Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party | Hacker News Reader

Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

arstechnica.com

301 pointspseudolus166 comments

Sophomore year in college (‘97) was the height of LAN parties for me. Our dorm building wasn’t wired for internet yet so about 12 of us got together and took it upon ourselves to create our own network. We cajoled the NetOps dept at UCSD to give us old repeaters and bought a ton of BNC wire to connect everyone. Of course the facilities dept didn’t like rogue wiring running all over the massive dorm complex so they would cut down the wires, which started a months long escalating battle of more cleverly concealing them. Eventually we found the paint company the school used, ordered the same color/finish, masterfully camouflaged any exposed wires, and the network never went down again.

So many nights of Diablo, Quake, Red Alert, Doom and the genuine excitement across the network when connecting a new dorm apartment are memories seared into my brain.

Just think how many health and safety forms that a college facilities team would have to go through to cut a mystery (possibly live) cable these days.

Isn't that what those AC-detecting pens are for?

If only those pens could remove the bureaucracy.

Of course Facilities would remove foreign cabling that crosses firewalls or floors, this is how fire gets across building compartments. It's more baffling that they didn't reach out to the hackers and help them lay cable that conforms to code. Sometimes you run into EH&S types who prefer to "enforce" standards instead of "uphold" them, and that should be a red flag and a signal to run into the other direction. (Ask how I know.)

In uni we were unhappy with the 10Mbps wiring that was in the engineering lab building and took it upon ourselves to replace it with cat5, which was what was current at the time.

We did the job over a weekend, informed IT the following Wednesday, they said "thanks but no thanks", then we clarified that it had already been done and was already running. Never got an answer but they left it alone.

We also replaced our wifi access points with the ones from the law library when they got the nicer ones, but that was entirely covert :)

Precisely my experience with Uni dorms as well, with the only exception that our dorm headmasters not only supported us, but they joined in the ad-hoc LAN as well. The massive sharing of files was a godsend. And this was all over the entire students complex, spanning like dozens of streets that formed it.

In 2004 every dorm at my college was wired and we could play in our own rooms. They blocked the outside but we would have massive Halo brawls all day. I still remember hating a couple players and meeting them in person later, oh you were that guy!

My university had adopted a no-wifi policy for about a decade, based on flawed research on safety of wireless communications by the individual who was the university president at the time. Fortunately, the whole university benefited from being wired with 100 and 1000 MBit anywhere you went.

There was a lot of Civ games played with my group.

It was the late 90s, and I remember going to a LAN party in a guy's garage where we all played various games, swapped pirated software, and second most importantly of all, an absolutely terrible VCD pirated copy of the theatrical release of the Matrix that somebody copied off of a PC that came into the repair store they worked at.

One guy realized we could hook the whole ensemble up to a dial-up ISP connection and he could share his connection out to all of us with network gear and we suddenly could access the internet...sorta...very slow and highly unreliable.

When we finally got it sort of working, a few of us all joined demoscene and gaming IRC channels and tried to sorta build a "meta" LAN party across the globe with everybody at their own local party all coordinated and joked around in the shared chat.

We'd send somebody off every few hours for a pizza run, and it being autumn, got pretty chilly by around 2-3am. Lots of caffeine, soda, coffee, and most importantly community and fun.

Days like those, where we were connecting to each other on the very edges of technology may never really come again sadly.

Thrown together LANs were the best! I remember one we had at an old (cleaned up) barn, it was during the winter, pretty cold, so someone had the bright idea of using an industrial direct fired gas heater/blower thing in there, we sure got cooking :D luckily, place was also so drafty that we didn't suffocate :D

I just put together a new Ryzen system last night, which replaces a core i5-750 from 2009, (which will probably remain in service in some sort of server role). As soon as I got that bad boy running, I jumped through a few hoops to get Diablo 1 fired up to really run it through its paces.

Nice were you in Revelle?

Gaming companies contributed to the death of LAN parties too. They killed the "split-screen" gameplay that would support 2-4 players on the same machine. They wanted each player to require their own copy of the game. They killed LAN support, forcing you to play on their servers. Culturally we saw a shift towards social isolation. People are more comfortable talking over a mic.

Split screen was never a part of lan parties. The reason why lan parties stopped was because it was hard to move a tower around.

Even during that period it was much easier to go to a lanshop and play there either as in lan or on the proto cloud servers they had.

Many fond memories of early battle.net and much fewer of steam.

Agree with your 1st statement, I dont think split screen had anything to do with LAN parties. There was no network with split screen.

However I don't think LAN died because of tower size. Maybe towers got a tad bigger at some point, but monitors got way thinner. I've done a few LAN parties on laptop even. I think they just died because it was easier to play over global network, and subsequently LAN mode disappear from games.

One of the greatest gaming experiences of my life is when I and my three younger brothers hooked up two original Xboxes with a network crossover cable and played the original Halo 2v2 split screen in separate rooms.

Split screen LAN may not have been the norm but it is fantastic.

We had four on a projector in a room, and then another couple down the corridor on a TV. Glorious. Lots of yelling between rooms.

After each game, the stats screen would motivate all sorts of trash talking. 20 years later, we still talk about the time someone called out at the friend with the lowest shots fired count: "You know the bullets don't cost anything, right?"

I can never understand why modern CoD lacks so many great post-game stats they could otherwise be showing.

Apparently the new COD doesn’t even have a career stats page.

Halo Infinite greatly reduced post game stats too.

The Internet killed the LAN party

In addition to the argument that "I can just play online with my friends", I'd also add that many games started to require internet in order to play. Around that same time, many host venues did not have enough bandwidth to support everyone playing online reliably at once.

I (roughly) hear it on the tune of "video killed the radio stars".

Yes I'm old.

mp3 killed the video star https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPHLSC635CM

> The reason why lan parties stopped was because it was hard to move a tower around.

No, no. The effort played itself. As OP said, it was a cultural change with companies piggy-backing on it. Split screen is not a major reason, no, I don't think so. But luggaging towers? That's not the reason.

Until you dropped your screen on the drive way into your friends house and heard the magic sound a CRT makes when it implodes.

And now you have a story/memory that the new generation doesn't. Working for something arguably makes the experience more rewarding too.

This a good sound

There was a lanshop that had a T1 of their own (this was '99) that had their machines (two dozen - there were a dozen in each room that had a partition so that people could play against each other).

The "clan tag" that they used was [LPB] standing for Low Ping Bastards as this was the time when people often were in the middling three digit pings - they were regularly in the low two digits. Human Head even had a release party of Rune there and they hosted one of the servers that was consistently up - it was a fairly popular one because it was always up (this is back in the days when many game servers were at the other end of an ISDN line that the owner would power down when not playing) and it had good ping times. It was a shock to some to find that not only did they have good ping times, but also there were some people with [LPB] that had ping times in the single digits. When asked about it the response was "I can touch the server."

It was a nice place to hang out and play games. This was also in the days before voice chat across the net was practical. It was a game changer to have a group of three or four people all coordinate a tank in Tribes - or a spotter and a mortar working together where they could talk rather than needing to pause and type to communicate.

The thing that killed the lan shop was that the college dorms started getting wired with acceptable networks and a good chunk of the player base could play on their own machines. There was still some "get a dozen people together to play" but not enough to pay the bills.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010406031620/http://www.ping-t...

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Regarding LAN parties : https://www.lanreg.org

When I lived in Eau Claire, I knew people who went to https://www.lanreg.org/winlan/winlanxi (noting that it was a thing last year, but doesn't appear to have been scheduled for this year - would have been last month).

That's just not true. All but a handful of the smallest LAN parties I attended I the 90's and early 00's included console gaming. It was pretty much assumed there would be consoles at a LAN.

Halo, which was arguably the first professionally competitive game, had it's entire birth at LAN parties as it did not support online play at all and had to be done with a LAN.

Smash brothers had a similar Genesis story at LAN parties I attended. LAN continues to be the preferred competitive environment for every game due to latency.

I'll tell you what killed LAN parties I attend, it was the year steam became standard. To get everyone at the LAN to play the same game no longer meant passing the CD around, but in /socially pressuring your peers to make a digital purchase/ That was the death of LAN.

> That's just not true. All but a handful of the smallest LAN parties I attended I the 90's and early 00's included console gaming. It was pretty much assumed there would be consoles at a LAN.

You should have gone to better parties.

I also played a lot if Halo LAN parties on consoles. I don't think I ever had a PC LAN party (probably too young).

> To get everyone at the LAN to play the same game no longer meant passing the CD around

Pretty sure I spent more time installing games and fighting with cracking software than I did playing games at LANs :)

There was always one person at least that needed to reinstall windows..

I disagree. My monitor's weight was around 20kg and it was a lot of work, to get it together with my large tower into the car.

Even though we enjoyed the gatherings, we hated doing the grunt work before and afterwards.

There were plenty of us who didn’t mind the “grunt work”. Laziness was not the reason for The demise of LAN parties :)

Sure, but that made it all the more worthwhile. You put actual effort into it, and were rewarded with a weekend of fun.

I definitley think it's on the product side that LAN parties died. The relationship between the player and the game, and the LAN community and the game were way different.

Gradually the companies figured out how to inject themselves into the social structure. Your relationships became mediated by these products. Rather than a social lubricant they became the relationship itself. They monetized that social capital.

You didn't play WoW with your friends anymore; you played WoW because that product allowed you access to your friends.

Some superguilds figured out how to hop games and maintain that social structure, but only the most organized and intentional. Gradually these LAN groups eroded as people got jobs, families, etc. Perhaps that was why the MMO declined; those friendship structures became compromised by the product, and people also developed constraints on their time by things like, spouses, children, and careers.

Fully agree. I still regularly organize LAN parties with the same crew as back then. 24 years and counting... Family has made finding a suitable date much more difficult. But the biggest obstacle is finding LAN-capable games.

10 people joining Dota 2 from the same IP results in instant ban for everyone. StarCraft 2 is horribly laggy when 10 PCs compete for UDP traffic to the internet server. GTA 5 keeps load-balancing us into different lobbies. Most new games just cannot handle a LAN party anymore. And yeah, I remember the time when I paid for a WoW account despite not playing because the WoW guild chat was the quickest way to reach all of my real-life friends.

Warcraft 3 fun-maps, Left 4 Dead 2, Flatout 2 are the games that reliably work well.

And then there's Anno 2070 which fails at login (it requires an account and an internet connection) for a second player in the same home network.

OpenRA is the only thing that really works for an ad hoc LAN party on whatever laptops we have with us when we get together with the old crew.

We join over public servers, so we skip the classic LAN curse (spending an entire day getting it all connected properly, then only having time left for maybe 1 or 2 rounds of actual play).

LAN parties used to be the only way to play together because playing over the Internet wasn't practical. Once that changed, it was so much more convenient to just play over the Internet, that the demand for LAN parties dropped quickly.

From my memory, companies ending LAN support came long after LAN parties were mostly done for the experience and mostly by people who had done them before.

Games explicitly allowed you to play in like 3-4 using the same CD code.

Now you need all the friends to buy the same (usually expensive) game.

Yah I remember some folks had all these pirated game installers, so you’d arrive at the LAN, access a shared folder and install whatever game everyone was playing. Then at some point we’d switch and repeat.

I don't know if they explicitly allowed it, it seems more likely the CD code was only checked locally so there wasn't much the game could do to stop code sharing.

For instance, the Diablo CD, it could be installed either as "full" or "multiplayer", if you had the multiplayer install, you could only join games, but not start a single or multiplayer yourself. It was very cool.

No it was even specified in the manual that above X players you needed 2 players with the game in the CD reader at the same time.

This isn't true. Yes, it's only checked locally, but you can store the key-code used and if you connect to another player with the same keycode it can prevent you from playing together. This is something many companies did to their games. But many others didn't, and they were treasured for LAN parties.

I remember Starcraft had installation mode that was basically meant for LAN parties so you didn't even needed to share the code.

This. I remember lugging even a midi tower but a 17 inch crt in my car to my friend's house each week and back. It was so much fun when you were there but the logistics were a pain. As soon as the Internet was fast enough to allow people to play from home and still have a lot of the interaction via video and voice that to me was the death of the Lan party not so much game support.

The fact that fucking AGE OF EMPIRES II/III DE doesn't have LAN is ridiculous.

Atleast for AoE III DE there is a server emulator because MS servers only do matchmaking.

Yeah that’s rubbish.

Not exactly the same but I’ve had a few LAN parties with 0ad. It’s still in alpha and lags up during the mega battles , but that’s been pretty fun too, watching armies crash together is slow motion when u finally throw everything at each other.

I’d definitely recommend 0ad for a small 3-4 player LAN party.

0ad.com

"Gaming companies contributed to the death of LAN parties too. They killed the "split-screen" gameplay that would support 2-4 players on the same machine."

Even consoles suck with this now. It seems like none of the big games support more than 2 players.

Exactly. I wanted a coop split screen shooter for the PS 5. I checked out 4 games. None had coop splitt screen. 2 were alway online which would require me to get a PS Plus subscription.

Games were: Back 4 Blood, Call of Duty Vanguard, Rainbow Six Extraction, Alien Fire Team Elite.

I still invite friends for Xbox 360 LANs. Just connect two consoles and play with 8 players. It is super fun and the hardware is dirt cheap.

360 consoles are so cheap right now… Facebook market has them by me for as little as $20 with a controller.

Even many of the 360 games only support 2 locally, especially the later ones.

I'm happy about the death of split screen gaming. It was just an awful experience. Especially when your friends were screenlookers

We were all screen lookers… it’s not like any other player had more advantage…

The death of split screen keeps me in retro games.

We'd run 2-4 consoles in separate areas, with each console being a team.

As a kid split screen adversarial was common, and the screen looking was never really an issue. If someone was better, you'd play 1v2, 1v3, or 2v2 with the best and worst player on the same team.

If you were at a LAN party and were too good, then it was you and the worst kid on one console vs 4-6 kids on the other 2 consoles. Haha good times.

Attended a LAN party in Manassas, VA back in early 2000s. It was literally in a barn with 100+ people. No Internet as it was pretty rural. I don't think this would even be possible now with no LAN option in modern games.

I believe there is a resurgence in LAN-like in-person social gaming when competitive multiplayer mobile gaming became a thing. It can take place literally anywhere, a quick few minutes during lunch, before classes.

I also think that the rise of quality gaming consoles helped kill off LAN parties. the xbox/etc took over pretty fast.

Xbox System link was a thing, for a time.

Xbox Live and co. was probably the real death knell of LAN.

System linking IMO came of age even earlier, in the PS2. The original PS2 hardware could system link over 4 pin FireWire (I-Link in Sony speak or whatever they branded it). Late generation ps2 hardware dropped the FireWire port.

Connecting two PS2s via FireWire/I link, two multi-taps and two big tvs for 8 player time splitters 2 is an all time favourite memory of mines.

Memory is fuzzy, but I think Gran Turismo 3 also could do this.

Probably after they were already dead but also Discord. Online communication is so easy and good now. My friends have talked about having some LANs again but it is so easy to just play online that it never happens.

Only 10 years ago I had two people over to LAN game. Newly released Far Cry 3 had some co-op bits in it!

Didn't work. Despite each machine being on the same network they tried to connect via the routers external IP and failed at the UPnP/NAT traversal stage.

Honestly, a "direct connect" option solves many things.

I don't think I remember ever playing a single game via split screen on a LAN party (except that one year someone brought an... N64?).

The server thing is true though, also just not paying for dialup by the minute.

I don’t think split screen has anything to do with it unless you are talking about consoles.

The biggest factor was companies removing LAN play as an option from games. Forcing you to be always online and not allowing you to run a local server.

When you can play an offline LAN game you can also use pirated copies or reuse cd keys, which was always necessary to get everyone up and running.

> crucial, awkward time

I mean, I disagree completely about the "awkward" part. Online gaming has nothing on hanging out with a bunch of friends in the same room playing PC games together for a weekend. If you happen to be younger and you've never had a LAN party with friends, you absolutely should try it once. It's a unique experience and it's crazy fun.

Agreed. LAN parties were amazing. I have such fond memories of gathering with 3 to 5 buddies in a basement for an entire weekend. The games were fun but more often than not they were just a background activity for an epic hangout.

Why says they are done? Next weekend me and 3 friends are doing our annual LAN-party. We are all older, but it is still so much fun. Super excited!

Take pictures!

LAN parties weren't amazing. They still are amazing. My friends and me still have LAN-parties the whole night on weekends. We play classic games like Warcraft, Starcraft, CS GO and 1.6, but also play "newer" (needs ro run on every machine) games like Borderlands.

My girlfriend also regulary have LAN-parties playing Stardew Valley with her friends all together in a room like in the good old times.

All of us are 20-30 years old. Some take their laptop with them, some their tower + keyboard and mouse. The only difference is that we can play over Wifi (still works better over LAN) and have fast Internet for all these annoying updates.

LAN-parties aren't a relic of the past. They are still totally awesome and no online-game can compete with good friends playing computer games all night. ;)

What killed the LAN party? In short, Halo 2 and Bungie. Before Halo 2, even games on XBox Live followed the same foundations as PC games - a bunch of servers listed in a browser that you had to pick from to join, then instantly relay the details to your friends so they could also join. Bungie developed a matchmaking system that made it effortless to play with friends, and it was soon used as a bedrock for XBox Live and copied by PC developers quickly. Peer to peer worked with everybody using broadband and was cheaper than running servers.

That has led us to our present moment where the developer controls the life of a multiplayer title from cradle to grave. They issue patches you have to apply; they balance weapons, they ban players, they charge for cosmetics and loot boxes and season passes. It all traces back to giving up control over how we connected and played games together.

Nowhere is this more evident than the Battlefield community. The majority of that community desperately wants a game that really follows up on Battlefield 2, without realizing it will never happen because EA as a company is too big to cede that much control over its multiplayer titles. They wouldn’t be able to monetize it if the community controlled as much as they did back in the day.

For us it was WoW that killed it.

I distinctly remember several of my friends dropping out of our LANs due to their WoW addictions. It was sad. Eventually, it became about half of the group, and the LAN parties stopped.

Multiplayer games with dedicated, community servers were very special. If you frequented a server, it wouldnt be long before you made friends with the people on the server.

I made many good friends in the battlefield 2 and team fortress 2 days through a couple dedicated servers. People to this day are SHOCKED at how many friends I have on steam.

It's because we all showed up at the same time to play games together, in commune. It was our coffee shop. It was our church.

These days, most people don't even use a mic/chat let alone friend someone.

"What killed the LAN party? In short, Halo 2 and Bungie."

I still played halo 2 and 3 at Xbox LAN parties. So existing groups didn't really go away, but I could see there being less of a draw to new groups forming.

Would everyone bring their TV set?

Yep

Edit: each person bringing a console also brought a TV. We would have up to 4 people per console.

Ah, split screen. No option for covert strategies.

I guess many people stopped investing into expensive pc gaming rigs when consoles became more popular. And work provided them with a Windows laptop.

"Ah, split screen. No option for covert strategies."

Not so. Each console/TV was a team. So you could only see your teammates.

I'm legit skittish about having to reinstall or update windows on my PC because I don't have convenient access to my Battlefield 2 discs and there's a good chance an old friend of mine will be trying to get me on an AIX match any random weekend. I made it to Windows 10 and this machine cannot go to 11 anyway so I'm fairly safe for now.

An update to Battlefield 2 with fairly open servers (and an ability to mod) would be an amazing game and platform. But yea it would have to be coming from somewhere else I have no hopes on EA.

The internet killed the LAN parties.

It was too much work and decent internet gave you the games without the effort.

I think the comment that it was harder to be an asshole because someone would just ask you to leave (physically! With your equipment!) is quite relevant. It’s way too easy to be a jerk online now.

There was a real magic to LANs at one time, and these photos certainly bring back memories. University and college dorms were pretty fun too, I imagine their LANs are quite locked down now and only serve as an isp to the internet, but you used to be able to find eachother on the campus LAN fairly easily once upon a time, and there was a lot of associated fun and magic, from intranet messaging to gaming to file sharing

> I think the comment that it was harder to be an asshole because someone would just ask you to leave (physically! With your equipment!) is quite relevant. It’s way too easy to be a jerk online now.

Maybe the big difference is that you would do a LAN party with friends, whereas you would play online mostly with unknown people.

That’s true! Certainly I was invited to LAN parties where I knew a few people and was getting to know 2 or 4 others, perhaps there was even the opposite effect to being a jerk, I wanted to have a better relationship with the others ?

I literally drilled a hole in the wall underneath the kitchen sink to pass a wire to 2 friends living in the opposite appartement. On campus, you could see wires hanging from window to window outside dorm buildings. Nice times

My cousin had a friend next door and ran Ethernet out his basement window and over to the neighbours basement window. They shared a cable internet connection eventually and made their parents pretty happy about the savings $

Is it just me or does the last section - "what killed the LAN party" keep appearing infinitely many times? I read it at least three times before realising I'd already read it, ha.

No, also happens to me (Firefox, Android).

Same, on iOS Safari with Wipr content blocker.

Opportunity for them to show a few more ads while we keep attempting to scroll?

When you want to have infinite scroll, but have no new content to show. :'D

Hah. Me too on mobile. I was reading it probably for the fourth or fifth time before it hit. Just started my coffee so wasnt awake

They just REALLY want you to know that LAN parties are dead.

Yes that threw me for a loop for a sec

Yup

I kind of miss LAN parties because our version wasn't just about gaming. It was about drinking, smoking good shit, having loud electronic music and lots of people coming and going all the time. I prefer dealing with alpha nerds.

Quake 1/2/3, StarCraft, NFS, Carmageddon, Star Wars Racer and lots, and I mean, LOTS of Mortal Kombat 3 (DOS version). We sure had some fun

Frankly, I don't have the energy to do any of this all night. Getting old sucks but it also injects anti-FOMO serum into your blood stream, making you regret missing fun less and less.

Our LAN parties typically started with paintball or quads, then switched to games after dark.

I really miss user-run servers. Back in the Quake 3 days I had a couple favorite servers and there were always the same couple groups of people around, known characters. You don’t get that sense of camaraderie from random matching.

This is somewhat Quake 3 specific but I also really miss user generated maps that would just automatically download. Played some really interesting maps back in the day.

Popular games switching from pub servers to matchmade 5v5/6v6 bums me out. It feels like it was just done to chase esports money, and it's such a worse casual experience. Way more stress, way less community.

I think this shift is a direct contributor to increased toxicity in multiplayer gaming, honestly. The server communities I remember were like your favorite pub where all the regulars knew each other and you all just liked hanging out. Occasionally new people would drop in, and sometimes they'd become part of things but usually they at least behaved, and if they didn't they were booted off an IP banned.

This is why I like CS:Source a lot still. User run servers but they have updated the graphics enough it doesn’t feel too dated compared with newer titles.

TF2 is amazing these days as well. Lots of crazy, fun stuff going on in community servers.

https://www.gametracker.com/search/tf2/

> This is somewhat Quake 3 specific but I also really miss user generated maps that would just automatically download.

This was (eventually) a feature of Quakeworld for the original Quake as well. You could even download an entire mod, like Threewave CTF, one asset at a time; though in practice it was much faster to download the full pak files.

Still, though, it worked well for maps, and for lightweight mods, or variants of popular mods. For example, there were many flavors of CTF that added their own runes. Anyone up for a game of Thunderwalker CTF? ;)

My dorm in 2006 didn't have any wired network (nor wifi).

So what we did is we wired one ourselves through the walls of every room, running ethernet cables from one balcony to the other. Every 6 room, we'd install a cheap fast-ethernet switch.

Eventually, we managed to connect almost all 300 rooms together in a giant single VLAN.

You can still see part of that mess in the history of Google Street View: https://goo.gl/maps/AQriNEJViMELQw8MA

That dorm ended up being a giant eternal LAN party. People would play games all the time, either from their own individual rooms, either after moving their PC using stolen supermarket shopping carts to other rooms for more conviviality.

You'd turn on your PC, and some custom scripts would tell you which games were currently being played, and the only thing left for you was to join the game of your friends, or the game of the total strangers from two floors down.

Fun times!

I've had 2 1-week long LAN parties in the last 4/5 years and they have been some of my favourite things I've ever done in my life. LAN parties aren't a thing that can die. If anything it's even easier nowadays to get together. Computers can be smaller and screens are lighter. Old LAN games are still around which will run on really low-spec hardware so it's even easier to participate.

I was renting a house in 2000 with three people who weren’t there most weekends. As such, all my friends came round for LAN parties, bringing their PCs and monitors on the Tube. We mostly played Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and Unreal Tournament, drinking unhealthy amounts of sugary drinks and eating pizza.

It was a weird niche of time in which this was both possible and likely, so much that I don’t know anyone else in person that did it.

One summer, we organised a massive LAN party held at a race-course. It wasn’t as much fun because it lost all the intimacy.

My 18-year-old son still packs up his big ass computer and monitor and spends the weekend gaming at his friends house. They don't call it a LAN party but at the end of the day they are still having a lot of fun and socializing with people in real life.

That's great! Glad to hear it's still happening. Some of the best memories of HS and college :)

Wow. I actually had to double-check if those are really not pictures from our LANs. I guess there really was a stereotypical look :D

lol same. having done this only a few times, i was shocked to see that this is how it looked everywhere else too

The exception for me is that epic Code Red supply. Me and my friends usually drank coffee (not that we turned down soda or anything, just wasn't typical).

I once held a LAN party in my parents three car garage. In the middle of summer lol.

Used Netgear 10/100 switches that we found dumpster diving in a tech park type area. My father (career engineer) even helped me run Cat 5E to the garage and install a jack.

After the 10th person or so showed up we blew the first circuit 15A circuit :) Learned pretty quickly how to fix that issue.

Direct link to the book:

https://vol.co/product/lan-party/campaign/

I think they missed a main factor: lag compensation inproved greatly.

The old Quake style games often had very naive networking. Whereas now, I seldom notice the network even exists.

It's not that lag has changed much--contrary to the article, broadband is less important in games. It's latency that matters, not bandwidth. Team fortress 1 can run on 16kbps.

And latency is still the same as I had 20 uears ago, 50-150ms.

But the benefit of LAN was that it was the only way to experience latency free gameplay. And it really did make a big difference. In comparison, internet play always felt weird after experiencing LAN.

Most of the online games today seem even worse for connection than before. I hear that only Fortnight, CSGO, and Valorant are using good servers.

Even in all online FPS games, due to the client predicting movement - there's still peeker's advantage due to your player being slightly behind on other's screens, so you see enemies before they see you.

This doesn't matter for the majority of players but that's why high skilled CSGO and other shooters must still use LAN for high level play. There's no entirely defeating peeker's advantage and other artifacts from latency.

Valorant, league of legends, and CSGO have their own CDN to try to help with connections. Can't really comment on other game's netcodes because they vary so much. For example, BF1 devs removed lag compensation entirely. League has no lag compensation since it's not a shooter. CSGO lag compensates a fixed amount so consistent ping is more important than fixed ping.

It has nothing to do with their network infrastructure and everything to do with the way they calculate player movement, input, and perform lag compensation.

Here's another surprise for you: although Fortnite and Valorant are on Unreal, they don't use the default multiplayer networking code. You can't create a reliable game with it.

Fighting games have gotten much better due to rollback - Japanese developers for years would release games that were just unusable outside Japan and now it’s fine.

LAN parties don't have to be dead!

I went to at least a few during High School (~7 years ago) where we'd bring our towers to the library and stay after school playing games for a few hours. The librarian was very kind to sacrifice his Friday evening so that we could play video games.

Aside from that, I hosted a LAN party just a couple of months ago and plan to do another. Last time we played League of Legends, the old Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (the iw4x project lets you host local servers), and a couple of others.

They aren't. Twice a year, for a weekend, I go to a LAN party that has 20-30 some odd people. People have brought kids, we are all adults, it's fun. LAN parties only died out because people stopped wanting to run them.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Gigap... - On screen, the WON version of Team Fortress. That brings memories :)

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Opponent_Network

Man, that CS image gives me such nostalgia.

Minor nitpick: that's Team Fortress Classic (Half-Life mod), not the original Team Fortress.

So does the "PHP4" book on the shelf.

I went to a LAN party on Microsoft campus in 1997, which was held in one of the bigger conference rooms. Amount of networking equipment that the hosting microsofties brought in was truly staggering, at least to me at this time. We played a lot of Quakeworld and other adjacent games with low, low pings I've not seen before, having played largely on dial-up. Fun times.

I recently hosted what is essentially a LAN party with my two teenagers inviting their friends to play various games. There was ~10 kids crammed into my TV room, organically switching between multi-person arcade controller games around our big gaming PC (glad I have like 16 USB ports in this sucker to connect them all), Elden Ring'ing with their various PCs, and then I don't know what. They had a lot of fun. Smelled just like the LAN party from 1997, too!

The obvious answer is that the Internet killed LAN parties. Now we're all on the same network. My kids primarily game online with their friends from the real world, not randos, so the dynamic is similar. Sometimes it's on xbox with the headset, sometimes on the PC, and when necessary they'll use ipads to facetime and have that on the desk next to the gaming screen. They're very connected to their friends when playing.

Until 2012-2013, we met at Internet Cafe to play LAN games with my high school friends. It was not common to carry your PCs in our culture but a lot of folk went to cafes to play Age of empires, counter strike, middle earth, generals. Then came non-LAN games. And we started to not meet. I still miss those days with almost zero latency.

Ah, simpler times.

The photos really took me back to the early 90's and 00's, when I was a kid/teenager, happy to spend hours playing the same first-person shooters for hours, on the same maps, over and over again, with my nerdy friends from school. I'd love to go back for a day and relive those times.

My first LAN (we didn't call them parties) was just with my step brother.

He brought his PC and we took 2 of 3 days to set up the network and the help of a local sysadmin.

I went to many over the years, and it's somehow funny that LANs globally looked like ours even without widespread internet.

I had small one with 3-6 friends. We used BNC for quite some time and always missed a terminator.

I also attended big ones with 150-600 people. They were a great source of games and videos, when you didn't have internet.

I did some LANs with friends later, when everyone had laptops. Was much easier. Than the big CRTs back in the day.

We once had a LAN party in a barn. In October. I vividly remember the cold - it was the night of the first snow. But that very cold must have stabilized our hardware - we never had so few crashes.

This was a great article, though I felt it was incomplete without the inclusion of the infamous “guy taped to ceiling” photo.

A picture’s worth a thousand ping…

https://thenerdstash.com/lan-party/

I read the title and thought the article was going to be about that exacty photo :)

I remember when the Unreal Tournament demo came out - it was supposed to be locked to owners of 3Dfx cards, but if you put an empty file in the game directory called glide2x.dll, it would run in a software-only renderer.

At the time, I worked for a company that had a large-ish computer training room. These weren't high-end machines, but they would run the Unreal demo, early Counterstrike (1.5-ish?), and Quake 1 just fine.

Around 4:30PM, a bunch of guys (30-ish and younger) in the building would gather in this room to play. This was totally unsanctioned by the company, and probably against some business policy there. The doors to the room would lock from the inside, and the two doors to the room had narrow windows. I cut a rectangular piece of cardboard that exactly fit these windows, painted them flat black, and we'd put them in the windows when we played - if people walked by, it looked like the lights were off in the room. We called these cutouts our "beatdown screens".

Those gaming sessions were some of the most fun I've had in a long time. At one point we may have had close to 20 people in the room. In the words of Penny Arcade, we were "Making punk bi*** suck it down".

Relevant PA links:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/12/20/a-threat-to-am... https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/11/19/with-special-g...

Good times.

LAN parties are definitely not dead lol. They're not "LAN" parties anymore though, but there's definitely groups of guys (sometimes girls) coming together bringing their computers into one room gaming together all over the place still to this day.

LAN parties in the 90s were an excuse to get drunk and smoke weed. We spent more time on setting things up and dealing with issues than actual gaming

And in true modern internet hell self-mockery, the page glitches out and I get a repeat of the end of it in a seeming scroll jacking. Then it glitched again and I’m back at the top of the page. Bizarre.

It is just incredible looking at these pictures: I keep on searching for known faces to see if a picture of one of our LANs ended up in there. So much nostalgia. I have gone from being an avid gamer (first at LANs, then over broadband in the early 2000’s) to gaming barely a couple of hours a month.. but these memories just make me want to ring up the whole crew again, rent some cabin in the middle of nowhere and go insane in AoE, CS and Wolfenstein all over again!

My friends and I have had a LAN party every year for the last 20+ years. Usually around Christmas or early the following year.

Since the pandemic hit we moved them to be online over Discord and I'd say that they've been just as fun as the in person ones. There are obviously pros and cons but given we're all much older now and many people have moved away I doubt we'll ever have an in person LAN again.

> “Just a bunch of idiots having fun”

This is not how lan players would have talked or thought. “Just a bunch of geeks having fun” if anything. Oh, it's Ars.

If you want more pics of LAN parties, the IU Gaming Club has a gallery of events going back 20 years! https://gaming.indiana.edu/gallery.html The club is still going strong and is having a mini-event the first weekend in December.

Ahh the careless and hopeful days... Blissfully ignorant that paradise wouldn't last.

"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them."

You leave them once you're an adult with a job/kids/etc. Kids are having good old days right now. And when they grow up, they will look back fondly at them.

The good old days are not about the times, its about not having many responsibilities, being able to do whatever the hell you want, and being surrounded by friends in a similar situation.

What we did (northern Italy, 1996-2010) was take an old storeroom, fill it with old desktops that would get cycled as technology got better, and have a permanent setup that capped out at 8 computers. The two most popular games were DN3D and Starcraft, with NFS2SE being added once we got eight voodoo cards. Great times, great memories, I'm still in touch with about half the people who showed up :) basically it was like having a little arcade, except free. House rules were no smoking (lots of smokers in Italy) and you're expected to contribute by buying sodas and snacks for the fridge, and donating old parts.

Used to host a LAN party on Halloween. Gave teenagers something to do except get into trouble!

Would rent a hall at the fairgrounds, set up tables, grill outside, big screen. Bring lots of copies of game DVDs!

We'd go all night until dawn. Those were the days.

> The games, and their economics, certainly drove this shift. Company-hosted multiplayer servers helped cut down on piracy, opened up new revenue streams, and, certainly, made finding opponents on a moment's notice much easier.

Indeed. I was (arguably) too old by the time LAN parties were a thing -- my generations' LAN party consisted of a bunch of guys huddled around a (single) home computer. But I do recall the outcry when SC2 was released w/o support for IPX (which wasn't supported anymore by Windows) or other means to play against other gamers server-less in a LAN.

This is mostly my opinion but I think an overlooked reason for the death of the LAN party was the shift to console gaming during this time. This was a dark time in the PC gaming world. Console use was rising exponentially with some dev shops completely dropping PC support in order to focus solely on consoles. It took in my rough estimation, over a decade for things to balance out a bit and PCs once again be prioritized for game development.

I have so many great memories from the 90s attending small copy parties in Sweden - it's what we called them back then, before they became known as LAN parties.

Oh, the glorious nostalgia! I never attended a LAN party, but I was spoiled beyond belief and my school had a bay if 8 terminals starting around ‘96/‘97 and my nerd buddies and I would race to them every day after class to play MUDs together. Our faces had the joy of the boys in the pictures. Such great adventure we had.

Edit: or maybe it started around ‘94/‘95. I’m getting old and my memories are fading a bit.

Surprised not to see mention of some of the massive LAN parties that were/are combined with tournaments. Some larger on the tournament side (DreamHack) and some larger on the party side (LPANE Nor'Easter).

https://hothardware.com/reviews/lpane-noreaster-2005-lan-par...

I never even heard about piracy on lan-parties.. A friend once told me, even if he were to strip the soundtrack from the first GTA, that the resulting zip-file would still span over like 60 3.5-inch floppy disks and that everything would be to no avail, if even a single floppy were to become corrupt. It's not like today, were almost everbody has access to an iomega 100 zip drive.

At the beginning of the gathering of each LAN party and had to say "Hello" or even shaking hands to some one in real life. Sometimes the toilet was blocked by another gamer during an important match! OMG You could smell pizza, not being yours. Or hear screams from the other side of the room. This type of social interaction quickly disappeared with the upcoming internet game servers.

I… HATED… all the things that made LAN parties chaotic and dirty. I don’t have fond memories of piles of garbage or spending half our time getting everyone on the same version of a game or whatnot.

Eventually we matured and realized that keeping the place clean was a good idea. Pre-planning the game list, pre-testing them online, etc. and having an actual bedtime (3am) all helped.

I very much respect your view but i couldn't resist commenting on... how insane all that sounds to me. Chaos was, for me, the essence of an epic, memorable LAN party.

It's fun to see how different people can be.

I don't think the lack of LAN support is really that big of a deal - you can still go to a friend's house and play together in a private game while using game servers. In fact, I'm doing that today - bringing my laptop and playing Humankind with friends at their house. I think that still counts as a LAN party in spirit.

Although not the same as a LAN party at a friend's house, I've quite enjoyed Insomnia in the UK a few times. Still some great LAN party vibes with a group of friends!

https://insomniagamingfestival.com/lan/

What I miss most about LAN parties was the fun of getting all the computers setup. Setting up servers to host things for others to downloads, troubleshooting networking, random projects, ...

That void is somewhat filled with DN42.

fun times, pizza, soda, my mom thinking what a bunch of nerds, while we played against each other or sharing mp3s and games into the night and next day. When steam came out, we started going to internet cafe's, they had better machines (had some friends that didnt have much) and didnt cost much to play for a couple hours. I miss those times, things were simpler.

So much nostalgia. Does anyone remember the Frozen cd piracy sets that used to float around at LAN parties? They were awesome man.

Have not heard of Frozen, was it like Twilight/crazybytes?

I would buy this book.

Do LAN parties still even happen?

good days... I have fond memories of LAN parties.

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