He didn’t start a new match.

Silence. The PC fans whirred. In the background, the faint sound of Leo’s dad watching cable news upstairs filtered through the floorboards.

Unlike its Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 counterparts, the PC version of Black Ops II launched in 2012 without split-screen capability. The prevailing theory was that the PC architecture relied on Steam integration for matchmaking, and the developers opted not to build a local user profile system necessary for couch co-op. For years, the only way to play locally was via complex third-party tools or by playing the inferior Xbox 360 version via emulation.