Welcome back to  Co-op Classics, the column in which we look at unique cooperative games from yesteryear....

The June E3 season came and went without Arcade1Up making any big home arcade cabinet announcements. Arcade1Up kicked offer July with a bang, though, first launching its long-promised Dragon's Lair cabinet, and now announcing three new machines. Today, two new Capcom Legacy cabinets have gone up for preorder that feature Captain Commando and plenty more co-op arcade classics, and a third cabinet features Ms. Pac-Man and other Namco titles.

Beat 'em ups have always been perfect games for co-op play. It all started with the 1987 arcade release of Double Dragon, a game that popularized co-op in a big way. Technos would go on to release The Combatribes, another quality beat 'em up that never made it quite as big as its forebear. Fast-forwarding to today, the iiRcade version of The Combatribes now supports 2-player online co-op! iiRcade is a home arcade platform for which users can buy individual games, a growing number of which feature online multiplayer.

We're coming to the close of September, which means Fall is officially kicking off. Next month is the appropriate time to start putting up Halloween decorations AND NOT THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST, CONVENIENCE STORES!!! Anyways, there are a handful of co-op title releases this week, like Cuphead and Total War: WARHAMMER 2, as well as the arrival of the SNES Classic and the final DLC for Nioh.

Following up on the popular, though limited, NES Classic this past holiday season, Nintendo announced yesterday that they are releasing an SNES Classic this September. The good news is that they're making more of them this go around, the bad news is it'll probably only be for this calendar year.

There are defining moments in any co-op player's life and one of those for this humble writer is the awesome Super Nintendo game Secret of Mana.  Imagine taking the best Final Fantasy games from the 16 bit era, splicing in a good amount of A Link to the Past and then adding 3 player co-op!  Now Nintendo Switch players can relive my joy, but so far only those from Japan.

Beat-'em-ups ruled arcades in the early '90s, and unfortunately, the 16-bit Super NES was incapable of bringing the arcade experience home at launch. Capcom's Final Fight hit the SNES in 1991 with a large chunk of its arcade content removed, and worst of all, it lost its two-player co-op mode - a key feature that drove the genre's rising popularity.

On August 23, 1991, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was released in North America. Today, we celebrate two full decades of this great system by taking a look at the top Super Nintendo co-op games.

A few years ago, a neighbor offered my wife a Super Nintendo with five games, all for $25, before it went into their garage sale. My wife nabbed it, and I was a happy classic gamer that entire day. One of the games in that lot, Donkey Kong Country, was easily worth that price by itself.