It's called the Four Score.  You could play 4 player Super Off-Road, some sports games, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, a 4-player co-op 2-D platformer based on the 3rd movie, The Dream Warriors.  It's really hard, but I love it.

Wait, how many other four player platformers are there Rubang, in the whole history of gaming? I'm actually interested, because it's not something I can remember playing.

Was there really a four player platformer on the NES, or was it more like a golden axe type of game? (It's a side-scroller but you attack things, have hit points, etc.) I don't see how they could do a four player platformer, where you're basically jumping and racing through levels, with four people on the screen back in the NES days -- four is exponentially so much more hectic, it seems like too much to fit on an old screen.

Of course my NES memory is a little hazy, since I was like five back then. Not everyone has a twenty year gaming memory, you know :)

There were plenty of multiplayer 2D platform games since the SNES.

Obviously sonic 2 and many other great games came up with creative ways of doing two player platformers over the years.

But, as I said above, four player games?

Oh wow. That's awesome.

So I checked out the Nightmare On Elm Street game, because I was skeptical that it was a platformer. I found this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqlBi3Vt53k&feature=related

And I've got to admit:  That is a platformer.  It's also got some beat-em-up in there, but man...  that's a lot of jumping :)

The funny thing is, that game reminds me of playing LBP too.  It looks insanely fun.  I'm going to have find a NES now.  How did people not make another four player platformer for the next twenty years?  (Or did they?)

How many four player platformers are there?  Short answer: not enough!

Let me see....

Cloning Clyde for XBox Live Arcade, 2006.  It has co-op and versus modes.  One of them goes up to 8 players, but I'm not sure which.  I'm assuming it's 4 player co-op or 8 player versus, but I can't find out anywhere.  The videos on YouTube seem to be people speedrunning puzzles by themselves.

I sorted this list ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperative_video_games ) by genre and by number of players, and it only listed 2 platformers as having 4 player co-op, but they were Cloning Clyde and LittleBigPlanet.  With A Nightmare on Elm Street that's 3 so far.  Man there's gotta be more!  I refuse to believe that New SMB Wii is going to be the 4th 4 player co-op platformer ever made.  Now I want to try Cloning Clyde too.

If LBP was truly the 3rd one and New SMB Wii is truly the 4th, I really hope those 2 games start a renaissance of the genre or something.

And hey, I was 5 back then too!  I was born in 1983.  I really am just that nerdy.  I got most of my NES collection within the last 10 years, at thrift stores, used game stores, eBay, and the swap meet at the awesome Classic Gaming Expo.  I'm just such a nerd that I ended up with hundreds of NES games and tons of peripherals and I enjoy reading tons and tons about the NES and became a sort of NES historian.  In fact, in a community college speech class I actually gave a speech about the history of unlicensed NES games from Tengen to Wisdom Tree.  That was probably my nerdiest day ever.

The 4-score was a relative flop and not a lot of games used it. I loved the thing, since I had 2 brothers. We used to play Ivan "Ironman" Stewarts Off-Road Racing, Superspike V-Ball, M.U.L.E., Gauntlet II and a few other games, but the four I named were the only ones we owned.

The SNES also only had 2 ports but also had a Super Multitap that originally came with bomberman. The Super Multitap got ~50 games for it, but mostly sports games. Again, I loved using it, but not a lot of games took advantage of it.

N64 was the first console to have 4 ports built right in (in my lifetime anyways, as the Bally Astrocade had 4 ports but wasn't sold while I was alive) but due to having lost so much momentum in the industry not a lot of developers were taking advantage of the 4 player capability. While more 4-player games were released on N64 I don't know of any 4-player platformers.

Sony went with only 2 ports, and did have a multitap, but both the PS1 and PS2 suffered the same fate as NES/SNES in having very few non-sports games that actually sported them. Or at least they were hard to find, as we bought a multitap for my cousins and ended up choosing between two non-sports games and 1 sports game for them.

Part of the reason I have always been a huge fan of Nintendo is because they supported 4 players, and we would have friends over and only 2 people at a time is lame when you want to have fun playing video games.

Mario's was multiplayer on the NES and if you look at recently, Brawl has a 2 player synchroneous platformer as the story mode....
oh and the kicking each other's butt part... they invented a genre with it... kart racing.

I think that it looks like Sony, Sega, and many others liked Nintendo's idea and tried put their spin on it.

Nintendo's idea is Mario in case you didn't know. 

That's what I think.