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.
[1] Extra points if a player had participated in another LAN party with other people and had changed some or the other Windows network setting for that LAN party. "It worked last month and I did not change anything!" was always only true until the "and".
one family had a room built on their garage setup for band practice and tables around the thing for lan parties since their dad was some high end coder or unix wizard or something.
later we took over an old single theater in north branch MN (the battle shack) and kids just lived there for the summer. 24/7 lan party and movies and music and just wild stuff going on. you'd show up with your PC and hook up and wander around trying to organize games, check out people's crazy setups (kids with crazy workstation CRT monitors for each color in as coax) and stuff like that.
After I got out of highschool we went to AWOL lans which I think died over the pandemic finally but they had like two days of games organized in a hotel with a huge arcade, laser tag, go karts.
Does anyone remember a specific reason why? I was too young to know or care.
Playing 90s games, that are rather cheap nowadays.
Btw, most of the 90s are about 30 years away now. So you could play games from the 2000s, too, even if nothing from the last decade works in a LAN.
As for recent games that do not have normal IP support, better to ignore them.