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Comment by kentonv | Hacker News Reader

Heh, of all arguably-valid definitions of "LAN Party" I think this one is as far away from mine as you can get.

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. :)

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This is a pretty amazing setup! I think in 2025 I would definitely prefer something like this. However, I think back in "the day" part of what made LAN parties fun was that everyone's PC was so individualized. I remember all of my high school friends and I coming of age and building our PCs. I helped a lot of my friends build their PCs and we all chose different things (such as the amount of RGB LEDs, which I thought were tacky...). I remember a friend of a friend had a water cooling system and I was so excited about checking it out. Also, things like the desktop wallpaper you chose, etc, contributed to this. There was something very magical about it all. Lugging our PCs to each others houses was a real labor of love.

And a real risk of a shattered CRT screen! I remember carting my bougie 17” Viewsonic around in the back of my Hyundai Excel and wondering if it would pick up a crack along the voyage…

Back in the hayday of lan parties in like 1995-1997 my only monitor was a absolute boulder of a 21" viewsonic (this is pre flatscreen or rather pre decent flatscreens, you could get like 15-17s but they were expensive and absolute trash). One night coming home from the bars, half drunk, in an alley my friend and I found an abandoned (maybe..) horizontal-able handtruck. Made the lan party load unload so much better.

Also 10-base-2 [1] Ethernet where you always had to debug a dodgy terminator.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

Or a shitty cable. Or the terminators were missing. Or both. Our rich friend buying a switch was a real life saver.

Token-ring marathon

In the previous century i visited many lan parties with my absolute beast of a pc case (an old Siemens 4U 19" metal monster where i stuffed an Amd Athlon setup in with a bunch of harddrives) that i got for free from somewhere. Then carried the huge CRT screen and placed it on top of it. It was insane, i was young (and insane), but i got it all dirt cheap. Most people loved it. And even back then repurposing discarded or super cheap hardware for as long as possible for as many functions as possible gave me much joy and saved me a great bunch of money.

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.

the height of 'gpu' in my lan party days was a voodoo 2 card.

4K LCD displays can be delicate as well and prone to cracking. I always worry when I am moving one.

CRTs might tougher than we gave them credit for. I once dropped a Sony Trinitron from shoulder height when it hit a low ceiling. Didn't crack. Still worked. (And yes, this was at a LAN party.)

When I was a kid we threw out our old B&W tv. I wanted to smash the CRT but had heard that they could explode so from a distance I fired several .22 bullets at the screen. They had no effect. IIRC the screen wasn't damaged at all? I can hardly believe what I'm writing but it was true

CRTs have to maintain a near-vacuum inside IIRC. So it's probably a matter of safety to make them strong; if they're too delicate and get mishandled, they implode and some hapless consumer gets a face full of glass.

Wouldn't imploding rather than exploding prevent the face full of glass? But I suppose it has to be pretty strong to maintain that vacuum even if they assumed no one ever touched, moved, or got near it.

CRTs implode—and then glass flies out at high velocity.

That website was a very fun read :) what a cool place and so awesome to have so many friends to play with.

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.

The Promised LAN is a bit of a WAN party, but I would say that "LAN party" can certainly be assumed to include virtual LANs.

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.

For my definition, I totally don't care whether the server is local or in the cloud. I have a fast enough internet connection that it won't make a difference. (I mean. I would _like_ servers to be local, but I'm not going to refuse a game just because it uses cloud servers.)

The important thing is only that the players are local.

Haha, have to drop the link to the recent Linus Tech Tips video on your house!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Y0MVUgjOw

This video is great, but it must have been awkward to have Linus narrating about your own house while you sit there. Why not interview Kenton?

Honestly I think interviews are just not something Linus does a lot of. He has a particular workflow where he writes a script for himself and then acts it out for the camera. Changing it up would be going outside his comfort zone and there wasn't a lot of time.

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.

Funnily enough the (only) LAN parties I ever experienced "back in the day" were pretty similar to yours:

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?

You just loaded up your enormous full tower PC and 17 inch CRT monitor in the back of your friend's brother's cousin's friend's station wagon, and made it happen. I had a Rubbermaid tub that I would use to lug the tower and all the necessary cables and accessories. A properly gaming-specced laptop would have been absurdly expensive (they still are) and a bit like cheating anyway.

I had a lanboy? case that came with a carry strap. The case was also mostly aluminum so it was pretty light. Not many people had laptops back then. Managers at work maybe had one. Most people had a proper desktop.

Don’t forget your speakers! Got show off your highly refined collection of mp3s…

Laptops??? There weren't gaming-capable laptops in the 90's, and besides that, the ultimate status symbol at a LAN party was lugging in your 80-pound 20" Sony Trinitron CRT.

I vividly remember the desk holding my 15" Trinitron slowly bending under the load, but I don't know what it would have weighed. I'd imagine that 20" was a bear to get out of the car and make your way inside with.

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.

This is what I thought which is what confused me - I guess lugging around CRTs just seemed a little much.

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.

Mate, my pentium 100mhz laptop played quake, carmageddon and nfs with at least 15fps in the 90's~

I did bring my dell craptop with that I scrounged parts from 3 nonworking used business ones together...it had the ATi Mobility 1 (Rage 128?) and could do half life 1 if you really tweaked things or Quake 3.

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.

To me, one of the defining features of a LAN party is a single broadcast domain. I thought that is what this was, at first, but it is actually an L3 overlay network with DNS and BGP and the whole nine yards. Somewhat a stretch for a LAN. :D

Absolutely. I think while plenty of games now can rely on UDP hole punching or file sharing can be done with centralized cloud storage, part of the earlier LAN appeal was sharing a segment together and all the ease that brought.

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.

I agree with that: to me a LAN Party is about having the players physically in the same place.

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".

Big fan of both your LAN houses! One thing I noticed is that you don't seem to have any art/pictures/decorations on any of your walls. Is that an intentional choice?

At the time the pictures were taken, we hadn't gotten around to populating the walls much. Now we've hung up a lot of our kids' art, nicely framed. Amusingly a lot of it looks sort of like abstract modern art, like Jackson Pollock or Rothko, enough so to confuse guests. :)

Abstract modern art seems to have some things in common with some kids' art: focus on materials, color, texture, perception; and representational art may focus on symbolism rather than realistic rendering. There's also an authenticity to art that is created for personal expression without worrying what other people will think about it.

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.

I actually had a similar question / comment but about plants! We have (at least) one in every room in our house and they do wonders for the space.

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?

Indoor plants are tricky with cats. They will chew on them, and many plants can be poisonous to them. Also keeping them watered is work, and they can create a mess if they grow in the wrong direction.

We have a lot of plants outside, though.

Makes a lot of sense. Mystery solved, thank you :)

Very nice. Well thank you for sharing your house with us, truly aspirational!

In 1999 or so, there was a exclusive demo of Unreal Tournament you could download and play if you had a 3dFX video card. However, someone found out if you created a text file called "glide2.dll" in the game binary directory, you could run the demo in a software rendered mode.

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 was in high school in the late 90s to early aughts. The school system used Novell NetWare with Windows NT workstations. At the time, their security was lax. In fact, they set up the directory so that by default, every user logged in using the first four letters of their first name coupled with the last four letters of their last name as the username, and the last four digits of their phone number as their password. I realized this also applied to school employees. Most of whom never changed their password. All of whom were local administrators for computers. Some of whom had network administration rights.

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 love these stories!

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.

My high school computer lab in 1998-99 was full of Windows 98 machines running a program called "Fortress" which was meant to lock it down and prevent tampering.

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?"

If you aren’t using IPX/SPX, it isn’t a real LAN party.

Or there’s true Scotsman all the way down to the turtle.

Null modem LAN parties!

I recall playing Warcraft I with my friend over null modem. Kind of boutique LAN party.

I fondly remember playing Atomic Bomberman over IPX/SPX with a bunch of people. One of the best LAN party games ever (to me).

exactly. that said, [ipxwrapper] (https://www.solemnwarning.net/ipxwrapper/) goes a very long way doing favors without needing a VPN, just an ipxrelay.

It's more like a "VPN party".

Sibling comments here have suggested "WAN party", but that sounds more like one that anyone on the public Internet can join.

I think your definition/setup is the wrongest as it does not capture the spirit. You have a cyber café.

It doesn’t capture the spirit of a group of friends getting together to play video games in a shared space? Or there’s a different definition of the LAN party spirit that somehow entirely precludes that aspect?

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”

You are trying to deconstruct something, keeping part of it and calling it the same. You seem to be making my argument for me, so I have nothing to add.

I think the spirit is people playing computer games with each other in the same room. I don't think it really matters who owns the computers.

There's a slightly relevant response under "Dragging over your own computers is part of the fun of LAN parties. Why build them in?".

Ah yes, spending an hour getting setup then at least two peoples computers don't boot or the GPU doesn't work...then no one has or installed any of the games you're hosting. Good memories

Then we all stand around and help debug it

So much fun.... It's so much much fun that LAN parties have gotten bigger and bigger in the past 25 years... Wait, or was it the other way around that this is exactly why people just play over the Internet with each other?

A cyber cafe would be full of strangers though.

Looks like a nice setup, but ideally the room should be like 25% of that size. Being almost uncomfortably close to each other is a feature :).

Hybrid LANs are also pretty good. During the Christmas-New Year break, old school friends would often have a LAN party with ZeroTier or similar set up, so people who couldn't make it could still drop in and out. You'd get a great LAN party vibe from the room full of PCs and ethernet cables everywhere, but you'd also get much higher player counts. Everyone wins.

Hah! OP feels more like a WAN party :P

I think we can welcome virtual LAN parties into the fold, especially post-pandemic. Also games like Diablo 4 have given up on LAN and are WAN-only (though there is couch co-op?) but still fun to play in person, as are MMOs, online team FPS, etc.

Interesting! I grew up before network cards was a thing in home computers (Commodore 64 and Amiga), but a group of my friends organized what we called «meetings» which I would characterize as your traditional LAN party. I remember at some point that we hooked up two Amigas over a fairly long parallel cable and were able to send data across. Cannot recall if we actually were able to copy larger files between them though. Fun times!

Jesus fuck.

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.

Do y'all get mosquitos on the roof? My back patio is screened in and some are still sneaking through. Would love to know the wired-ethernet-certainty type of approach to dealing with this.

There are sometimes mosquitoes, but there's usually a pretty nice breeze on the roof which makes it hard for mosquitoes to navigate there.

My definition was close to yours, but the guest computers were bad. Like, an iMac G3 in the year 2012 or some Hackintosh'd ewaste PC.

Cool I also live in Austin and I heard of your LAN party house many times, curious though, how often do you LAN?

People move far away but still want to participate in LAN parties.

* offer comes with some money-binding requirements

Wow, that place must have cost millions to build.

Only 1 (one) cat picture. This is wrong... :-)

your definition is LAN Party with BYOB but not BYOD

WAN party maybe ?

> My LAN party: All my friends come over to my house and use the computers that I have already set up for them.

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.

did you try ipxwrapper?

https://www.solemnwarning.net/ipxwrapper/

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