been extraordinary as Multitap experiences but weren’t developed that way include Black (Criterion’s stunning 2006 FPS, which is a two-player split-screen game that would have been phenomenal with four), Killzone (which had online multiplayer via DNAS but never implemented local four-player), and the entire Ratchet and Clank series, which remains stubbornly single-player throughout its PS2 run despite clearly having the creative energy for competitive modes.

The GTA series represents the biggest missed opportunity. GTA: San Andreas launched in October 2004 and had a two-player co-op mode hidden within it, but never extended to four-player via Multitap. Given the open-world chaos that two players could already create together, a four-player version would have been extraordinary. Rockstar North, based in Edinburgh, had the technical capability. The decision not to implement Multitap support was almost certainly commercial rather than technical.

Preserving the Memory: Why You Should Care Right Now

There’s a specific urgency to the PAL PS2 Multitap story that I don’t feel with most retro collecting topics. The hardware is deteriorating. Laser units in fat PS2 consoles are failing at an increasing rate — the PS2 uses a relatively fragile KHS-400C or KHS-400R optical assembly depending on the revision, and replacement units are available but increasingly expensive. The discs themselves are subject to disc rot, particularly the cheaper-pressing PAL editions that used less durable dye formulations. And the cultural memory of this specific era of gaming is thinning as the generation who lived it moves into middle age.

The games in this library are not being preserved institutionally. There is no major museum acquisition programme for PS2 software. The British Library’s gaming collection is commendable but inevitably incomplete. The Internet Archive’s PS2 section is legally contested. Physical copies are the primary preservation vector for this material, and physical copies are finite.

I don’t want to be melodramatic about this. We’re not talking about lost masterpieces that exist only in the memories of those who played them. The games exist. But “existing somewhere” and “being accessible and affordable to someone who wants to experience them” are different things, and the gap between those two states is widening every year for PS2 Multitap titles specifically.

The reason is simple: these are games that were designed for a social context — for four people in a room — and that social context is becoming increasingly rare as the gaming population that grew up with it ages and changes. When someone clears out a loft and finds a box of PS2 games, they’re more likely to sell the individual high-value titles (Shadow of the Colossus, Silent Hill 2, Kingdom Hearts) and bin the rest. A copy of Micro Machines v4 or Amplitude in a charity shop bin bag is not going to attract the same attention as ICO. But it should. It absolutely should.

My Verdict: The Case for Building a Multitap Setup Today

I run a dedicated PS2 Multitap setup in my study. Fat PS2 (SCPH-50003, a particularly reliable European revision), original Sony Multitap (SCPH-10090), four genuine DualShock 2 controllers in various states of joystick wear, and a library of about thirty Multitap-compatible games sorted in a drawer by type: shooters, racers, party games, sports. It took me about six months to assemble and cost me, total, somewhere around £120. That includes a component cable, an OSSC upscaler, and a full Buzz! set with buzzers. It is one of the best £120 I have ever spent on gaming hardware.

Every time a group of people comes to my house and that setup gets switched on, something happens that doesn’t happen when we play modern games together. The conversation changes. The physical energy in the room changes. People who don’t consider themselves gamers pick up a controller or a buzzer and are immediately in the game. This is what the PS2 Multitap was designed to create, and it still creates it, twenty-odd years later, without any of the friction that modern multiplayer gaming involves. No accounts, no updates, no online subscriptions, no loading screens that take longer than the actual game. You press the button, the disc spins, and four people are playing together.

I started this article with a memory of Christmas 2001, sitting on a floor in Wolverhampton with three friends and a copy of TimeSplitters 2. I can still feel the texture of that carpet. I can still hear the specific sound of a player getting sniped and swearing. I can still remember the strange, sacred quality of those hours. The PS2 Multitap made that memory possible. It’s a peripheral that deserves to be remembered, collected, and — most importantly — used.

Don’t wait for the prices to climb before you start paying attention. The time is now. The hardware is still out there. The games are still findable. The memory is still makeable.

Buy the Multitap. Call some friends. Put the game on.