You could play multiplayer Tetris that way. I think I saw it once in my life.
I played multiplayer Tetris frequently.
When you get lines, your opponent’s stack pushes a line with a gap up from below, except when you get a Tetris, which pushes four lines (with the gap aligned, so you could Tetris back and forth).
You had an indicator for the max height of your opponent’s stack next to yours.
Great game.
There‘s also an excellent Gameboy Color romhack of Dr Mario that supports multiplayer. Recently tried that out with my girlfriend and it was a lot of fun.
Edit: this is it for anyone interested. Looks like even the original version for the Gameboy supports multiplayer.
Wasn’t there a way to link with the IR blasters on the GBCs too? I never tried it but I’ve heard it was possible
I remember it for Pokemon, but also for those Zelda games that were a pair - Oracle of Ages/Seasons? But I don’t think it let you do much, just continue a game save when you finished one of the two games.
Four Swords came with Link to the Past too. Never played it, but it’s exclusively multiplayer, as far as I know
Four Swords is the most competitive co-op game I have ever played. It’s brutally fun, but you’re going to want to punch your friends in the throat after about 30 minutes.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/06/11/the-gang#
This comic is an accurate description of the experience.
The Oracle games didn’t actually use the link cable, they had a password system.
It had both! You could use either a link cable or a password to continue your game in the opposite title, and to bring over the rings you had from the original save. At the jeweler’s shop, the red snake was for password transfers and the blue snake was for link cable transfers!
Were there other uses? Yes.
Were they common? Well, just look at the GameBoy pocket. At the time it was designed (it released 7 years after the original GameBoy) there were a lot of people at Nintendo who wanted to get rid of the port entirely because it was barely ever used. They ended up compromising by using a different, smaller, cheaper port that needed an adapter to work with the regular ones.
Which was kind of a pain for some people because the GB Pocket and Pokemon both came out in Japan in 1996 lol.
I think there was a Bomberman game on the GBA that used the link cable for multiplayer too that I remember playing
