The original Spyro the Dragon now has two player split-screen

Nearly 28 years after Spyro the Dragon landed on the original PlayStation, someone has given the purple dragon something his first adventure never had: a second player. A new Spyro 1 co-op mod adds two-player split-screen to the 1998 platformer, letting two Spyros run, jump, charge and glide around the same levels at the same time. This isn’t based on the Spyro Reignited Trilogy or a modern PC remake. It’s running through the original PlayStation game. And yes, both players get their own camera.

Two Spyros, one level

The basic idea is straightforward. Two players enter the same Spyro the Dragon level and control their characters independently. Player two can drop in or leave during play, so you don’t have to restart the game whenever somebody joins. The mod also supports horizontal and vertical split-screen layouts, along with 4:3 and 16:9 display options. That’s useful because the original game was obviously never designed around splitting its picture between two people.

Each Spyro has an independent camera, rather than forcing both characters to stay inside a single view. That matters quite a bit in Spyro, where levels regularly send you around corners, onto raised platforms and across gaps that need a well-timed glide.

Two players don’t have to stick together either. They can head towards different areas of a stage and deal with different parts of the level at once. Sparx is along for the ride too. The dragonfly serves as Spyro’s health indicator in the original game, and the multiplayer setup accounts for him as part of each player’s status.

Enemies have had to learn about player two

Putting another Spyro on screen is only part of the problem. The original game’s enemies, objects and other systems were written with the assumption that exactly one player character existed. Add another one and suddenly the game needs to decide which Spyro an enemy should chase or attack.

The mod handles this by letting relevant objects react to whichever player is closest. It’s a small detail on paper, but it’s one of the changes needed to make the whole thing behave like actual co-op rather than simply displaying a second character. Lives are shared between the two players. Respawning isn’t.

If one Spyro gets taken out, the other player can keep going while the defeated player respawns independently. That keeps both people involved without completely rewriting Spyro’s existing lives system.

The current version isn’t completely free of problems. Some camera behaviour can still cause issues, while flight stages have problems with pitch control. Four-player support is also planned, but right now this is a two-player mod.

Spyro was very much a single-player game

The original Spyro the Dragon arrived on PlayStation in 1998, developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It introduced Spyro as a small purple dragon tasked with dealing with Gnasty Gnorc, who has trapped the dragons of the Dragon Kingdom in crystal and turned their treasure into enemies. The setup quickly leads into the structure that defined the early Spyro games.

You move between Dragon Homeworlds, enter stages through portals, rescue trapped dragons and collect gems scattered around the environments. There are also stolen dragon eggs to recover, along with enemies to charge or burn depending on what you’re fighting.

Spyro’s moves are simple but give the game plenty of room for exploration. He can charge across the ground, breathe fire, jump and glide. That glide is particularly important.

Levels often hide gems, dragons and other objectives on platforms that aren’t immediately obvious from the main route. Reaching them can mean climbing to higher ground, lining up a jump and gliding across a large part of the stage. It’s easy to see why adding another independent player creates complications.

Co-op changes how the old levels work

Spyro’s stages weren’t built as straight corridors, and that’s where the co-op setup gets interesting. Two players can move in different directions. One might head after enemies and dragons while the other checks side areas for missing gems. You’re still playing the same campaign with the same objectives, but you don’t necessarily have to tackle each part together.

The mod doesn’t add a separate co-op campaign or rebuild the game’s stages around multiplayer. It’s still Spyro the Dragon. The difference is that there are now two of you running around inside it.

It runs on the original US PlayStation version

The co-op modification targets the US NTSC version of Spyro the Dragon. Players apply the patch to the appropriate game image, after which the modified version can run through compatible PlayStation emulation with two controllers configured. Suitable original hardware capable of running modified software is another option.

That also makes this quite different from multiplayer projects built around Spyro Reignited Trilogy. This is the 1998 PlayStation game being changed at a much lower level, complete with the limitations that come with getting a second player working inside software designed for one.

There are still rough edges, particularly around cameras and flight controls, and four-player support hasn’t arrived yet. But the important part already works. Spyro the Dragon can now be played by two people on the same screen. For a PlayStation platformer that spent almost three decades assuming player two didn’t exist, that’s quite a change.

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