Secret of Mana · Super Nintendo Entertainment System · 1993 · 3 players · Simultaneous
Square's Secret of Mana (1993) supported up to three simultaneous players through the SNES Multitap adapter, making it the first action RPG to allow a full party to be controlled by human players playing together in real time.
Secret of Mana was developed by Square under director Koichi Ishii and was originally planned as a launch title for the SNES-CD peripheral that Nintendo and Sony were developing. When that collaboration collapsed, the game was redesigned for the standard SNES cartridge with a compressed scope, but the three-player simultaneous mode survived the transition. Using the Super Multitap adapter, three players could each control one of the game's three party members — Randi, Primm, and Popoi — simultaneously in real time. The three-player design required significant AI accommodation: when fewer than three humans were playing, the uncontrolled characters were managed by the game's AI, which players could tune through a ring menu system to make each AI companion more or less aggressive, more or less likely to use magic, and so forth. This hybrid human-AI party system was unlike anything in contemporary RPGs. The real-time combat, in which each character's attack power recharged on a visible gauge and swings delivered at less than full charge produced reduced damage, rewarded patience and coordination but remained accessible to players unfamiliar with action game timing. The game's music, composed by Hiroki Kikuta, is among the most acclaimed SNES soundtracks. The three-player mode added a social layer to the emotional experience of the narrative — players encountered story beats and character deaths together, invested in a shared fictional world in a way that single-player RPGs could not replicate. The cooperative design of Secret of Mana influenced every subsequent action RPG with multiplayer components and demonstrated that the JRPG's narrative ambitions and multiplayer social dynamics were compatible.
The SNES Multitap adapter allowed up to five controllers, but Secret of Mana used only three ports — one per party member. The decision to match controller slots to party slots rather than splitting party control among more players was deliberate: each human player had full ownership of a character and their decisions, creating individual accountability within the cooperative group.
The three-player format changed the social texture of RPG engagement. Players experiencing story cutscenes together reacted to narrative events collectively — the death of a party member was a shared loss, and triumphant boss victories were jointly experienced in real time. This communal story engagement, impossible in conventional single-player JRPGs, produced a different emotional investment from the solo experience and anticipated the social dynamics of later online RPGs by a decade.
Secret of Mana's three-player action RPG template had few immediate successors. The hardware demands and design complexity of supporting three simultaneous players in a real-time RPG were significant, and most developers chose the easier path of single-player RPGs with AI companions. Seiken Densetsu 3 (1995), Secret of Mana's Japan-only sequel, extended the formula to three-player with a more complex character system but remained unavailable in the West until its 2019 Collection of Mana release.
The design principle — a JRPG party controlled collectively by human players in real time — eventually found its fullest expression in online RPGs and action co-op titles, where it became the genre's central mechanic. Secret of Mana demonstrated that it was viable on 16-bit hardware decades before the infrastructure to deliver it at scale existed.