The Promised LAN
tpl.house
tpl.house
Traditional LAN party: Everyone brings their computers to one place to connect via a LAN, where they play games, swap files, demo stuff to each other, etc.
My LAN party: All my friends come over to my house and use the computers that I have already set up for them. Nobody brings their own. The point is to interact face-to-face, with video games as a catalyst. Swapping files and demos doesn't really happen since nobody brought their own computer. (My house: https://lanparty.house)
The Promised LAN Party: The LAN is extended, virtually, across multiple houses, so that the participants can play games, swap files, and demo stuff without actually leaving home. It's arguably no longer "local" but functionally it enables the same activities as a LAN party, other than the face-to-face interaction part.
I wonder who gets told their definition is "wrong" more. :)
If i had to do a "lan party" these days i'd just connect my Steam Deck to some hdmi beamer and play Jackbox games with a bunch of people.
OS's like Windows can easily share folders and printers, games (particularly older ones) run LAN discovery off of broadcasts, and the lot. Sure, sometimes you can route it, but when I think LAN, I think back to the wireless bridges in a neighborhood LAN between houses we would setup - ARPs and all, in a big messy broadcast domain that worked well enough.
Today I think I'd reach for GRE tunnels to add that functionality if I was them. Otherwise, this is just the Internet with more steps.
1. there was one smallish computer lab tucked under a stairs in the science department in university, in which all of the computers had been "compromised" in some fashion & games installed for student LAN parties. Mainly after hours for those living on campus.
2. In the first tiny little company I ever worked for we'd have them in the office on occasion.
For your "traditional" types - how did people transport their computers? Laptops?
Similarly, I'm not sure how 13 or 14 year old me got a 27" Trinitron TV downstairs by myself. 34 year old me would need an entire bottle of Advil for sure.
I don't live in the US though so perhaps we just missed out on that rite of passage not living somewhere where kids are more likely to have access to a car.
That aside, it sucked performance wise even with a Pentium 3. My main PC and 19in monitors were what we drug around to LANs all over.
There used to be an old movie theater in North Branch MN that was converted to basically a permanent LAN Party where people would just come and go.
Movies and bands would play on the stage on weekends or something, too. Best time of my life.
I had many computers but not that many. Most friends would bring their own PCs.
Countless hours on Half-Life maps and mods, pre Counter-Strike. Then the Counter-Strike beta came out and that became our (full) life!
We'd also play Warcraft II on our LAN.
Now... Warcraft II wasn't meant to be played over the Internet, so when there was no actual LAN party, we'd simulate a LAN protocol using Kali:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)
That allowed us to play Warcraft II with strangers on the Internet.
Wild times!
P.S: my very best LAN that said was a coax cable going through the window directly to my neighbours' house. Brothers in each house made for nice Warcraft II games.
Like I could understand saying it misses out on the aspect of literally bringing your individual PCs, missing out on the neatness of everyone’s individuality as another commenter pointed out, but I don’t think they’d agree that the in person, gaming in the same place aspect is entirely precluded from “the spirit”
It's hard to capture three dimensional physical art in two dimensions and/or digitallly, even more so when the art is abstract. The context and interaction with the physical environment can also be important.
Not suggesting you go out and buy plants for the gaming rooms (maybe you already have) but wondering if it was a conscious decision not to have any?
We have a lot of plants outside, though.
Or there’s true Scotsman all the way down to the turtle.
That said there is a "behind the scenes" video where we initially toured him through the house which is a lot more conversational, but it's on their pain subscription service.
This line made me chuckle:
> I suggested to Jade: Should we move to Austin? Jade initially said no, because she wanted our kids to benefit from Palo Alto's school district. At the time, it was rated #12 in the nation. But, looking closer at the rankings revealed a surprise: The Eanes school district in Austin was #8. When I showed this to Jade, she changed her mind.
Could tell your wife was Chinese without even seeing the name. Chinese parents will made radical housing decisions for their children, even just to move from #12 to #8, lol. Love this.
Obviously, as you predicted, the first reaction is "how do you afford all of that", which is a silly question, because the answer is "just be in the right place in the right moment".
Now, the second question is how do you get to actually organize a big party? My experience is that in modern times it's very difficult to maintain an extensive social network. First, people live far away from each other, so visiting someone becomes a journey. Second, people have shit to do, and when you invite them for a beer it usually means asking them to give up something else in that time (like taking care of their kids). Third, in the age of hyperindividualism it's difficult to meet people you vibe with, because everyone has their own distinct personality and the era of shared values and hobbies seems to be gone.
I'm even willing to say that a get-together of friends in the same location playing the same online game (perhaps using laptops / handhelds / tablets / smartphones / etc.) still fits the spirit of the LAN party, even though it might technically be over a WAN. (Former LAN game series like Diablo have evolved in this direction, for better or worse, and MMOs were always in this space. It's still a blast to play them with people in the same room.)
The best LAN party is the one that you are part of.
The important thing is only that the players are local.
Sibling comments here have suggested "WAN party", but that sounds more like one that anyone on the public Internet can join.
I don't call it a LAN Party when I plan an evening to play with my remote friends, it's just a "game night".
At the time, I worked for a company with a large training room full of computers. The room had locking doors, and a small, narrow window in only one door. We made a cardboard cutout that fit into that window perfectly, and painted it flat black. If you put it in the inside of the window, it appeared as if the room was empty and dark. We called it the "beat-down screen".
We loaded up the UT demo on every machine in that room, and used to get a bunch of like-minded gamers to come down at the end of the work day and we'd play the three demo maps for hours. We eventually added Half-Life deathmatch (I loved the snark pit map) and Counterstrike. None of those machines had discrete video cards, so we had to run in software rendering mode on all games, at something ridiculous like 320x200, but it was glorious.
Good times.
I used multiple school officials' accounts to log in, push a copy of UT99, filled with custom maps, to a network share. We would then copy that folder to the hard drive of the school computers and play UT99 on them. We had amazing LAN parties where we would find empty computer labs after school and play games for hours.
They had BNC networking in that building at the time. It took "forever" in my mind to copy the game from the network share to the local hard drive. Totally worth it.
In those days they even let us maintain the high school website using Dreamweaver...
I was a sophomore in college in '99-00 and they had just brought in new Power Mac G4 machines with ATI Rage 128 16MB AGP cards. They were faster and better than anything I had used to that point and it also was around when Unreal Tournament was released which was a big deal. I was the administrator of this lab and was supposed to oversee students working on video and audio projects. But instead, we had epic UT tournaments and better yet, I got paid to be there. I also had keys to get into the lab so we would catch a buzz and play for hours.
Absolutely amazing times.
I made a custom boot disk (floppy) that would boot Windows bypassing Fortress. It was pretty easy.
During computer programming class I'd install Worms on the machine and we'd all play.
The instructor was a cool guy and said it was fine as long as we were getting our work done.
On one of the tests he included a question: "Who is the master of the ninja rope?"
I think that's a more interesting read than the linked page.
Not ill advised at all. The internet was never meant to be centralized; more should be done to resist the ICANN hegemony. The replacement for manually swapping host file entries ought to have been something that placed control over identity in the hands of the individual instead of selling it.
The set of internal services is growing too.
> The Promised LAN is a closed, membership only network...
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It's actually completely fine, and good, for people to voluntarily form social groups based on a shared interests and traits. The movement to oppose this sort of thing has been a large factor in the deterioration of social life for many people. You are not entitled to membership in a community of close-knit friends.
I was just bemused at the webpage bragging about hosting a "24/7 LAN party" but then not even mentioning what games they like playing
> it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of treehouse
They're just sharing the idea because they like what they've built and think other people could have fun building something similar. It's like a treehouse enthusiast putting some pictures of the cool treehouse they've made on their website. It's not an invitation to come and hang out in it.
I'm tempted to make one of these, TBH.
At which point you might (reasonably IMO) complain that you're rather curious what use they find for said treehouse in practice.
Whereas if they are captioned "this treehouse is my absolute favorite place to hang out" or "everyone should build one of these for themselves" or "building this treehouse saved my relationship" or whatever then I am going to find myself wondering why that might be.
Like if I tell you that Python is just the best language ever and you ought to be using it for approximately everything you do because it will improve your life or society or perhaps even the universe as a whole, might you not wonder _why_ I think that?
I'm clearly in the target audience as I'm now considering doing something like this. The page gives me all the information I need or want.
> around half of the people on the LAN have thermal receipt printers with open access, for printing out quips or jokes on each other’s counters.
> there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”.
The above is from the linked essay about the current sordid state of the internet. It gives a few ideas for fun pastimes but honestly not a lot. Gaming with close friends is probably the majority of what I'd use a LAN setup like this for so naturally I'm left curious what I might be missing out on.
If the idea of setting up one of these doesn't sound like fun in its own right, I wouldn't recommend attempting it.
DN42 (https://dn42.network/) is kind of like this but public, mostly used to play with networking technologies though you could also use it to make a virtual LAN party.
Note: If you do, you should probably check the paths your traffic takes and get consent of everyone on the path, since most people expect to mostly pass network-control traffic and some nodes have very limited bandwidth. Fortunately, AS-paths in DN42 are usually quite short. If all your LAN party traffic is confined to your own network then obviously it's not a problem.
If you built one of these you could also connect it to DN42 as-is, being aware more people will be able to access your network if not firewalled.
When you join TPL you get a generated LaTeX document with all your connection-specific details. That document breaks down kind of _everything_ you need to know to join, and then you're paired up with one of those primary backbone people to connect.
The only use case I can imagine is a legacy game which performs a server search by broadcasting/scanning the local network. And even then - most of the time these games had server browsers.
They are using BGP and routing nodes (backbones), recreating a mini IP (layer 3) network I think.
I've used raw wireguard in a p2p fashion to interconnect LANs. I run wireguard on each segment directly inside the network routers.
Just make sure all LANs are using a different subnet. A /24 is standard. Then configure all the peers and you get a fully peer to peer network. No relays. You only need one side of every peer "pair" to be reachable from the internet.
I do have a small management script to help peer discovery (dynamic IPs) and key exchange, but it's not strictly required. With a dozen nodes or so, it's maintainable manually. Wireguard supports roaming natively, as long as one peer can reach the other.
Very little overhead. ICMP, TCP and UDP support.
I personally ran into the legacy setup issue for running vanilla Wireguard for my setup before Tailscale is a thing and have to manually manage keys, routing and DNS.
But one thing Tailscale has that annoyed me is that they are using 100.64 CGNAT addresses (which is more RFC-compliant) but conflicts with one of my cloud service provider's pre-configured DNS, NTP and software mirrors setup. Using it became more or less messy for this reason.
I can somehow consider migrating now.
Part of the fun of TPL isn't just that your computer can talk to another computer, it's that you have your own setup configured form the ground up so your /24 can talk to other /24s on TPL. I 100% understand some people will not enjoy that and won't find it fun, and that is ok. Some people do enjoy learning new things about setting up infrastructure, and this scratches some of that itch.
I knew guys who set up something like that in Culver City / West LA. It was slow, but it was self-reliant . Basic email, image transfer etc.
It's possible to use ham skills to make links that are not ham-class though, of course. For example encryption is (typically) legal on ISM band general use licenses (such as used by wifi).
Are there bands where licenses are reasonable? i would be interested to rekindle this sort of network with some friends.
The more public resources you want to take for private use the more you can expect it to cost. You might have heard about billion dollar spectrum auctions to companies like Verizon, but that's for the rights to use a certain band within the whole country (for cellphones). When it's just at one location it's a routine process. As I said though might have some requirements like the use of certified equipment - look them up
For us a "tailscale" equivalent with SoftEther is what we used to manage the DNS/Tunneling for our fileshare/services.
So cool to see more people playing in this space. Please post more! <3
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/pc-lan-tourneys-if-you...
https://web.archive.org/web/20020605175253/http://www.thepro...
My biggest/only concern - which they gloss over, mostly — is security. Combining networks puts added responsibility on every family that joins. What if friend-X’s kid downloads a virus-riddled torrent, which is capable of multiplying across hosts?
Your own hosts/perimeter can always be protected, but there’s a loss of control with this setup.
As some other commenters have said, Headscale/Tailscale scratches some of this itch for me. Having individual devices connect directly to an overlay network is fabulous. However, I can never fully control Tailscale the way I wish to, and connecting networks together with it is difficult.
DN42: build a second internet to learn how it works. Public, no privacy features.
Yggdrasil: build a next generation Internet with some privacy features, and self-organization without central assignment
Tor/I2P: build a completely private internet, but sacrificing speed and the ability to operate on the base layer. (Yggdrasil and DN42 and TPL can run on individual one-to-one links, but Tor and I2P assume existing any-to-any connectivity on the layer beneath, which means you already need an internet)
It's a VPN connecting sites together to form something like a LAN, but geographically separated. Multinational company "LAN"s are set up in a similar fashion.
Tailscale is this on easy mode, of course. There's a blog post by apenwarr somewhere that I can't find right now that lays out the fundamental thesis of Tailscale and its very similar to these folks' manifesto.
But I guess that's fine. We can each have our own spaces, and never the twain shall meet.
no word on how to join though
>This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN. Connect it with friends’ homes. Remember what is missing from your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate and get it running. Build slowly. Build your community. Do it with joy.
Only useful thing for my friends would maybe have been for gaming but with online these days it’s less necessary.
I hate when people that don't know anything about this scene make laws. It just kills the fun in them...
You miss the fun and games of running your own DNS infra etc I guess.
The whole argument is: "Every other page I find myself on now has an AI generated click-bait title, shared for rage-clicks all brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors–completely covered wall-to-wall with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy"
Well, you'll still need content outside your friends group. Even with the "Promised LAN" you'll continue having the same experience.
And what for? What are the use cases? Exchange files? Jokes? Chatting? The examples given: "It’s incredible how much network transport and a trusting culture gets you—there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”."
Ok, fun. But you'll still need WhatsApp/Facetime to talk to your mom, the whole internet to search and learn, sometimes social networks to communicate or to get a job, etc etc etc.
But the networking chops to set something like this up are super practical. My current project has forced me to go from "i know how to use sockets in serious applications" to "i run GCE instance snapshots unmodified in a kernel-level TAP web of lies with tricky DNS overlaid to migrate complex workloads that can't go down to bare metal instances colocated in weird places". This is a pretty radical shift in perspective for a historical "network stuff, got it" guy like me.
In the words of that guy from the 10x programmer meme video: "cloud edge is a hype!" The cloud is terrible in 2025: arthritic Xeon SKUs no one wants marked up 10000%, FinOps is like a casino that knows the whales need to neither win too much nor lose too much: they have active calls to action when the grift is so insane that they know you'll eventually do the books and churn out forever. The security theatre around IAM and shit is like going to the DMV, it's a whole thing to make an S3 bucket now.
There are bright spots: fly is the perfect tool for a busy admin who needs to keep an eye on a bunch of prompt engineers with docker and confidence, but for the most part?
Going back to bare metal is just a strict upgrade, and once you do that, knowledge like the knowledge these folks have from operating this thing? It becomes a whole new set of superpowers over and above standard out of the box networking. Standard networking is great when it meets your needs, but if it's all you know, you don't realize how big on an appetite your business has for wizard stuff.