How to throw a LAN party in 2026

justinbecker.dev

3 points·geekman7473··4 comments

Please forgive the SEO optimized title, but I put together a blog post as a one-stop-shop guide for hosting a small LAN party in your home. I figure that if you are hosting a huge public LAN then you probably know what you are doing, and don't really need a guide. Presumably running smaller parties in your house is the gateway to doing the big ones anyways.

LAN parties are a dying tradition, so I hope that writing down some of what I've learned over the years will inspire others to give hosting a LAN a shot, especially the younger gamers out there. I ran my first LAN ~15 years ago when I was a teenager, and I hope that today's teenagers give LANs a go as well.

You left out the "circumvent copyright protection so your friends can also play the game without buying twenty copies of the game" which takes a considerable amount of time. Of course, I was lanning well before your purported time, so I can understand why you might not have included this part.

There is a section in here on piracy. That has always been part of it for me as well.

Ah yeah, I see it now. I guess I expected it to be front and center since in the old days this was item number 2 on the list. Shortly after, you had to make sure traffic still flowed as the client had been modified and the game might work on YOUR computer, but no one else's.

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