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Comment by theferalrobot | Hacker News Reader

> Playing together now a means an hour of downloading content from an online service before the game even starts — and this particular game is an entirely offline one!

Did nobody else spent the first 8 hours of 00s LAN parties trying to get the equipment set up, the networking to cooperate, the games shared? Then finally after a reformat of windows xp or two around 2am finally getting to the gaming? That was my only somewhat dramatized memory of things. I loved every second of that struggle which is maybe why remember it. This seems to be a case of seeing the past through rose colored glasses. It was sooo much harder to get a group of friends together to play some counter strike than it is today. It’s not even close.

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This entire post is pretty much the definition of having rose tinted glasses when remembering the past. There was a lot of annoying shit back then too, you just choose to not retain those memories.

Am I misreading your post? I think that’s my whole point right?

Someone is agreeing with you... on the internet.

Oh lol - I read it as a critique of my post (which confused me) not an agreement about the parent article

There's an element that all the silliness of the LAN party was technically necessary for the production, and as a grassroots thing the hardship added to the buyin and culture.

Part of the reason this was all acceptable in the LAN party era was that you were having fun together with friends while dealing with the annoyances. You could curse, you could laugh, and you could eat pizza together while you were wrestling with the faulty ethernet hub (remember those?) or whatnot. I remember I once accidentally blew a transformer at my friend's home while getting set up, and we all had a good laugh.

Nowadays, you play a game over the internet and you would be lucky to have even a friend next to you watching enthusiastically and intently.

More than that, people knew that they were going to have to do technology stuff, and tech stuff was oriented more at semi technical users.

So people actually learned how to do stuff, and that in itself was fun. Whereas the current low friction set up is so difficult to fix that if the first three Google results don't work, there's nothing you can do.

More than that, people knew that they were going to have to do technology stuff, and tech stuff was oriented more at semi technical users.

Prior to the pandemic we would play Diablo 3 in my home office with four people once a week, all night. Takeout food. Six plus hours of gaming after work. It's an "online" game, but we're effectively just playing a LAN game with friends. Since the pandemic we're down to three people in the home office, with desks and big monitors setup, but we still get together and play regularly.

Absolutely ... but don't forget the fun of trying to play multiplayer Command & Conquer via dial-up modem: "Wait, I thought I was calling you?", "Why is your phone engaged?", "Hold on, let me call you on my mobile" ...

Not 8 hours. More like 1. Then thinking F... it, inserting a Linux floppy, and messing with the LAN from there, unfortunately not usable for gaming then :-)

However, the instantly working IP connectivity impressed the others, and reinforced my aversion for anything from Microsoft at the time. Around 1994 to 1995 btw.

Edit: Thinking further about it, this 'demo' convinced the others to set up their IP-addresses the right way in a CLASS-C /24, statically. This accelerated the NetBIOS and IPX finding each other, so we all just checked if drivers were good, patches, levels, maps & mods for games were on the same level, and could start playing without endless rebooting. Should have done DHCP, though ;->

But then things improved and none of that had to be done to play with friends. We had it better then they ruined it again. I think that's the entire point.

Especially on consoles with limited patch sizes. Compare the experience of playing Call of Duty 4 on Xbox 360 to the experience of playing the newest CoD on a console. I haven't played in a long time but just reading that the first thing you have to do is download dozens of GB to play a disc you just bought is bonkers.

And Steam is really a great piece of software when it comes to utilizing your connection. They can saturate even high capacity connections much better than any other software I know and you can play basically immediately after the download has finished.

Just getting everyone on the same patch version to play a game was a pain. We ended up just copy pasting around Half-Life folders, and you'd have to change your player name when you first started or your have the same as the source copy.

Ah LAN parties, AoE, BfME 2, C&C ... good days. The LAN setup times, not so much but we had it down to a spritely 1.5 hours ;)

Ready to play Quake 3 and then someone decided to bring a G4 Mac. Easy to communicate right "It just works!"... :D

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