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Comment by geekman7473 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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".

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!

>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.

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