The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023) | Hacker News Reader

The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

superjumpmagazine.com

160 pointssusam87 comments

This really doesn't capture the core element of early 2000s LAN parties. You spent hours debugging basic networking issues. There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine. Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives. Passing around CDs to install games and the crack for it, since no game was ever owned by all.

Fun fact: you could make a Starcraft license key on the fly by randomly entering numbers and then altering the last digit until it worked. It wouldn't get you on Battle.net but it could get you to IPX.

God do I miss those days sometimes.

> There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine.

Our first LAN parties (early 2000s sometime) were organized without DHCP servers, just manually helping people setting up manually assigned IPs, explaining to them to not touch their network settings until they came home and wishing for the best, first day basically spent just setting up networking stuff and routing. 2-3 days post-LAN was spent helping people restore their modem/broadband connections once they were home again and we had ruined their network settings...

Was feasible until we hit ~100 people or so, then of course DHCP became a necessity.

There's an RFC for Peg DHCP! :D https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2322

While it's an April 1st RFC, I've seen this implemented at a Hackspace in Amsterdam, works very well!

First 100 then dhcp? I've been to 400 and 1000 people lanparties with ips on a clothspin (or whatever it's called in English). Works fine until someone misreads.

At a three person LAN party in 1998, I didn’t have an Ethernet card. The owner of the house had two phone lines. I connected my modem to one of his phone lines and dialed across the room to his dial-up server on his Win95 machine. We played Quake that way :-D A little laggy, but acceptable.

Im going to sound like the ultimate hipster, but the best thing about LAN parties back in the day was that video games were still very much a "geek" thing, so it attracted a certain type of person, which was fun to be around. I learned so much from people LAN parties - basic networking, IRC, torrenting, modding Half Life, little bit of music production. Video games were made for people like that, and you could tell.

Nowdays, most video games are made for the lowest common denominator of people and targeted at consoles, so the mod scene is a fraction of what it used to be, you don't meet interesting people anymore in the gaming world. So no wonder Lan parties aren't a thing anymore.

I dunno, it always felt a bit mixed to me. Of course, us who were deeply into computing and LAN parties went to the parties to play video game, nerd out and everything else, but also "popular kids" were attending with their own spots, mostly to play CS1.6 and Battlefield 1942, but in the end our parties ended up quite a mix-match of people from different walks of life, from poor families and rich families, from nerdy kids to "future sports athlete cool people", everyone just wanted to game their favorite games with others, as most of us only had modems so online-play wasn't really a thing for us.

This was early 2000s sometime, and in a really small place, less than 1000 total population, maybe that's why, but attending larger events like Dreamhack back then also seemed to attract a wide-range of different folks.

Our biggest LAN was at our School’s gym (we had 2 or 3 smaller ones before that inside the normal building, and of course a few even smaller private ones) in 2004, I think we had ~80 people playing over 2 days, the more normal ones going home to sleep (or just being there for a single day), the full nerds having sleeping bags. It was more nerds, but we had all kinds of people (and even an oversized casemodding sponsor that probably didn’t make any money with their stand).

Fun times. But I don’t think I’d still survive a LAN like that, nowadays. Too little sleep, too much on-screen gaming, too much action, too many energy drinks. Later this year a few of the people from back then will rent a holiday house in Denmark for our modern, yet more relaxed version: A week of boardgaming ;)

> You spent hours debugging basic networking issues.

And that was FUN, as long as you were enjoying the tinkering and not stressing about missing a game.

> Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives.

I think this is an under-remembered aspect, or at least, under-told. LAN parties were filesharing parties too, sometimes that more than gaming. (Which caused no end of strife with the gaming folks, until we learned to segment the network to keep the filesharing congestion from lagging the gaming packets.)

The heyday of mp3 also coincided with the explosion of coffee-shop wifi, in the days before client isolation. Grab a latte, browse Network Neighborhood...

In college we had Mojo for downloading tracks out of other people's iTunes, for a precious little amount of time (maybe just a year or year and a half before they released an update that killed the actual filesharing). It was always fun finding hidden gems in people's libraries - learned about some of my favorite artists that way.

LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :)

I am moderately obsessed with LAN parties, so I built a file sharing tool for LAN parties specifically, if you want to check it out https://justinbecker.dev/blog/2026/05/16/why-i-built-lanbuck...

There’s still a few large ones. LANfest and quakecon are two that come to mind. Also LAN all night.

Very long time I ago was there last time (Maybe 2006 or 2008?) but Dreamhack is still going strong and seems to still be the largest one, and even have branched out to different countries now it seems!

No modern LAN party discussion is complete without reference to kentonv's houses:

https://kentonshouse.com/

https://lanparty.house/

I love this technically, but part of the magic was all setting up trestle tables, sitting in someone’s garage / outbuilding, and it all being a bit raw.

I vividly remember cutting a hole in the side of a Shuttle XPC case to fit the fan of a GPU someone had bought over for me at one. That was all part of the experience for me.

I'm torn on this issue as well. I have fond memories of the janky setups, but also it is nice to actually have time to play games at the party. At some LANs, I've spent hours and hours just trying to get everyone in the game and playing. Plus with a setup like his you don't have to worry about finding older games that will run on the lowest common denominator hardware that people bring.

As you said though, there was a certain magic those days...

Yeah a few of us who used to LAN together picked up on this article independently. We all came to the conclusion most of us are on Macs now, and GFN seemed like the path of least resistance.

He touches on this on the website and I agree with his statement

> I do feel a lot of nostalgia for the days of trying to pack four people, four computers, and four monitors into one car on the way to a friends' LAN party, setting up machines on haphazardly arranged card tables with questionable seating arrangements, daisy-chaining power strips and network hubs. I'm a little less nostalgic for the experience of trying to copy game files over the network to get everyone on the same version, or pitying the one friend who inevitably has to reinstall Windows and doesn't manage to get in-game until after midnight. [...] Even the most enthusiastic of us didn't really want to do all that more than, like, 3-4 times a year, and a lot of people—even those who like games—really don't care to do it at all. I'm not even sure if I could do it anymore, as a 40-something with two kids!

Yeah a few of us who used to LAN together picked up on this article independently. We all came to the conclusion most of us are on Macs now, and GFN seemed like the path of least resistance.

>I have on multiple occasions gone player to player, typing the IP into their address bar for them.

Sounds like you play with some serious noobs, friend.

You would be surprised. Many of my guests are professional software engineers, and they still struggle with these types of things. I suspect this is downstream of how streamlined the gaming experience has become in the last 15 years. Most people are buying, downloading, installing, and launching games exclusively through launchers these days, so even the technically minded might not have the muscle memory for "the old ways." I have also had to explain to people "yeah you just click on game.exe" who then didn't know what I meant by "DOT E-X-E". It's just a sign of the times.

Nice, I'm hosting a LAN party with friends next month, I might try this out. Thanks for sharing!

Are there any plans to open source it?

For now, no. I would want to clean up the innards quite a bit before releasing the source, and it has already consumed so much of my time as it is. I also need to figure out Linux support as well before really "going public".

> The defining element of a LAN party, however, is the social factor. Playing a game with others in the same physical space, sometimes huddled side-by-side on the same large table, is an intimate affair. Cries of joy and frustration fill the air.

That's really the major thing that made LAN parties so special. Being in the same room is so, so different than online gaming together and hanging out on discord.

It also forces you to compromise when choosing games and maps, because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people. You end up playing games you're not as familiar with (and not as dominant in), so your friends will play your game with you later. This brings you into situations, where the person next to you frantically gives you the crash course in rush build orders while building their own base, making the payoff so much better when it actually works out.

> because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people.

Probably depends on the size, but even our tiny LANs we had some groups preferring some games, other's preferring others, and plenty of other activities others were doing throughout the LAN. The group that managed the LAN I was familiar with was really into medieval costumes, events and roleplaying, so bunch of chainmail making, clothes making and what not going on at the same time while others play BFV or Starcraft, or people sleeping under the tables.

Same here, even for smaller LANs people sometimes sat games out, sometimes watching, sometimes doing something else.

There's two LAN parties - the small group of friends (4 to 10, say) where you'd mostly be playing the same game, but as it progressed people would drop off or split up (we ended up with one small group playing a Heroes III comp-stomp on hotseat, another watching someone playing HalfLife).

Then there's the larger parties that are closer to gaming conventions, which have so many people that you basically have to have multiple gaming sessions, if not multiple games.

I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3

It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experience possible for participants :3

[1]: https://tg.no (no English site exists unfortunately)

I attend “The Party” in Aars, Denmark for a few years around 2000. It was at the crossroads of broadband, but got to taste the demoscene vs gamer experience. It was magnificent. There were a real festival atmosphere, and afterwards you’d declare never to attend again - that was, until the tickets were released and you somehow couldn’t help yourself.

Good times.

It's an uncomfortable truth that even TG is failing to pull in participants lately, but LANs don't have the critical role in nerd culture they had in the 2000s. I'm happy it still exists and the board seem to be making some decent attempts at revitalising it for a modern crowd

Historic bit: in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a bit of a trend - and quite some tension - of demoscene parties getting taken over by LAN parties. I believe the Gathering used to be a demoscene party, but completely transformed into a gaming LAN party.

There were also those that tried to be both (I believe Assembly is doing both to this day) or those that kept the gaming out (Mekka/Symposium, which no longer exists, but there's been a followup party called Breakpoint, and later another followup called Revision that still exists).

The Gathering used to be a demoscene event! Even hosted the scene.org awards in 2011. Looking at pouet.net, quite a lot of famous demos were released there, such as:

* desert dream by kefrens in 1993

* tint by TBL(!) in 1996

* rupture by ASD in 2009

* numb res by carillon & cyberiad and fairlight

Here is a TV report from the first event in 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SACVynerMhA

Also shoutout to ODD's world domination, which is somewhat of a meme in the Norwegian demoscene community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgnBi6PuA5M

Today, the demoscene still lives in Norway albeit arguably on life support. Those that are still interested usually go to "proper demoparties". Solskogen, the old demoparty, had its last event during COVID. Black Valley is a replacement and it seems to be doing well. I was at Solskogen '17 and it was a great collection of hacker-minded people. There was also plenty of alcohol, I can understand why demosceners - an aging population, would prefer their own party to the alcohol-free The Gathering.

The Gathering currently has a mix of creative and e-sport events. I feel like the end of creative has loomed over our heads for 10 years, at least we definitely felt like a minority when I was crew back in the first half of the 2010s. But it still lives, and people still participate in the competitions!

Stratlan UK is still going. It was a spinoff of Multiplay's i-series. Now independent and ran three times a year. The next one is in July, not ever had a chance to go but always heard the great things. Will one day.

As someone else said in this thread, my bed time is now 11pm so no more all nights for me.

https://stratlan.com/

As kids me and my friends used to muse over the fact that growing old, eventually moving into a care home would be awesome. Pension, you say? Well, what's that if not an unending LAN party!

It turns out reality is different - the older I get, the less interested I have in computer games. It feels like I've seen it all at this point, and I'd rather see grass twice than a virtual anything.

When me, and my generation, are old enough where people start getting shipped into care homes, I suspect there won't be any interest at all, save perhaps a nostalgia trip every now and again.

I feel both sides of this. I'm almost 40 and for me it comes in waves. I dumped like 100 hours into ARC Raiders over the past few months and had a great time with it, and before that I've loved obsessing over single player adventures like Spider-Man and RDR2, as well as indie darlings like the Hollow Knight games.

But there are always gaps in there where I don't feel as drawn into it. Right now I try to get in a few rounds of Deep Rock Galactic every week with my twelve year old, and that hits the right things as far as having some progression for us to chase together while still being time-boxed to clear rounds and not having a huge survival/base-building component to it like Minecraft or Valheim or Don't Starve Together.

Basically... I expect this pattern will remain for the remainder of my adult life. I'm not going to retire and suddenly be like "ah yes now I will revisit six decades of forgotten gems sitting in my backlog" but I'm also not going to completely walk away from it. Rather certain things will grab me and I'll obsess over them for a bit, and then I'll take a break to work on a coding project or build something with my hands, or putter around the garden, or whatever else it is.

Lan? Still awesome.

For my kids' parties I have 3x OG xboxes. Each has 4 controllers. Plug them into a router.

12 player lan. Halo, Nascar, (6 player) crimson skies, mechassult.

https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/wiki/Xbox sort by per console and total players.

I promise they have vastly more fun all being in the same room playing each other all at once than anything with modern graphics.

The last enjoyable LAN party I went to took place in the summer of 2004.

The next year, most of the guys that would frequent these parties were completely engrossed in World of Warcraft. They just weren't interested in playing any LAN games, or any of the socialization. Many of them were in WoW guilds with people that lived in completely different time zones, so they weren't even there when the few of us others tried to play something.

At least to me, that was a watershed moment. To me the magic was gone, and I more or less lost interest in multiplayer gaming for years.

To me LAN wasn't just about gaming, but also shooting the breeze, talk abut techy or gaming stuff. When two thirds of the people were glued to their screens 24/7 grinding WoW, a lot of that died.

EDIT: Not saying that WoW single handedly killed LAN, but I feel like it was final nail in the coffin.

WoW was a big part of it but times were changing without it - and in-person WoW raids showed up now and then (40 man raids with 40 people in one room is a site to see).

The real killer is that many WoW players did NOT play with "local friends" for very long; once you got into raiding you likely joined a guild that was spread across the country or world.

Our high school computer science team did a StarCraft LAN party on a flight coming back from a coding competition. We felt like the coolest kids in the world when we did that.

One seat plug per laptop, and a bonus one for the network switch haha.

We did this on a train! Also StarCraft, also a coding competition, also felt like the coolest kids in the world.

Don't you tell me the competition was in New Jersey...

Nope, it was in the Midwest.

My core memory of LAN parties was the one I organized at my university and there was so much power draw it threw the breaker for the entire student lounge building.

Had to run a massive extension cord across to the next building to spread it out a little so we wouldn’t keep tripping it.

This is still very much alive in the fighting game scene. At least in the US, every major city has at least one local running a bracket and casual sets regularly. This has many of them, not all: https://sk-tekken.com/tracker

I was reminiscing with some mates about LAN parties when we were younger — pushing mattresses against the wall to make room for folding tables so you could pack 20 people into a house. Cat5 running from daisy-chained switches (since this was pre-WiFi). Hunking over large beige monitors. Slamming network shares as everyone tried to download the same game ISO.

Then we realised we're the adults now, we can do what we want. So about once or twice a year, we'll block out a weekend and do an old-school LAN. Maybe just 4-5 of us. Order in nice take-away, drink nice whiskey, try and squeaze in as much game time as possible. Its harder now that we have kids, but worth it! Hardware is different, games are different, but still the same experience!

My teenage son has held multiple LAN parties this past year at our house. They are far from dead, just maybe not quite as widespread as they used to be when I was his age.

I'd say the primary benefit of LAN parties now is how capable "old" hardware is. I have several laptops I configure with Linux and several games and environments loaded up. Smoke test the whole thing before anybody gets here. This year we played UT2004 with custom maps and characters. That game ran flawlessly on a 10 year old laptop with no dGPU. Emulation as well, but I actually still have most of those systems still.

Me and some other friends used laptops (think they were IBM ThinkPads), PCMCIA Ethernet adapters (maybe from Xircom?) and thin Ethernet (coax) to play multiplayer DOOM on a Reno Air or AA flight from San Jose to Austin once. I think we were using IPX for networking and we just strung coax between the seats.

Needless to say this was before 9/11 and the flight attendants took it in their stride.

Studios have "forgotten" even more than players. My friends and I regularly have Age of Empires 2 LAN parties, and you can't even connect to each other without an internet connection and steam or Xbox account.

It feels a bit dystopian considering that 25 years ago the very same game let me pop the CD out and put it in another computer to set up a LAN.

The article opens by saying LAN's chief advantage was "nearly eliminating latency" and closes by saying revival is as easy as sharing your Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi and a wired switch are not the same thing. The one thing that made LAN parties technically distinctive is the one thing the revival pitch quietly removes.

The distinction they're drawing isn't WLAN vs LAN but WAN vs LAN. Remember that in the peak days of the LAN party it was an alternative to gaming on dial-up or DSL - even if you had a good connection it was unlikely the whole game had one. A reasonable Wi-Fi connection today is miles beyond the WAN connections of Y2K.

The big LAN parties also had a fat internet connection at a time when the best you could have at home was INSD. But even more important was that everyone at the LAN shared their piracy collections over DC++ or FTP. Good times.

> that everyone at the LAN shared their piracy collections over DC++ or FTP

And that one person sharing their 100GB (virtually unheard of amount of storage at the time) archive of porn, proudly announcing themselves as a "winner" of something at the end of the party.

There's a huge difference between the latency you get from connecting to each other via the Internet, and the latency you get going via a local network, even if that network is a wireless one.

There's an even bigger difference between that, and going online via the Internet back in the days when LAN parties were really popular, because the most common method of connecting to the internet was via modem.

IME WiFi always adds ~20ms, which might be more than a server in your city (though realistically 50ms is a good number and 100ms is acceptable).

But I expect this number gets worse in a LAN party due to contention.

The millisecond added by Wi-Fi isn't changing the experience.

Just avoid or throttle downloads while playing.

Average latency difference isn't much, but wireless's inherent sensitivity to interference makes the worst-case latency difference a lot higher. I don't want to lose a game because somebody in the vicinity turned on a poorly shielded microwave oven. If you're going to all the effort of getting everybody together in person, why not do it right and set up a wired network?

> I don't want to lose a game because somebody in the vicinity turned on a poorly shielded microwave oven.

You shouldn't be using 2.4GHz anyway.

And there isn't much else that's likely to interfere out of nowhere.

> If you're going to all the effort of getting everybody together in person, why not do it right and set up a wired network?

Sure, go ahead and buy a bulk pack of cables, but I don't think it's going to have a particularly large impact on a generic small LAN.

I think LAN parties made sense in a context where internet speeds weren't what they are today, where pirated software and games were distributed in these environments, and where you could get together in groups to play CS, Starcraft, or Age of Empires. But nowadays, with internet access and resources so widespread, and peer-to-peer networks offering countless more than eMule, they've lost their original purpose. Perhaps a pivotal shift for these events is needed, focusing more on building social networks than on the simple idea of eating pizza and sleeping on inflatable mattresses on the floor.

In wired LAN mode you can play Mario Kart 8 deluxe with up to 12 players, or Mario Kart World with up to 24 players.

(picture of original/SNES Mario Kart reminded me of this; note you can also play it on the Switch)

*Super Mario Kart

We always hold one at $WORK at the end of the year. I am not a fan of racing nor CS (prefer UT) so I went and made a retrogaming corner last year.

The year before that the Among Us was the highlight. I landed on imposter so many times they started ejecting me habitually. :-D

I think this year I'll finally play some AoE2 with my wife. We're going to Wololo the shit out of my colleagues. Well, mostly her. I'll just send her some tribute I guess.

My own efforts in this area amount to creating the game, Space Nerds in Space[1], which is a LAN game in which everyone gathers in a room with their computers, and each computer acts as one of the stations on the bridge of a starship: navigation, weapons, science, comms, engineering, damage control, etc. Multi-bridge is supported as well, so if you can overcome the insurmountable task of gathering enough people together, you can indulge in that luxury. This is in the same genre as such games as Artemis: spaceship bridge simulator and Empty Epsilon, but with the additional hurdle that it's linux only. Good luck mustering enough spacenerds. If there are missing features, well, it's open source, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.

[1] https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space

"Who's that LAN guy and why is he throwing so many parties?" was running joke in our group of friends back in the days ...

For those in Australia, there are regular LAN parties held in most cities still: https://dadlan.au/ (held monthly) and https://www.thebiglan.com/ (~5 a year).

Quake Arena and LAN parties during college created some of the best memories I have related to computer games.

I used to get invited just to debug networking issues which seems to have foreshadowed much of my career.

The hardware people would bring was amazing.

"Here's a 24-port BaseT100 hub" "I built my computer in this flight case, may I place it atop your tower?" "The network card in my PC has an integrated switch, so we can easily reach the other end of that table"

Someone posted these photos a while back which seem to capture the spirit: https://issung.com/posts/lanphotosarchive/

We did the LAN party for a while then converted it to magic the gathering game nights because we could sit around the table, see and talk to each other instead of through the screen.

Both were fun. The magic the gathering was akin to a guys poker night.

I think lan parties are set for resurgence since we're almost at the point where a small handheld can run almost any game. What killed lan parties wasn't the internets. It's having to schlep a CRT to my friend's house.

But LAN parties were probably more common during the CRT era.

I wonder how much of an impact harder to crack games has had, as well as many titles removing LAN play as a form of DRM. PC LANs were basically driven by piracy.

I have fond memories of carrying my computer and CRT monitor to LAN parties in a homemade bicycle trailer !

It was at the time of 10BASE2 ethernet... I also had a huge coaxial cable I used to hang from my window to the neighbors window over the street :P

I’m bringing them back! I added a LAN Party mode to my upcoming Minotaur inspired game.

Attended Dreamhack in the late 90s. Fun times! I was always AMAZED by the demoscene.

Don't forget bawls water and imported caffeine packs.

They are far from dead, just less popular. We would host small gatherings regularly when we were young (mid 30s now). Things died down a bit when the internet hit and we would stay up all night at home playing CS 1.6 looking for 5on5 server on in quakenet IRC (good old times).

I resparked this, when I hosted this for my best friends wedding as a best man's gift for him. Was the same fun as when we were young. We kept going and started again visting https://www.northcon.de/ which is once per year in Germany. Many recommend to visit https://www.caggtus.de/ but we yet have to make this one happen.

One thing got harder though: aligning everyone's schedule. Life is happening, and this is fine. Wonder how long we can make it to NorthCon :)

I was lucky enough to have one 3months ago :)

me too. Convention-X-treme in Germany. 430 people, one big hall, a whole weekend, incll. sleeping areas and (affordable) food and drinks delivered to your seat.

The demand is huge, and it's a gamble if you can manage to get a ticket or not, but it's totally worth it.

Not forgotten… we just all got too busy :(

LAN parties?! Pfff, what we would’ve given for a LAN. When I were a lad we made do with a badly soldered RS232 cable and a copy of DOOM. The shareware WAD at that.

It barely worked but we were ‘appy!

…after Cleese et al.

nice

We really need a tool to flag and remove AI slop like this.

That is called the flag button. It works by majority vote. But beware: if you disagree with the majority too many times, your flag button is silently changed to a placebo.

Oh well now, let's see if it really is a disagreement with the majority indeed.

Nothing about this screamed AI slop to me. What makes you think it’s AI slop?

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