Actually, in the era you specify, pretty much anything in the action/arcade genre (not text adventures, of course) ought to qualify. Gaming was an afterthought in the original IBM PC design, but the bus supporting analog control had professional application (CAD) which happened to put it a step above the digital joystick controls of contemporary 8-bit systems. Since the basic gameport required no drivers all that was needed was for the game to program support, especially before mice (with their proprietary buses) became widespread since prior to then the gameport was the ONLY bus offering analog control as this was still the time before console control pads changed the fact of joysticks & gaming (on any platform) going together like bread & butter.

BaronSFel001 wrote on 2026-02-18, 16:54:

Actually, in the era you specify, pretty much anything in the action/arcade genre (not text adventures, of course) ought to qualify.

Yeah, I found some examples of games that support 1 joystick. I think 2 player back then was typically one person on keyboard, and the other on Joystick? I haven't found much that uses two joysticks. Games that I believe support 2 joysticks are (haven't tied them yet):

1. Archon
2. One-on-One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird.

Pretty much anything multiplayer. To narrow down a starting point, you could research the oldest example of a gameport splitter. While the configuration changed a bit the operational design was always 4-axis 4-button; it was only later multiport cards that flubbed into a "half-gameport."

BaronSFel001 wrote on 2026-02-18, 18:53:

Pretty much anything multiplayer. To narrow down a starting point, you could research the oldest example of a gameport splitter. While the configuration changed a bit the operational design was always 4-axis 4-button; it was only later multiport cards that flubbed into a "half-gameport."

From what I can find it seems that the IBM gameport card was available in 1981, but wasn't that popular. The gameport splitter came out somewhere around 1983-1984.