Memories from old LAN parties

So many found memories of Red Alert 2 and Quake 2 playing at lan parties in the 90s.

I was lucky enough in the early 2000's where I could use my love of video games and lan parties as part of my job. I was responsible for the Flash community at Macromedia, and we would set up 4 xboxes with split screen for 8 player Halo 2 and 3 tournaments in conference rooms (which has multiple plasma screens already set up).

I quickly realized that we could use this to make friends in the broader community, so we bought a bunch of LCD monitors and pelican cases, and began to take our setup on the road to Flash conferences. During the day we would hang out at the conference, learn new programing / visual techniques and generally see super cool Flash stuff, and at night we would invite everyone over to our hotel room and then play Halo all night. We made so many friends and close contacts in the community through this, and it really help us meet a lot of people, and build strong, personal relationships.

I remember we were on a 6 week bus tour in North America doing events for Adobe AIR, and making a detour to NYC for the Halo 3 launch at at Best Buy. We then played on the bus all night long.

Here is a clip of me walking to the launch, so happy and singing about it being my Halo birthday (whatever that means!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVQKgui28O8

So many good times.

I remember writing a tool that blared a siren wav every time someone connected to your network share. It would be quiet at the start of a round, and then as people died you'd hear sirens going off left and right.

Remains one of the few contexts where nerds would do drugs. Speed mostly. You ever played Quake with a bunch of dudes on speed? It's fucking nuts.

The smells. Some LANs would go on for a week. Lots spanned several days, most lasted upwards of 12 hours.

People didn't game with laptops. You had to bring you whole case, your monitors, accessories. It was great when LCDs came about. Lots of people had intricate setups too, heavy Thermaltakes with watercooling shit.

ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and that annoying Windows service that let you send pop-up messages to any IP if you hadn't disabled the service.

My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back in.

I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on configuring networks and just general overhead of running events. Always fun: people who configured the wrong IP address so there'd be conflicts and you had to get up on stage, get everybody's attention, and get everyone to check they IP addresses at the same time. DHCP? Lol. After a few events we switched to peg DHCP, that worked remarkably well, as long as you had a few tech support guys who could help people out setting things up.

And also, people bringing extension cords on a roller, not completely unrolling it, plugging in several computers and the wires inside the coil melting as soon as the load was high enough. Smoke coming out, breakers going off, actual flames once.

And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with us.

> If someone has shared their installation of Warcraft III over SMB it will run much faster if you copy it to your local machine first rather than execute it directly from the network folder.

This one made me laugh. I'm really surprised it started that way at all.

I think my LAN party time was a little later than most of what the author is describing (mostly Windows XP era), but I also remember the networking problems I had at the start of _every_ LAN party.

Once I also accidentally turned off a handful of PCs when I had to leave a party early, because I didn't notice my multiple socket outlet was powering several other PCs.

It's a pity that kids these days grow up without LAN parties.

If you are found using a wallhack, you will be duct taped to your chair for the remainder of the LAN.

Buy the latest most expensive graphics card and return it after the LAN, but this trick only works a couple times before the computer store will only return your money by check after 3 months.

Real Lan Parties(TM) bring their own electrical distribution boxes to avoid surges in the commercial building's existing setup.

Don't leech the giant shared network drive while the kindly soul providing it is trying to frag.

The hottest girlfriend there is being ignored the entire time by the weird dweeb boyfriend who just wants to talk StarCraft.

There is a pecking order of games, and without question the most hardcore players are the gods of Rocket Arena 3, followed closely by anyone who is so good at Counter-Strike that it's impossible to tell if they're cheating. (they are.)

Irrespectively of the number of participants, there will only be a maximum of 1 terminators available for the BNC network.

It will take years until you can use Ethernet at a LAN party, because of the one poor guy who can't afford to upgrade from BNC.

There is always that one pr0n addict who watches it the whole weekend.

Everyone says they won't sleep the entire weekend, but at the first night all but one person are sound asleep.

At private LAN parties, there is only one person who has basic understanding of networking; it's never the person with the best PC, albeit the rich dude will talk like he knows more than the poor ones.

I went to LAN party where everyone had lugged their CRTs, except one kid who had a 15” TFT LCD screen, which were super rare and expensive at the time. It had a huge crack right down the center, but was still just about usable. I asked him how that happened. He said he was playing online (Counterstrike I think?) and lost a match, causing him to punch the screen in frustration.

That screen must have cost >$1000 at the time.

Sure enough, the guy was a tool - the kind of gamer that gloats over every win and questions the opponent’s sexuality after every loss. And he was every bit as toxic right there in the room with us.

The experience completely put me off online versus-stranger gaming forever, and in retrospect I’m very grateful to him for this.

I've only done a few LAN parties in the last handful of years, and they weren't quite as magical as doing it as a teenager where you spend 75% of the time deciding on what to play and then figuring out how to crack it so everyone can play.

> If you’re using a 10 Mbit hub and copy the same directory to two Windows SMB hosts simultaneously it is somehow smart enough to make the transfers coincide so it can transmit the same data to both at once. To this day I have no idea what heuristic it used but honest to god, it slowed down the earlier transfer and then went in lockstep file by file for the remainder.

That is really cool.

There's a new book coming called LAN Party, funded and in production:

A loving photographic celebration of the energy-drink-fuelled, furniture-rearranging, multiplayer gaming trend and its nocturnal participants

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

The note about running SC2 over a file share reminds me of my own experience:

In my first professional job I realised their overnight job runs of a custom mission critical optimisation software was actually a VBA program run in MA Access and was also being run over the network share. The databases themselves were small, maybe dozens of MB but not bigger, but the way Access worked is that it would constantly re-read the data over the slow network share.

It was also just generally really flaky and would often run into data quality issues. So you'd cue up the routine and half way through it would crash it require restarting everything from scratch. A lot of cursing was heard* around 9am when people started work and found their overnight job had failed.

All the developers in the company were distracted trying to develop the "proper" replacement, coded in a "real" language (C# iirc) and server based, but the impression I got was it was stuck in development hell, with all the features anyone wanted always being pushed out to "phase 2", while delivery of "phase 1" was nevertheless always slipping futher away any time anyone asked. As a result the old tools were just left to us "analysts" to use without any maintenance (and most these tools had organically grown out of the analyst team's efforts with spreadsheets rather than being developed by the devs anyway).

So I had a poke around and taught myself enough VBA to do some "optimisations", the biggest of which was to simply copy the data locally before executing all the scripts.

I also put in an "integrity checker" which checked for common data errors pre-launch.

The runtime went from overnight to ~10 minutes, with a ~30 second data check you could run first. I looked like an absolute genius.

It eventually dawned on me how disfunctional everything was and I stopped turning up to work, but the impact of those first few weeks of work definitely let me coast the next couple of years.

* This detail is an embellishment, the company was oddly strict about this kind of thing. They also still required jacket and tie in their dress code.

Me and some friends host a pretty weird event, the name of which loosely translates to "Field Lan". We set up tents, generators and an antenna in the middle of a field in Estonia and compete in various games for 72 hours straight on an open field in fresh air. We sleep in tents. Its a private event once a year, but we have 30 - 50 people there every year. Next year is the 10th year we do this.

I've never been to a legit LAN party.

I started out (ca 1995) in "network" gaming playing DOOM (the shareware copy, I think we could only play 3 levels). My buddies would come over after school. We'd hook up my dad's work laptop and our home computer with a parallel cable and play 2-player (2 kids playing and 5-10 other kids watching along).

I think next came Command & Conquer, which we played over IPX/SPX also, but I believe by that time I'd set up a coaxial network, where it would just randomly stop working every few months. I'd replace the BNC terminators and it was good to go again.

Next, a lot of "C&C: Red Alert" over direct modem connection (2 player).

Finally, I got ethernet on my PC. It was a game changer, since it was much more common for PCs to have ethernet than coaxial networking. We'd lug our PCs and monitors (think 15" CRT monitors, Sony Trinitrons for the lucky ones) to each other's houses for Starcraft. Running ethernet wires from various rooms to the Ethernet hub (not switch, those were too expensive).

I won't miss carrying those huge things around just to play multiplayer.

> There were websites which aggregated downloads of keygens for various games. These worked more often than you would expect.

What did I expect? The "warez = trojan" thing is mainly corporate propaganda. Commercial products are just as likely to contain malware.

> Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted for copy protection, or rip a CD for that purpose. This only became popular once hard drives became big enough for people to spend many gigabytes imaging their CDs.

Actually, it was Daemon Tools :^)

It was a 90s and we met through our BBS systems. there was no debate what to play, doom. Warcraft came soon after. The Internet sounded cool, too bad actually kind of destroyed everything. some of us had pagers. we made plans, over land lines, and everyone actually showed up.

we didn’t take photos because that would be stupid. our parents would find out what we were doing. which was mostly drinking and smoking way too much and playing video games until the sun rose.

In the early 90s, my LAN parties were going to the school where my dad was principal and playing with my friends in the computer lab. They had a bunch of Mac Classics and we would play Bolo. So much fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)

I did LAN parties in the early '90s when a bunch of BBS nerds would show up at a local pizza joint cradling Mac LCs, IIsi's, and Powerbooks, bust out some PhoneNet connectors and play some intense Bolo [0] or Spaceward Ho [1] games. Later, Spectre [2], Marathon [3]

Maybe someone would demo some app they were working on in MPW or Think C, or demo a funny postage stamp-sized quicktime (new video format) of an exploding whale or dumb Dan Quayle quotes.

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)
  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceward_Ho!
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game)
  [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)

Some personal memories:

A switch might explode by using the wrong power adapter and still work afterwards somehow.

At my high school, every computer was on unrestricted LAN divided by floors. Four classrooms playing Armagetron (the open source tron clone) was a LAN party I didn’t expect.

>A LAN isn’t legitimate unless at least one person has to reinstall Windows along the way.

Never a truer phrase spoken.

> The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600. The rich kids had a 9800.

This made me chuckle. For my computer I went though a bunch of local computer stores, going through all their CPU boxes and got lucky on the second day. There it was, an Athlon XP with AQZFA stepping. Overclocked twice as fast as the other models, and the coolest of CPUs in that generation.

Overclocking of an AQZFA Athlon XP was as easy as using a pencil to draw a line in between the two right pins. The mods I've seen on LANs to cool this thing were something else. From custom-built PLC radiators to water cooling setups, which were the new hot stuff at the time.

>There were websites which aggregated downloads of keygens for various games. These worked more often than you would expect.

Reminds me of serials.ws . It was pretty good at the time.

I remember thinking this TCP/IP will never work out, too complex.

Whereas IPX works just perfectly.

DHCP was a god send that proved me wrong. Well, until someone, somewhere forgot to disable its own server...

Ah, the smell of BAWLS Guarana flowing and the music of CD Keygens[1] filling the air...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE

I remember being terrified of applying my aftermarket Thermaltake cooler on my Athlon XP, so I waited until I went to a local LAN so I could get someone more experienced than me to install it.

To this day I still get anxious applying CPU coolers, even though they're a lot easier to install. Thanks anonymous person from Auckland's LAN at Upper Harbour stadium (I can't remember the name of the event).

It's 2023 and AMD couldn't run a Halo Infinite tournament at Quakecon properly. And one of the teams was out getting pizza anyway because they were off by an hour. My friend won a 7800X3D though.

Cases must be windowed, very small or very large to be "credible" these days!

Alcohol120 and a hard drive full of ISOs was the only way to get a large group of people playing the same game. Such as UT2004.

Having Internet almost makes the LAN worse because unless you really plan it with your buddies, it has felt like a lot of people just do their own thing. So go into a LAN with friends having agreed on at least two games everyone is interested in.

My first LAN was in a church gym playing Battlefield Vietnam on 128MB RAM and a Celeron 1.1ghz (the family computer before I got into building). I drank 7 bottles of Bawls. I weighed 140lbs at the time.

Still remember huge "bring your own PC" lan events 20 years ago in Italy with 1000+ people.

I find it crazy that better connectivity killed socialization in gaming rather than helping it.

LAN parties got me into casemodding. I was always more interested in looking cool (to this particular crowd) than actually playing games [1]. I always picked a seat at the end of a row, close to the catering so people would come over to take a look. This quickly got out of hand with sponsors (Cooler Master, Silverstone, among others) and dragging my builds to casemodding contests and trade shows (CEBIT Hannover). I was still in high school. Good times.

[1] Serious Sam was my favorite though.

I miss these, these days people just don’t want to bring hardware together anymore. I get it but the social aspect was wonderful.

My friends and I had only a few LAN parties that I can recall, at least ones that took place at any of our homes. There was, however, a PC repair shop in town that had a (pretty high-end for the time) LAN gaming room. I wanted to learn about computer repair, and so offered to work for them once a weekend or so, for a few hours, in exchange for learning about computer repair and free gaming for my friends and I. After raising an eyebrow, they agreed.

In the end, I don’t think I really learned all that much. (The solution was often to just backup what we could of a person’s storage and reformat.) But my friends and I had a good time at this shop, run by two computer geeks of an older generation, that was probably just a few years shy of being wiped out by the Geek Squad and Genius Bar.

Apart from that, my school district had a kind of magnet career skills center that offered a network administration course. On Fridays the instructor would let all of us in class play Counterstrike on the classroom’s LAN. I think that was put a stop to, however, after a district supervisor came into the room just as a student gleefully yelled, “Headshot!”

Before consumer LAN parties were a thing, there was xpilot on the university HP 9000 workstations. We’d play from 7pm until 6am. By then, our hands were completely cramped from pressing a million different buttons to navigate the space cave, shoot bullets and activate the ECM system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPilot

> The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600. The rich kids had a 9800.

I still remember trying to flash my 9600 bios to a 9800 because some were able to that. Unfortunately I didn’t have one of the lucky models that could do so.

These are my favorite HN threads. Personal expenses that double ad historical accounts.

In high school a land center opened up and they would do 24 hour lans once a month. Being 15, we all loved it. So many new people that all loved the same stuff as us. It was a blast. It eventually closed due to lack of profitability but I'm very thankful for them taking that shot on that business.

Always check your beer bottle, you never know when someone is going to use it as an ash tray.

If you sleep in an aisle or under your desk, you will wake up with dicks drawn on your face.

If you ask the guy who draws dicks on peoples' face to not draw one on yours, he will make sure to know your sleeping location, so that when you sleep, he can come by and draw a dick on your face.

There is often a "magic room" where drink and food is abundant and free for admins. If you befriend an admin, by the end of the weekend you may get invited in the room and get a share because there is way too much for them anyway.

If you play a lot at a certain game (let's say Quake 3), and you want to hustle some LANs, make sure you know how to setup a dedicated servers ; some admins do not use the proper competitive settings like sv_fps and whatnot, so you can advise on that and avoid playing under sub-par conditions.

Make sure you have a lot of free space on your hard drive so you can leech stuff while you are sleeping and somebody else draws dicks on your face.

I remember every lan party there would be someone that would have issues with his PC, that being network or Windows and could not play at all.

One of my finest memories was at a lan of around 150 people. We had everyone install Natural Selection half life mod and had a full match going for hours.

Similar happened at another even a few years later. Had about 30 people playing that revolutionary war half life mod on LAN. I think it was called BG mod or something. Good times.

I did LAN parties through out highschool in the late 00s. It's funny looking how different our era of lanning was. This was post Steam, and so the piracy was less rampant. By the time I went to college, they also had a lan club and I started doing that. It was the early 10s, and that's when the lan part of the lan party was truely dead. Everyone stopped playing TF2, and CS, and everyone moved to League of Legends. There was still SC2, and a bit of cs going on but the majority of the lan was just people grouping into fives/tens and playing league. Esports became a thing a few years later and sorta ate the lan club. I can't say I every lugged a CRT but games of UT2k4 and TF2 in a dingy basement full of nerds are core high school experience memories for me.

Great moments in this vid. Captures the scene in Australia in 2003. Focussed on Team Fortress. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ESzTCRsz7vY

Many of the people captured in this video still play today and have enduring friendships.

Are there any LAN parties happening these days on regular basis? How does one become part of that group?

LANs are still a thing! Knew no one 10 years ago when we moved to the Netherlands. Pretty much all friends come from the local LAN group.

Now we still organize them but there's kids running around as well, and we sometimes also go to each other's weddings

Some memories, indeed.

How we had it (rural Norway, late 90s/early 00s)

- Some guys would show up and spend 10% of the time on gaming, and like 90% on coding. They'd mainly be at LAN-parties to collect tools and meet other coders. Sometimes they'd show some cool demos they worked on, or some game they were working on

- Shared folders of music, films, and pictures would get copied an masse. A LOT of the pictures were definitely not for the public eye.

- Some LAN-parties would drag on for weeks, and kind of just become LAN-clubs. People would practically live there...I remember a friend hosted one of the last LAN-parties right around the time World of Warcraft got released, and while it was meant to just last for a weekend, 5-6 guys ended up staying there for a solid month, gaming WoW since the host had high-speed internet. Owner didn't mind, as he was equally hooked on the game.

- The older games would only play Age of Empires, and not much else. The competitive gamers would grind StarCraft, and later on CS.

- Playing all the pre 1.6 CS versions was a fun time. They seemed to change quite a bit between each update, until 1.6 became the standard.

- If we encountered some networking problems, someone always knew a 40-year old networking dude that would gladly show up and fix whatever was needed. Same dudes would always have tons of spare parts lying around.

- Right around the time CS 1.6 became popular, we started seeing the first "pro" gaming e-sports teams. Back then, these teams would just play at LAN parties, and then go compete in larger regional LAN parties. The prizes were laughable compared to the modern ones...one clan I knew won like $5000, which was split on 5-6 members? Those guys decided to drop out of school and pursue CS full-time, which lasted around 6 months or so.

- We would have a national LAN party in Hamar (The Gathering), and traveling there from all the way north was a real bitch. Imagine bringing a full-tower case and 19" CRT onboard the plane. Even though the first flat-screens sucked, it was infinitely easier/more practical than those CRT screens.

And lots of other things.

installing Back Orifice on people's computers so you could open and close their CD drives remotely...

I stumbled upon the StarCraft CD key thing myself after my sister broke my original CD and case. I had a ripped copy and tried a pattern until it worked. I was maybe 12 and didn't know what an ICQ was.

I remember my earliest LAN game was the first Warcraft RTS, mainly because slower school computers could still run it and it allowed for "spawn installs". I got to experience real LAN gaming later in the 90s because I traveled to Europe. Sure, my friends in the US would play Tribes, Descent, and Quake, but we never had a room full of powerful enough computers to play it on a LAN.

When I got back to the states, I was hooked. I built my first PC (a Pentium III with an ATI RAGE 128, I believe). I must have been 14. A few years later, I made a video* about the LAN parties. It's a good time capsule of the experience.

* (Two parts because back then YT limited uploads to 10 mins) Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZVrZRgVGrs, Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3-_N3kwMqQ

i think remembering LAN parties is my sign of me becoming a greybeard. i would say missing from this list is that feeling of just tribal yelling in close proximity with your team and screensniping by turning around. i'm sorry for all the gamer kids that grew up without that in their lives.

Token ring coax cabling with a terminator at the end

DOS, Windows

Quake 3 arena, Descent, Warcraft 2, Unreal Tournament

94-98

I worked at Chick-Fil-A for a year or so in high school. One of the ones in a free standing building in the middle of a parking lot of a much larger shopping center- bordering the interstate. A group of 6-7 of us, INCLUDING the General Manager, were big gamers.

At the time, Call of Duty releases were all the rage. The night of the Modern Warfare 2 release, we all closed up at 10pm, invited a few of our friends, and brought in our monitors (mostly 40inch TVs) and Xboxes. We set them all up on the Chick-Fil-A tables and booths and made several batches of Chick-fil-A nuggets and fries. We played 6v6 from about 11:00pm - 4:00am.

I remember thinking how ridiculous it must have looked from the interstate to see a Chick-Fil-A lit up with 12 screens inside through those translucent shades at 2:00 in the morning on a weekday.

That is one of the greater memories of my childhood. It delights me just to think about it!

Summer of college, working as a temp at a soulless company where all I did, all day long, was call doctors and ask if they still took a certain insurance.

Someone brought a cracked version of Quake to work one day and we all stayed late playing. Even the boss got into it - LAN parties were always amazing but going from call center temp job -> LAN party was like going from the lowest low to highest high.

Any lan party organiser or participant worth his damn knew a variation of K4HVD-.. by heart for those reinstall situations :P

Reminds me of the year LANs died, for my circle at least. One year we were lugging equipment for PC or Xbox LAN parties, the next it was hardly anyone showing up. Halo 2 had come out, GameSpy and other services had traction, so folks just got their fix online. Even when there was online voice chat it wasn't the same.

This list sounds like it's written a little after the time of my first LAN parties.

I recall really only having one game we could play (and really only one game we wanted to play)... Doom. And the network was fully 10BASE2 running IPX, not IP.

Fun fact: I have the BNC connector I used back then sitting on my desk in front of me as I type this.

So I'm younger than the person who posted this, but my high school did do something called LANfest where we all set up the computers on campus to connect to play games over the local network. But proper LAN parties sound like they were amazing, it's a shame they're not really a thing anymore.

My high school friends and I built a website and web forum for us to chat about our LAN parties. We also spent one summer turning a dirt space beneath one guy's house into an epic lan room - we put in floors and carpeting and lighting and tables. So awesome.

Some of the best memories of my childhood.

> The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600. The rich kids had a 9800

Oh man. I had the 9800XT with aftermarket Zalman cooling. I didn't know what attention was before I went to a lan with that build. Got called the coolest things and the worst things

The first prize I won at a LAN was a 16 MB Corsair USB flash drive for winning a Call of Duty 5v5 tournament! That would have been around 2003?

During the 90's my older brother and I had a coaxial cable running between our two rooms through a hole in the wall. We used to play deathmatch DooM and Quake. If he wasn't home, I would invite my best friend over and we would play together. Of course, I got to play on my brother's PC which was superior.

My best friend and I would frequent Duke3D. I vividly remember a wide open city map with a fire truck driving around the perimeter. You would think that getting run over by the firetruck would kill you, but instead you would just appear on top of it.

> If you don’t have enough warez to reach the minimum share limit for the DC++ server you can always add the directories for your games installed under Program Files.

Not sure if it only started in the Windows XP days, but it's a bad idea to put games in that folder, one of the reasons being that they might not work unless you give them admin access, for instance to be able to write user files in their own folders (and you might want to mess with them too, also consider mods), and giving them admin access is not the best idea.

Lol, there is actually a 'gaming zone' (commercial space set up for LAN parties) still operating in Sunnyvale. I had a shuttle PC that I used for LAN parties and would re-image the disk when I got home.

Going to quakecon and meeting John Carmack was a top life experience for me

* Packing a whole PC and CRT monitor into a suitcase * Setting up DC++ and getting all the latest warez (and discovering there's always someone with the worlds largest hentai collection) * Counter-Strike

I lived in a tiny rural Australian town during this era, still at school. We stole a bunch of network cable from our computer lab and had 2-5 person LAN sleepovers.

I got way into case modding, and daydreamed of the day I moved to the big city and could hit the massive LAN parties with my fellow nerds. I even built specific smalk and robust PC for it.

But by the time I made it to the city, broadband was a thing and our city is also pretty small, so the one big LAN event had already stopped.

Still, I think we captures the spirit of it all in our pokey town the best we could.

> Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted

Wasn't that Virtual Clone drive? As far as I remember Alcohol was for burning ISOs.

The outdoor lan parties that quickly popped up in the Netherlands is where I have my best memories of. Also, modding levels of Shadow Warrior or Quake and then telling your friends that they had to copy this newer version as it had a patch and then pranking them for an hour in game by completely destroying them with hidden passages and explosions… all the while hearing them in disbelief.. and then sharing the secret… also FTP Servers with more music, movies and games you could ever put on your own hard drives..

Some of my fondest memories are LAN parties. We used to play all sorts of games, some of the usual suspects like Counter-Strike, Age of Empires II, etc, but my favorite is when we did 3v3 DotA.

We had three people in one room on a team, and the opposing team in another room. The winning team would walk into the room after the match to talk about the highlights, but the losing team would say "Nope, get out, let's run it back!"

Best party I ever attended had someones girlfriend jump onto the table in only brah and thong and yelling at her boyfriend "just stop that and ... me already!" and he looked up "I will but we're in a match right now", my 15 year old mind was blown away on multiple levels. I also met my to this day best friend there, we still laugh about the girlfriend episode once every while to this day.

I have fond memories of lugging our desktop machines and CRT monitors to someone’s college apartment to play Age of Empires all afternoon in the mid 90s. Good times.

I feel like this spanned at least a decade, but still got me right in the feels. Nobody had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ while BNC was still running around.

> Having a PC with a window in the side of the case does in fact give you credibility.

That, plus of course the obligatory blue/green cold-cathode tubes :-)

Ooooh yes.. Fond memories of attending a few events that were hosted by Hurricane Electric on folding tables in some conference room annex of their data center. And the marvel of finally having an Ethernet connection to the Internet instead of dialup! I'm not sure I balanced "game time" with "download-all-the-things time" well enough.

Unreal Tournament 99, 2004. Counter Strike. Innumerable MMORPGs. Emulators with netplay. Friends bringing terabytes of data to share.

I miss it.

The OP is younger than me. You haven’t been to a LAN party until you’ve shocked yourself by unplugging a BNC connector.

So many young people here :)

We used to call these "copy-parties", because not a single person had a network capable computer. It was the late 80ies and besides a demo competition (or two) it was basically copying floppies and playing games with two joy-sticks attached to a single computer.

For my circle of colleagues LAN parties have not died out, but evolved to couch coop. Computers are strong enough to host the same game N times. Playing Left4Dead2, FlatOut 2, BeamNG drive on one PC with a couple of monitors in split screen gets 8 people into a room for a lot of fun.

very familiar points except the part about stealing hard drives. Totally unthinkable scenario.

You just don't ever, EVER, touch another persons computer without them inviting you in for help, or some kind of showoff. Atleast one of your boys would look after your computer while you were afk. Someone would always be there

We always played Starcraft at LAN parties. My poor desktop could barely keep up, especially when everyone would decide to all have giant Protoss carrier battles. As soon as I exited the match, the game performance for everyone else on the LAN significantly increased.

I remember my first LAN party. No Internet, just one continuous 10Base(something) coaxial network where I was on the one far end. I brought down the entire network more than once when I needed to disconnect my BNC connector and terminator, in order to troubleshoot some hw/driver issues.

There was this one guy that didn't sleep very much and had to much caffeine pills and jolt cola, he started having severe hearth problem and he passed out so they had to call an ambulance, he survived. The following in monday in school the teachers were condemning caffeine consumption

Good times. Lug your big ass computer and monitor. Setup and install everything you need, someone has a pirated copy. Break out the energy drinks. Game all day and night (most likely counterstike and call of duty) until it’s time to head out for early morning breakfast, then crash.

Fun memories. I remember when we had to borrow internet from a city building across a field, using some weird antenna setup. When it rained the internet went down.

And of course the random rage quits of keyboards being thrown across the entire hall.

Used to organize LAN parties at my college as a fundraiser for the newly minutes ACM chapter I helped run. Learned more from running the LANs than I did from my networking, leadership and general computing classes.

"I've got you covered like a jimmy hat" q2 3wave ctf lan party quotes from OKC lan party which we drove to from Texas.

If you don't know, the recent q2 remaster includes ctf and people are playing!

I feel like most of west missed out on internet cafe around the street corner, lan gaming whenever you want culture. Fancy bars with VIP seating and way too many unhealthy people.

Kenton (cloudflare) has a LAN-party-optimized house https://kentonshouse.com/

Back in the early- to mid-2000s, I used to frequent a yearly recurring LAN party ("Hobslan") for up to some 100 people hosted in Germany, about 1300km away from my home. Of course, my midi tower PC that was specifically geared towards attending LAN parties was riding with me on the train(s) going there, and after a refreshing 14 to 18h trip (depending on the year's train schedule and my monitor-and-ride-providing German buddy (thanks, Han! :)) giving me the last-200-mile lift to the proper place), it arrived with me in all its glory: A Pentium 4 "Northwood" 2.6GHz (overclocked to 3.5GHz) on an ABIT AB-AI7 motherboard, a Geforce 4 4200 Ti AGP-based GPU with 64MB of VRAM, 512MB of dual-channel DDR-SDRAM at a frequency I cannot remember, and, of course, my trusty 160GB RAID0(!) SATA HDD array to store all the things you could leech on the sweet, sweet Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) fully-switched LAN that I was going to plug this thing into! The little beast had Gentoo Linux installed, and its hardware was perfectly balanced to provide that highly sought-after stable 125fps (where a certain physics bug in the game engine allowed for maximum jumping distance) under all possible conditions in Quake ]|[ Arena ;)

The events were a blast, and even the tournaments I did majorly suck at (playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo on an original SNES, hooked up to a projector that illuminated pretty much all of one of the walls of the school gym that the event took place in, for example) are forever etched into my memory.

One year, the network was plagued by the infamous W32.Blaster worm, and most of the Windows-based machines the local admins had provided fell to it in short order. People were starting to get desperate - most of their gameservers and DC++ hubs AWOL or even FUBAR, and many were going through the motions of redoing the Windows XP setup left an right, only to see their machines becoming infected again on the first network-enabled boot-up. It was mayhem, and a weekend of pure Quake awesomeness was threatened to be reduced to a week of reciting FCKGW-... from (muscle) memory ad nauseam. Luckily, my Gentoo machine was invulnerable to that particular problem, and my little gaming beast ended up on a separate network segment for "vetted", provden-clean Windows machines only, providing FTP and several Quake ][ and Quake ]|[ game servers at the same time for those who HAD machines that still worked, or were brought back from the dead. I even saved a relevant screenshot from back then as a cherished digital artifact: https://coloss.us.to/blaster.jpg

Makes me smile whenever I happen to revisit it :)

Never had this experience - would like to have it as a 40 yr old but I guess shooting real guns is also fun and more accepted by normies..

LAN? In the Amiga days we occasionally had nullmodem cables between two computers, often for playing Stunt Car Racer.

CounterStrike beta, a Half-Life mod.

Quake 2 & 3.

Where was those LAN Party he’s talking about? Was it in the US? France?

Probably the one positive experience I had at uni before dropping out!

Memories of sleeping on floors! But oh those were fun weekends.

LAN parties were a very big part of my high school experience.

wow, sdf.org - another blast from the past

So much pr0n

lol.

midimaze.

I worked at such venues and helped friends who worked at such venues back in the day. What I remember mostly is having to move from one computer to another setting IP addresses and the annoyance of having to restart Win 98 after setting an IP. I still don’t understand why that was a requirement.

Later during Win XP days, most places started having a dedicated set of machines and you didn’t need to lug your computer along anymore, those were actually the days I remember I had most fun, playing UT and C&C Red Alert 2, god damn the music was exciting!