> Titles like 1998’s Half-Life ... Other first-person shooters (FPS) like Counter-Strike (itself originally a mod for Half-Life) ... the typically low network speeds of the period meant that these games, unlike slower-paced and less graphically intensive strategy games, were nearly unplayable over an internet connection. In this moment, in which communications technology was being outpaced by graphical power, the LAN (local area network) party was born.
Yup that's exactly how I remember it. We were playing half-life at home LAN parties (often at my place and sometimes at big LANs) even before the beta of CS came out. We'd spend lots of time on the various maps, like the "small" map (if I remember the name correctly).
We'd also play Warcraft II on LANs but Warcraft II was playable over "KALI": we'd simulate a LAN over the Internet. For Warcraft II the latency was good enough already.
My best LAN though was the one between my home and my neighbour's home, where a coax cable (!) would hang from window to window, on the second story, in the street. And the phone calls: "Mate, did you forget to put the terminator on a cable, my LAN ain't working anymore!" (if you were to forget the BNC terminator, nothing would work anymore).
"RJ45" ethernet cables already existed but we were broke ass teenagers: so we managed to fetch a shitload of coax network cards and cables a company was throwing away. We didn't have the proper tool(s) though so we'd use kitchen scissors to cut and attach the 'T' connectors to the cables (by squeezing them with the handle of the kitchen scissors). It was totally ghetto but it worked fine.
Great memories, thanks for TFA and for posting TFA!
gorbypark 9 days ago [-]
Not quite the same, but I used to play Duke Nukes 3D (iirc) with my friend over a direct modem link (like my modem would call his, no ISP involved). I don't remember the exact details, but playing over the proper internet was more or less unplayable with our 33.6 modems, but the direct connection worked pretty well!
Lammy 7 days ago [-]
Starcraft supported direct-dial too and a friend and I played it that way all the time.
chupasaurus 9 days ago [-]
Warcraft 2 was playable because it has a good netcode, it's easier to write one for RTS than FPS though.
sshine 10 days ago [-]
I remember showing up at my first LAN party, ~20 years younger than my online friends. They just couldn’t believe I was actually 13. They were really nice. One woman had a son my age that I went to a music festival with when I was 20. Another got me my first job as a programmer.
Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
hobs 9 days ago [-]
Haha I had this exact experience, we showed up for a Halo lan party (the original) and we were 15 and 16 thinking that we'd be driving out to the burbs to play some games with some people our age, we met on a local LAN forum board.
We rang the doorbell and an "older" man answered the door, and we were confused and said "uh we're here to see ____" and he was like "That's me."
For context all of our lan parties up to this point were us schlepping tube tvs around to various basements of our friends houses, occasionally getting to mooch some pizza off of someone.
Instead, we walk into the huge suburban house and there's four rooms with gigantic flat screen televisions setup for 16 player madness and the entire place is filled with adult couples, the men came to game and the women to socialize and cook and have fun.
They had an entire table of snacks and drinks and everything you could ever want as a wee gamer.
We were so blown away but they were super nice and didn't make us feel too awkward. When the game started they asked us how good we were, "uhh, we beat legendary" - they laughed and put us on the same team for the first round.
The second round we were not allowed to play on the same team, turns out the kids can game :)
We made long term friends and ended up scrimming and hanging out with people 20 and 30 years our senior, a total blast and yeah, I don't see me hanging out with 16 years today.
kennyadam 9 days ago [-]
When I was 19, I used to meet up with people of all ages from various torrent trackers (we were all staff from various sites, forums, affiliated 'radio' stations, IRC channels, etc.) and it was awesome. People paid for me to fly to Amsterdam with them to hang out with even more people and I think the oldest was a guy in his 50s, but back then we were like, I don't know, Internet People and that was what we were centered around. I miss those days like crazy now.
lmm 9 days ago [-]
> Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
Parents were sane back then, it's today that they've gone crazy. They watch too much news and keep their kids caged up, and end up doing far more harm than what they're trying to prevent.
SlightlyLeftPad 9 days ago [-]
The massive irony here is that the internet itself has become a much more dangerous place for kids than itself or going outside ever was. Particularly when it comes to mental health, parents don’t let their kids go out but the same parents put no parental controls or at the very least, screen time limits on their devices.
__MatrixMan__ 9 days ago [-]
I'm happy to report that the internet is still safer than what "going outside" meant for me as a kid. Mostly we were blowing things up or seeing which roofs we could get on.
All that freedom was good for my head though, so I'll give you that one.
Aeolun 9 days ago [-]
I'll argue that blowing things up and seeing which roofs you can get on are a lot healthier than Facebook.
sshine 9 days ago [-]
> the internet itself has become a much more dangerous place for kids
There used to be a joke about the Internet:
Where men are men, women are men, and kids are FBI agents.
It seems that this is no longer true, and with the massive influx of kids, that itself has increased risk.
It wouldn't make much sense to be a child predator on the Internet in 1998. There just weren't that many kids.
pkphilip 9 days ago [-]
Internet has become a crazier place now than it was during the 1990s. Also, the smart phone revolution (with the cameras) has led to a whole bunch of crazies taking over the internet via their mobile devices.
treflop 9 days ago [-]
Oh helicopter parents existed back then too.
And these days, there are still plenty of parents that let their kids run wild.
I don’t think anything has changed.
hyperman1 9 days ago [-]
Sleep in a gym hall? I don't remember sleeping much at lan partys. Besides, there were more kids than computers, if you fell asleep you lost your seat.
bionsystem 9 days ago [-]
I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).
ayewo 9 days ago [-]
> I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).
I guess what gp is saying is that not everyone that attends the LAN party is able to sling along their computer to the venue so there are more people than machines and of course limited seating for folks without a machine.
BTW, the gp said you might lose your seat and not that your seat gets stolen since there aren’t enough seats to go round, there will always be someone who has been standing for while ready to take you seat.
hyperman1 9 days ago [-]
Correct. Everyone knew everyone, so stealing is the wrong way to look at this. A lot of people had no PC and were just hanging around, looking at other people playing mostly Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. We tended to e.g. switch the PC between players when they got fragged.
Some people played until total exhaustion, so around 3AM you started to see people fall asleep while playing. That's the moment the hopefull looker in the next seat would gently grab they keyboard and mouse and 'borrow' the sleeper's PC and finally join the game.
Good times. Don't ask about the smell of the room after a 2 day fragfest.
j45 10 days ago [-]
The interesting thing that you point out to me is the indirect mentoring / support from someone ahead of you in tech you received simply based on mutual interests.
Sadly there's a lot of segments where juniors want to learn much on their own, often re-learning lessons of the past that could have been put towards more meaningful progress for them in hindsight.
intelVISA 9 days ago [-]
Sometimes it is a necessary experience for them.
j45 9 days ago [-]
Totally. There's plenty of necessary experiences that are shared.
theyinwhy 9 days ago [-]
I prefer learning myself as it leads to finding novel solutions.
j45 9 days ago [-]
First principles learning is critical for sure.
Being able to navigate first principles concepts and learning to use them gets to what's novel is more a little quicker.
Jare 9 days ago [-]
> Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
Back then, I can't imagine parents letting their daughters do that either. The kind of freedom to roam at 12yo that you describe was what allowed me access to people and computers we didn't have the money for; but I've always been very conscious that my sisters would have never been given that kind of opportunity.
distances 9 days ago [-]
My sisters definitely did have the same kind of freedom I did. Say, my little sister took her first intercontinental flight (with two plane changes I think) alone around age 14.
sshine 9 days ago [-]
I took my first 300 km train ride alone at the age of 7.
My parents told me the name of the destination train station, and that my grandmother would be waiting on arrival.
The train staff knew I was travelling alone and checked up on me a few times and gave me free drinks.
Two years later the train stopped being a direct path, so I had to switch trains halfway.
I remember all the little unknowns made me very anxious that I'd get lost somewhere.
For example, they changed the second departure platform so it didn't match the one on my ticket. And the departure platform was located elsewhere on the train station, not in direct connection with the national lines.
When coming back, I remember they'd announce my city as the next stop, and then I'd see these other city names fly by. I remember thinking "They must have forgot to stop!" because I didn't understand that those city names were suburbs of the capital city that I lived in, and that the national train went directly to the train station.
30 years later I still remember all of these. It all worked out fine.
This was before mobile phones.
Aeolun 9 days ago [-]
I mean, that sounds a bit stressful for her, but eminently possible. Can't say I'd have liked the idea when I was 14, but I was capable of it.
distances 9 days ago [-]
Yep not sure if I would have been up for it either at that age. She's always been much more of an adventurer than I would ever want to be.
freilanzer 9 days ago [-]
I still don't particularly like the idea.
huytersd 10 days ago [-]
This seems specific to your family. My family would never allow that unless they knew the parents of atleast a few people at the place I was sleeping over.
hypercube33 9 days ago [-]
In North Branch MN there was an old movie theater with the seats taken out and tables setup - The BattleShack. parents would dump kids there and they'd be there for days or weeks just gaming and hanging out at the Denny's in town. My buddy had a workshop addon to their house where the same thing would occur. Summers around us were just a solid LAN Party.
yesimahuman 10 days ago [-]
Recently, my friends and I recreated our old LAN parties. Went up to a cabin in the woods, brought some cheap network switches, and had everyone install OpenRA (https://www.openra.net/, open red alert), and had a blast, even with everyone on laptops (mac/win). You can still do this in 2024 and it's worth it!
n8henrie 9 days ago [-]
My son (8) and I have a ton of fun playing OpenRA together! Runs surprisingly well on his old MacBook Air 11" running Manjaro and me on an M1 MacBook Pro.
freilanzer 9 days ago [-]
OpenRA looks great.
> For others to join your game, you must forward a port in your router for them to connect to. By default, OpenRA uses TCP port 1234. You can test this on sites like canyouseeme.org yourself.
This however concerns me.
IIsi50MHz 7 days ago [-]
Seems to be an instruction for people who are playing over internet, not a LAN.
random3 9 days ago [-]
That’s awesome. I have some friends that I get together with every 1-2 years and always make time for a few hours of StarCraft
hammock 9 days ago [-]
Oh heck yeah thanks for the heads up about openra
rickdeckard 9 days ago [-]
I think it shouldn't be left out that the audience of LAN-parties were not people who just played games.
It was a "PC-community", people really focused on their PC. Its hardware, its OS, how to squeeze as much power as possible out of it. The perfect CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for each game, which hardware to use/buy next etc.
And THEN they played games. But they also hung out with like-minded people, exchanged alot of knowledge, data and content which would have been impossible to get by just going online with some modem.
The more this complexity of HW/SW was reduced, the more this breed of "consuming" gamers grew who only wanted to play games and didn't know/care that much about the hardware running it (other than wanting it to look colorful and pretty some years later).
--> If all you want to do is play games, the huge effort of hosting/joining a LAN-party is even more of a burden than it was for the PC-community...
sgt 9 days ago [-]
The bizarre world of a bunch of friends bragging about who had the best AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files. Those were the days.
geraldhh 9 days ago [-]
yea, we did that in elementary school and progressed towards the intricacies of networking tech by the time coax gear was thrown out at dad's company.
liotier 9 days ago [-]
> LAN-parties were not people who just played games
True: we also swapped warez and burped too many soft drinks.
geraldhh 9 days ago [-]
warez was the main thing for lots of ppl, as internet speeds at the time more or less prohibited sharing at home.
gaming was the goofy part
Aeolun 9 days ago [-]
I don't feel like that is quite true? I was never really interested in pushing as much as possible out of the hardware (beyond being able to play the games in the first place), but LAN parties were still the shit.
The one time we could steal the schools computer room with 24 or so PC's in and have an all day LAN party is still of the things I remember most fondly from that time.
pyinstallwoes 9 days ago [-]
Yeah, at the same LAN parties we'd also talk about installing Slackware or some new obscure Gentoo stage 1 install.
But man, when you used to have to buy Half-Life to play Counter-Strike. Those were the days. Heck, member' when CS had no recoil? Those were the days.
Sohcahtoa82 10 days ago [-]
When my brother was getting married ~6 years ago, we ended his Bachelor Party with a LAN party.
Sure, we played games we would have normally played at our respective homes (Mostly League of Legends back then), but there's something different about having everyone in one place.
Now, we go to a semi-annual LAN event called PDXLAN [0]. It's an 800+ seat event in Ridgefield, WA (Just outside Portland, OR...it used to be held in Portland, but we out-grew the venue), sponsored by NVIDIA, Intel, MSI, and over a dozen other PC gaming hardware manufacturers. I've been going since 2016 and it's an absolute blast. There are gaming tournaments, but they really try to appeal to casual gamers as much as hardcore competitors. They've been running a Golf With Your Friends tournament at every event for a couple years now, and it's their most participated tournament.
I'm part of a group that still holds 3-4 LAN parties a year with ~16-24 seats. We play mostly older stuff and it's still as fun as it was back then.
Gaming has changed dramatically, but it's not like that old stuff disappeared. Sure, some games don't hold up well in the slightest, but the good ones have. Some favorites are AoE2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Re-Volt, C&C, Natural Selection, Call of Duty, and oh god so much more.
nbenitezl 9 days ago [-]
I like Re-Volt. I've tried to play Re-Volt on the SteamDeck but I've been unable to get the controls right, the default configuration does not work.
KJBweb 9 days ago [-]
Theres a community controller layout you can apply under controller settings which works great.
quadyeast 9 days ago [-]
q3 arena
pathartl 9 days ago [-]
Yes! Dunno how I forgot to mention it as we have a tournament every session and the winner gets the title and a trophy.
Nextgrid 10 days ago [-]
Any love for Crysis (the first one, not the subsequent abominations)?
pathartl 9 days ago [-]
Not at the moment. We use recycled 4-6th gen i5 all-in-ones so everything runs off the iGPU. It basically limits us to games that were released up until 2006. We _do_ play Far Cry, though.
yayitswei 10 days ago [-]
I found out about this LAN-party-optimized house (https://kentonshouse.com/) from a previous discussion on HN, and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
kentonv 9 days ago [-]
Hey that's me! Thanks!
I finished the new, bigger, better one a few months ago. (The old one was actually very small -- photo angles are deceiving.) Not published on the internet yet, maybe later this year...
Recently held my 28th Annual New Year's Eve LAN Party, as well as a big party around the solar eclipse (we had totality at the house). Both were attended by some of the same friends as the first one (and many new friends obviously). Gonna keep doing this for a long time, it's so much more fun having everyone in person vs. over the internet.
Just hope my kids don't decide they hate video games...
yayitswei 9 days ago [-]
That's wonderful! Would love hear about it / see some photos if you do decide to publish. Sounds like you've built a real community which is priceless.
Imagine having a website for your house. Seriously awesome.
mixermachine 10 days ago [-]
I was on some great LAN parties.
Nice memories.
Four years ago I attended a LAN party where I was the youngest one (26 back then).
All others already had kids but swore to keep the old spirit alive.
Never have I seen such a well organised party with actually working games :D.
They used the "eti-launcher"
mikae1 10 days ago [-]
I held Quake LAN-party this weekend and it was so damn fun.
We played Deathmatch Dimension[1] which is a very recent map pack that's better than anything I played back in the day.
LANAllNight in Dallas is happening this weekend, it happens twice a year now. 200ish people, good old-school vibe. Minimum red tape.
Quakecon is this July or August in Dallas. Several thousand people. A sight to see, but a lot more bullshit these days, lots of security, metal detectors, etc.
In fact, I'm wearing a Quakecon shirt right now!
LANs even today are so much fun, just to escape reality for 2-3 days and play games, even single-player sometimes while you wait for friends to wake up. I can't stay up til 7am like I used to, no amount of BAWLS will help it.
Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake Live/Quake Champions, Risk of Rain 2, Left 4 Dead 2. Golf With Friends is a fun casual game to unwind with after dinner (pizza) and before hitting the hard stuff.
I predict Helldivers will be popular this year.
Joe_Cool 10 days ago [-]
Does Helldivers 2 have a LAN mode? The first one didn't.
Or does this LAN have Internet? Where I am at LAN parties are completely offline, so genuinely curious.
genewitch 9 days ago [-]
No LAN mode but on PC the "host" actually hosts the game (not sure how they do TURN/STUN but it does work most of the time), so if you have all four people in the same building it should run as though it's LAN. There are server side checks for the items you find in the game so it has to run partially through a central server.
battlefield bad company 2 is a similar experience to helldivers 2, IMO, and that is LAN-able.
Joe_Cool 8 days ago [-]
Bad Company is a staple at our LANs, you need a server emulator though. It's really fun when a few dozen people are playing.
dc3k 10 days ago [-]
I can’t speak for other events, but QuakeCon and Dreamhack have had internet access (and quite good access all things considered) for a decade or more now.
intelVISA 9 days ago [-]
Not sure, but it does have a kernel level 'anti-cheat' that enjoys eating cpu cycles and hates when you remove eth0.
unethical_ban 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, I read about that over the weekend and decided not to buy it. I got AoE IV instead.
The excuses by the company are foolish, too. It's PvE, period. Get out of my system.
unethical_ban 9 days ago [-]
Yeah the LANs I go to are online. Steam and many of the games have global browsers. Also, unfortunately, I don't think even the smaller one is literally one LAN. it's a routed network.
That eti launcher looks neat, though.
holoduke 10 days ago [-]
I loved lan parties. Putting all my heavy gear in my cheap old little car. Big ass 19 inch crt and a big tower full of useless buttons and knobs. Spend the entire day and evening setting everything up. Of course everything broke to the point windows had to be reinstalled. Driver issues, network issues, hardware issues. But then finally at 1am we started playing serious sam, unreal tournament, dune 2000, 1nsane, moha, quake 2 or 3, team fortress 1 and many more. Good old times.
genewitch 9 days ago [-]
always had that one friend who bought a tower case with a handle on it, and the other friend that had a little handcart for their CRT and tower.
I bought a silverstone desktop case (like a 4U but the same size as a midsize tower laid down, so not as "long") that i would bring to LAN parties. That held a large variety of machines until they started requiring larger (longer) PSUs. I wonder if i still have that case in a closet somewhere.
ethbr1 10 days ago [-]
My last LAN party (20 years ago):
* A few gallons of Code Red = $40
* Having a drive full of the latest cracked games = awesome
* Owning your friends face to face = better than awesome
* Given every game in existence, still playing a 4 hour Risk game because computer dice are bullshit = priceless
jader201 9 days ago [-]
There was something special about being in the same room (or at least building) as a bunch of friends playing a game.
Nowadays the internet makes it easy to play with friends, but it’s too easy now to make the effort of trying to be colocated not worth it.
Even couch coop games, while still around, aren’t near as common, and people would still just rather play games like that online.
The internet has made connecting with people so easy.
Yet the world feels much lonelier now.
m463 10 days ago [-]
I remember when there was a lan party aboard the USS Hornet aircraft carrier in the SF Bay Area.
1996. I'm 14 years old. My best friend and I are obsessed with the new big game, Descent. My city suffers a massive freezing rain storm that coats everything in ice. Power is out almost everywhere. School is cancelled. My neighborhood, with underground power lines, is one of the few that still has power.
My best friend and I load up his computer -- CRT, peripherals and all -- in a plastic toboggan, and haul it (On foot! We were't driving yet!) about a mile over to my house, dodging foot long icicles falling from power lines all the way.
The glory that was a couple of junior high nerds turning a snow day into a LAN party.
derwiki 9 days ago [-]
I was just excited to be the “networking guy” who got all the PCs to talk to each other. NetBEUI was the trick IIRC. And Quake 1 multiplayer was great! Vaguely remember a multiplayer mod named Rune?
genewitch 9 days ago [-]
i was the tech support at every lan party. I think i got relegated to that role because i could whip everyone at starcraft and counterstrike (for instance), so it was usually 3-4 hours of me quickly fixing everyone's network stack and replacing cables, then setting up my computer to join in the fun.
After drinking age we didn't LAN party much anymore, but i would host poker nights with two tables full of people. Less tech support, and i still whipped everyone.
nixone 9 days ago [-]
VulkanLAN in Graz, Austria, last year with 925 participants, growing every year, maybe this year with over 1000. See https://event.vulkanlan.at/
c0l0 9 days ago [-]
Oh wow, I did not know(/remember) that this existed! Will try to be going with my brothers-in-law this year, it's gonna be awesome :D Thanks for linking it!
urda 9 days ago [-]
Staff member of Lanwar.com here! We are still kicking it in Louisville, KY and encourage everyone to check us out!
Our next event is Lanwar 72
Thursday, July 25, 2024, 12:00 PM EDT - Sunday, July 28, 2024, 12:00 PM EDT
thoughtpalette 9 days ago [-]
Just tried to dig up the old LANWar video I have on my steam profile, looks like it's down [0] :{
Still have my CS:GO [1] "trophy" from 2012.
Was a great LAN, good people and nice setup(s). Thanks for still doing it.
The "whitebox" PC building company I worked for in the late 90s was owned by a gamer. That meant that the office PCs had fast CPUs and good video cards. I put a script on the PCs to rejigger the partition tables so we could reboot onto the LAN party Windows 95 install (or DOS with NDIS drivers-- thanks, CONFIG.SYS menus!) and have after-hours LAN parties on the office network. I appreciated that the PC I used for the day-job was pretty high-spec for the day along with getting to play multiplayer games (Warcraft, StarCraft, Rainbow 6, Quake... I forget what else...)
hi-v-rocknroll 9 days ago [-]
$70/month 512Kbps SDSL from Verio/NTT at Davis CA enabled our LAN party flop house. 7 ms to Stanford.
genewitch 9 days ago [-]
i had both 768kb and 384kb sdsl in los angeles, and we had 4ms ping to most servers, we got accused of being bots so much. 4.2.0.0/16 ;-)
sgt 9 days ago [-]
I remember my first LAN party more than the subsequent ones. It was so memorable. We were a bunch of guys (obviously, no girl would be seen dead at a LAN party in those early days), all struggling to set up our network using BNC connectors and a coaxial network based on 10base2.
Whenever the guy at the end left the network and forgot the terminator, the whole network grinded to a halt. Oh yeah, we had no Internet access.
gibbonsrcool 10 days ago [-]
Speak for yourselves... I'm flying to Seattle to LAN next month! :P
SebFender 9 days ago [-]
Best memories ever - 30 years ago was just fun and games - literally and wires! To all that are appreciative of this old school style of gaming - have a great day.
Being part of one of the biggest in the world back in 2002 was also very cool.
TreeInBuxton 9 days ago [-]
I still manage to attend lots of LAN parties in the UK!
The major one - several thousand - Insomnia (although I volunteer for that), and a host of smaller ones with a much more community feel, such as StratLAN.
Is the feeling slightly different to what I imagine it used to be? Yes, as if the Internet goes down, then many games stop working - but then at the smaller ones (ie Strat), I find I spend more of my time chatting to like-minded people, playing board games, etc. I even have a friend that comes over from NL for it sometimes!
LANs aren't dead quite yet :)
ocardoso 9 days ago [-]
It's amazing than reading the comments here makes me realize that even in "1st world countries" we all play the same ol' games (one flavor of UT, Other game that became a must for that specific LAN Party like Delta Force, and some other strategy game).
I used to be "the young guy" in my local group back in the late 2000's and I often wondered what games we would play if everyone had access to a top class PC back in the day.
partiallypro 9 days ago [-]
I remember having LAN parties in HS with my friend, we'd do a lot of Quake 3, Urban Terror, Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament 2003-2004, etc; and another friend we'd LAN and even more we once rented out the community center and had a massive LAN party with like 30 people. Not everyone had to play the same game, but most did. We'd all chip in on pizza, etc. Man, to be 16-20 y/o again.
trog 9 days ago [-]
A bunch of my photos from our local LAN (QGL in Brisbane, Australia) made it into this book, it was a blast going through them again.
hasoleju 9 days ago [-]
These pictures are a flashback to my youth. Back in the time the limiting factor of how many friends could join the LAN Party where the switches. I remember the time a friend of mine bought a 12 port switch. That opened up a whole new level of gaming. With 12 friends now being cramed in a room.
An of course. Every LAN Party went on for the whole night.
matheusmoreira 9 days ago [-]
Really miss playing Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike and various MMORPGs with friends. Some of my fondest memories were made in LAN parties. Sadly it hasn't been easy to organize one as an adult. Nobody seems to have free time anymore. I'm also worried the magic won't be there anymore if I succeed.
We used to run lanparty.com - big mistake letting that one go. Is there a credible lan party directory anymore?
senectus1 9 days ago [-]
I was lamenting to my son just the other day that he misses out on the LAN party weekend sessions I used to enjoy as a young adult.
Part of the problem is that a lot of games these days dont lend themselves to spontanious server setups. They all need internet access.
xtiansimon 8 days ago [-]
A friend setup RedHat 2 server to run NAT server so my housemate and I could share a DSL modem c1997. And the LAN let us play Marathon and Myth between our Macs. Weekly games ensued for a time.
iwontberude 10 days ago [-]
Shout out to my old homies from LC3 LAN (Loraine County Community College in Ohio)
davexunit 9 days ago [-]
I ordered a copy Merritt K's book for a longtime friend who organized many LAN parties for our friend group in high school and college. He had nice things to say about it, so pick up a copy I guess!
Lammy 10 days ago [-]
> Lee’s Summit, MO (USA), 2002
I wonder if that person ever got to meet Lowtax lol
t0bia_s 9 days ago [-]
Since 2015 we occasionally have LAN party with 4-5 friends. Usually we play Titan Quest, however we cannot finish it. They still make updates and new expansions!
genewitch 9 days ago [-]
i've tried to beat that game a half dozen times on 3 different platforms. My latest save is on a Switch, even.
cess11 9 days ago [-]
LAN parties still seem to be a thing where I live, and demo parties are still going strong.
I think it matters a lot where one is looking for such gatherings.
enlightens 10 days ago [-]
I started attending a monthly Halo 3 LAN party last year. It's all flatscreens and current-gen consoles running MCC, and we all have to juggle the schedule around our adult responsibilities now, but it's still such a blast to get together with ~30 people and yell at each other from throughout the house.
thesnide 10 days ago [-]
Another thing that DRM (and always online) killed...
Being online just hasn't the same feeling when you could hear screaming within earshot when your plan executed to perfection...
I miss the raw simplicity of IPX. Not the NE2000 IRQ hell, though
Joe_Cool 8 days ago [-]
Good thing those old games are still just as fun today ;)
unixhero 9 days ago [-]
Gamers and gaming killed it. There used to be a large element of computer exploration, making stuff work amd so on.
TThe decline started in 2000 when Counter Strike came out. The new type of gamers it attracted helped kill the scene.
Picture a wine convention, where a new breed of visitors just chugf down each glass instead of actually savoring. That isban apt analogy.
parl_match 9 days ago [-]
I honestly don't think this is it. High speed internet enabled a whole new class of games and experiences, and new distribution methods. And the relatively monocular monoculture of games exploded - suddenly, everyone was playing different games.
So no, it wasn't "those kids".
unixhero 9 days ago [-]
I was there and saw it happen.
This is way before mmorpgs, mass online multiplayer and consoles mostly completely took over.
It killed the culture. But of course as we know, gaming is now a billion dollar industry so maybe it was the gamers that had it right all along.
parl_match 9 days ago [-]
I was there too. I work in the game industry. That culture you're describing was completely destroyed by not having to leave the house to participate in it.
It's even killing off conventions, it even got major ones 20 years in - like E3. Covid just hastened the slow decline.
katzenversteher 9 days ago [-]
Happy memories. I started with just 1:1 multiplayer games using the serial port (GTA, Dogfight, Doom). GTA (or our serial port config) had horrible problems with de-synchronization. The game just went on but players where in completely different locations in the game. As a workaround we yelled the scores to each other from time to time because that was one the best ways to notice the games where out of sync.
Later we used 10BASE5 coaxial bus connections with ~5 people. At that time we had no internet access and not much information about the IP protocol. IP address / subnet configuration was only known to a few people (including me) but we also did not really understand what they where doing.
So this was kind of similar to what I imagine tech priests do in Warhammer 40k. We entered the sacred numbers (192.168.0.X and 255.255.255.0) and did some other things we thought where necessary (but weren't) and somehow got it running.
Also, for some reason we often got electric shocks when we touched the coaxial connectors, I guess it happened because the different players connected their PC do power outlets connected to different phases.
After that with Ethernet everything became much smoother except for cable issues. Ethernet hardware at the time did not sense the cable type so we had to be careful if the players brought crossover or patch cables and use adapters if necessary.
mschuster91 9 days ago [-]
> Also, for some reason we often got electric shocks when we touched the coaxial connectors, I guess it happened because the different players connected their PC do power outlets connected to different phases.
Different phases should not cause electric shocks - these are a result of a ground connection being broken or impeded (e.g. due to a clamp not fastened tightly enough). You're lucky you didn't get yourself killed.
katzenversteher 9 days ago [-]
Thanks for the clarification. Luckily BNC connectors are rare nowadays. It happened at a friends house. I lost contact but I'm pretty sure he's still alive but maybe their house is still dangerous.
mschuster91 9 days ago [-]
> Luckily BNC connectors are rare nowadays.
This can manifest anywhere that has grounding issues and electrical wires that are not isolated from human touch, not just BNC.
For example, in conventional Ethernet, you have to ground the shielding for EMF reasons, but you usually ground only one of the shieldings on both sides of a cable - conventionally, at least in Germany, in the distribution rack of the patchpanel, and if you connect two distribution racks/rooms, on the "upstream" side - but you never ground both ends as that can not just cause ground loops but especially very weird issues where fault current suddenly doesn't pass back to the AC distribution panel on cables with the proper wire gauge but through the (very tiny) gauge of a network cable shielding. That's a perfect recipe for invisible fires, and even assuming there is no fire, some points of the effective "micro grid" can be at a high enough potential to shock someone.
Neutral connection losses/resistances in multi-phase grids are even worse because these aren't just a threat under fault conditions - here, "normal" operating return current makes its way back to the actual neutral/ground via whatever path it can, and that may even include water pipes [1].
I went to so many LAN parties at friends houses during high-school in the mid 2000s. Without this experience, I doubt I would have pursued electrical engineering and moved to silicon valley.
10 days ago [-]
RetroTechie 10 days ago [-]
Waaazzup?
Rendered at 10:31:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Yup that's exactly how I remember it. We were playing half-life at home LAN parties (often at my place and sometimes at big LANs) even before the beta of CS came out. We'd spend lots of time on the various maps, like the "small" map (if I remember the name correctly).
We'd also play Warcraft II on LANs but Warcraft II was playable over "KALI": we'd simulate a LAN over the Internet. For Warcraft II the latency was good enough already.
My best LAN though was the one between my home and my neighbour's home, where a coax cable (!) would hang from window to window, on the second story, in the street. And the phone calls: "Mate, did you forget to put the terminator on a cable, my LAN ain't working anymore!" (if you were to forget the BNC terminator, nothing would work anymore).
"RJ45" ethernet cables already existed but we were broke ass teenagers: so we managed to fetch a shitload of coax network cards and cables a company was throwing away. We didn't have the proper tool(s) though so we'd use kitchen scissors to cut and attach the 'T' connectors to the cables (by squeezing them with the handle of the kitchen scissors). It was totally ghetto but it worked fine.
Great memories, thanks for TFA and for posting TFA!
Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
We rang the doorbell and an "older" man answered the door, and we were confused and said "uh we're here to see ____" and he was like "That's me."
For context all of our lan parties up to this point were us schlepping tube tvs around to various basements of our friends houses, occasionally getting to mooch some pizza off of someone.
Instead, we walk into the huge suburban house and there's four rooms with gigantic flat screen televisions setup for 16 player madness and the entire place is filled with adult couples, the men came to game and the women to socialize and cook and have fun.
They had an entire table of snacks and drinks and everything you could ever want as a wee gamer.
We were so blown away but they were super nice and didn't make us feel too awkward. When the game started they asked us how good we were, "uhh, we beat legendary" - they laughed and put us on the same team for the first round.
The second round we were not allowed to play on the same team, turns out the kids can game :)
We made long term friends and ended up scrimming and hanging out with people 20 and 30 years our senior, a total blast and yeah, I don't see me hanging out with 16 years today.
Parents were sane back then, it's today that they've gone crazy. They watch too much news and keep their kids caged up, and end up doing far more harm than what they're trying to prevent.
All that freedom was good for my head though, so I'll give you that one.
There used to be a joke about the Internet:
Where men are men, women are men, and kids are FBI agents.
It seems that this is no longer true, and with the massive influx of kids, that itself has increased risk.
It wouldn't make much sense to be a child predator on the Internet in 1998. There just weren't that many kids.
And these days, there are still plenty of parents that let their kids run wild.
I don’t think anything has changed.
I guess what gp is saying is that not everyone that attends the LAN party is able to sling along their computer to the venue so there are more people than machines and of course limited seating for folks without a machine.
BTW, the gp said you might lose your seat and not that your seat gets stolen since there aren’t enough seats to go round, there will always be someone who has been standing for while ready to take you seat.
Some people played until total exhaustion, so around 3AM you started to see people fall asleep while playing. That's the moment the hopefull looker in the next seat would gently grab they keyboard and mouse and 'borrow' the sleeper's PC and finally join the game.
Good times. Don't ask about the smell of the room after a 2 day fragfest.
Sadly there's a lot of segments where juniors want to learn much on their own, often re-learning lessons of the past that could have been put towards more meaningful progress for them in hindsight.
Being able to navigate first principles concepts and learning to use them gets to what's novel is more a little quicker.
Back then, I can't imagine parents letting their daughters do that either. The kind of freedom to roam at 12yo that you describe was what allowed me access to people and computers we didn't have the money for; but I've always been very conscious that my sisters would have never been given that kind of opportunity.
My parents told me the name of the destination train station, and that my grandmother would be waiting on arrival.
The train staff knew I was travelling alone and checked up on me a few times and gave me free drinks.
Two years later the train stopped being a direct path, so I had to switch trains halfway.
I remember all the little unknowns made me very anxious that I'd get lost somewhere.
For example, they changed the second departure platform so it didn't match the one on my ticket. And the departure platform was located elsewhere on the train station, not in direct connection with the national lines.
When coming back, I remember they'd announce my city as the next stop, and then I'd see these other city names fly by. I remember thinking "They must have forgot to stop!" because I didn't understand that those city names were suburbs of the capital city that I lived in, and that the national train went directly to the train station.
30 years later I still remember all of these. It all worked out fine.
This was before mobile phones.
> For others to join your game, you must forward a port in your router for them to connect to. By default, OpenRA uses TCP port 1234. You can test this on sites like canyouseeme.org yourself.
This however concerns me.
It was a "PC-community", people really focused on their PC. Its hardware, its OS, how to squeeze as much power as possible out of it. The perfect CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for each game, which hardware to use/buy next etc.
And THEN they played games. But they also hung out with like-minded people, exchanged alot of knowledge, data and content which would have been impossible to get by just going online with some modem.
The more this complexity of HW/SW was reduced, the more this breed of "consuming" gamers grew who only wanted to play games and didn't know/care that much about the hardware running it (other than wanting it to look colorful and pretty some years later).
--> If all you want to do is play games, the huge effort of hosting/joining a LAN-party is even more of a burden than it was for the PC-community...
True: we also swapped warez and burped too many soft drinks.
gaming was the goofy part
The one time we could steal the schools computer room with 24 or so PC's in and have an all day LAN party is still of the things I remember most fondly from that time.
But man, when you used to have to buy Half-Life to play Counter-Strike. Those were the days. Heck, member' when CS had no recoil? Those were the days.
Sure, we played games we would have normally played at our respective homes (Mostly League of Legends back then), but there's something different about having everyone in one place.
Now, we go to a semi-annual LAN event called PDXLAN [0]. It's an 800+ seat event in Ridgefield, WA (Just outside Portland, OR...it used to be held in Portland, but we out-grew the venue), sponsored by NVIDIA, Intel, MSI, and over a dozen other PC gaming hardware manufacturers. I've been going since 2016 and it's an absolute blast. There are gaming tournaments, but they really try to appeal to casual gamers as much as hardcore competitors. They've been running a Golf With Your Friends tournament at every event for a couple years now, and it's their most participated tournament.
[0] https://www.pdxlan.net/
Gaming has changed dramatically, but it's not like that old stuff disappeared. Sure, some games don't hold up well in the slightest, but the good ones have. Some favorites are AoE2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Re-Volt, C&C, Natural Selection, Call of Duty, and oh god so much more.
I finished the new, bigger, better one a few months ago. (The old one was actually very small -- photo angles are deceiving.) Not published on the internet yet, maybe later this year...
Recently held my 28th Annual New Year's Eve LAN Party, as well as a big party around the solar eclipse (we had totality at the house). Both were attended by some of the same friends as the first one (and many new friends obviously). Gonna keep doing this for a long time, it's so much more fun having everyone in person vs. over the internet.
Just hope my kids don't decide they hate video games...
Four years ago I attended a LAN party where I was the youngest one (26 back then). All others already had kids but swore to keep the old spirit alive. Never have I seen such a well organised party with actually working games :D. They used the "eti-launcher"
We played Deathmatch Dimension[1] which is a very recent map pack that's better than anything I played back in the day.
We use the Quakespasm Spiked source port.
[1] https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/dmd.html
More anecdotes and discussion of the book LAN Party from it's early stages
Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party (2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680678
And more recently a review last year:
Berlin Review: LAN Party
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36898833
CNN last month:
A nostalgic look back at when the Internet still felt joyful
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805005
Quakecon is this July or August in Dallas. Several thousand people. A sight to see, but a lot more bullshit these days, lots of security, metal detectors, etc.
In fact, I'm wearing a Quakecon shirt right now!
LANs even today are so much fun, just to escape reality for 2-3 days and play games, even single-player sometimes while you wait for friends to wake up. I can't stay up til 7am like I used to, no amount of BAWLS will help it.
Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake Live/Quake Champions, Risk of Rain 2, Left 4 Dead 2. Golf With Friends is a fun casual game to unwind with after dinner (pizza) and before hitting the hard stuff.
I predict Helldivers will be popular this year.
Or does this LAN have Internet? Where I am at LAN parties are completely offline, so genuinely curious.
battlefield bad company 2 is a similar experience to helldivers 2, IMO, and that is LAN-able.
The excuses by the company are foolish, too. It's PvE, period. Get out of my system.
That eti launcher looks neat, though.
I bought a silverstone desktop case (like a 4U but the same size as a midsize tower laid down, so not as "long") that i would bring to LAN parties. That held a large variety of machines until they started requiring larger (longer) PSUs. I wonder if i still have that case in a closet somewhere.
* A few gallons of Code Red = $40
* Having a drive full of the latest cracked games = awesome
* Owning your friends face to face = better than awesome
* Given every game in existence, still playing a 4 hour Risk game because computer dice are bullshit = priceless
Nowadays the internet makes it easy to play with friends, but it’s too easy now to make the effort of trying to be colocated not worth it.
Even couch coop games, while still around, aren’t near as common, and people would still just rather play games like that online.
The internet has made connecting with people so easy.
Yet the world feels much lonelier now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Hornet_(CV-12)
I think that would be the pinnacle.
My best friend and I load up his computer -- CRT, peripherals and all -- in a plastic toboggan, and haul it (On foot! We were't driving yet!) about a mile over to my house, dodging foot long icicles falling from power lines all the way.
The glory that was a couple of junior high nerds turning a snow day into a LAN party.
After drinking age we didn't LAN party much anymore, but i would host poker nights with two tables full of people. Less tech support, and i still whipped everyone.
Our next event is Lanwar 72
Thursday, July 25, 2024, 12:00 PM EDT - Sunday, July 28, 2024, 12:00 PM EDT
Still have my CS:GO [1] "trophy" from 2012.
Was a great LAN, good people and nice setup(s). Thanks for still doing it.
[0]: http://video.smithville.net/lan-war-xxiii-player-and-rig-cov... [1]: https://i.imgur.com/p2EdyxH.jpeg
https://stratlan.com/
Whenever the guy at the end left the network and forgot the terminator, the whole network grinded to a halt. Oh yeah, we had no Internet access.
Being part of one of the biggest in the world back in 2002 was also very cool.
The major one - several thousand - Insomnia (although I volunteer for that), and a host of smaller ones with a much more community feel, such as StratLAN.
Is the feeling slightly different to what I imagine it used to be? Yes, as if the Internet goes down, then many games stop working - but then at the smaller ones (ie Strat), I find I spend more of my time chatting to like-minded people, playing board games, etc. I even have a friend that comes over from NL for it sometimes!
LANs aren't dead quite yet :)
I used to be "the young guy" in my local group back in the late 2000's and I often wondered what games we would play if everyone had access to a top class PC back in the day.
An of course. Every LAN Party went on for the whole night.
Part of the problem is that a lot of games these days dont lend themselves to spontanious server setups. They all need internet access.
I wonder if that person ever got to meet Lowtax lol
I think it matters a lot where one is looking for such gatherings.
Being online just hasn't the same feeling when you could hear screaming within earshot when your plan executed to perfection...
I miss the raw simplicity of IPX. Not the NE2000 IRQ hell, though
TThe decline started in 2000 when Counter Strike came out. The new type of gamers it attracted helped kill the scene.
Picture a wine convention, where a new breed of visitors just chugf down each glass instead of actually savoring. That isban apt analogy.
So no, it wasn't "those kids".
This is way before mmorpgs, mass online multiplayer and consoles mostly completely took over.
It killed the culture. But of course as we know, gaming is now a billion dollar industry so maybe it was the gamers that had it right all along.
It's even killing off conventions, it even got major ones 20 years in - like E3. Covid just hastened the slow decline.
Later we used 10BASE5 coaxial bus connections with ~5 people. At that time we had no internet access and not much information about the IP protocol. IP address / subnet configuration was only known to a few people (including me) but we also did not really understand what they where doing.
So this was kind of similar to what I imagine tech priests do in Warhammer 40k. We entered the sacred numbers (192.168.0.X and 255.255.255.0) and did some other things we thought where necessary (but weren't) and somehow got it running.
Also, for some reason we often got electric shocks when we touched the coaxial connectors, I guess it happened because the different players connected their PC do power outlets connected to different phases.
After that with Ethernet everything became much smoother except for cable issues. Ethernet hardware at the time did not sense the cable type so we had to be careful if the players brought crossover or patch cables and use adapters if necessary.
Different phases should not cause electric shocks - these are a result of a ground connection being broken or impeded (e.g. due to a clamp not fastened tightly enough). You're lucky you didn't get yourself killed.
This can manifest anywhere that has grounding issues and electrical wires that are not isolated from human touch, not just BNC.
For example, in conventional Ethernet, you have to ground the shielding for EMF reasons, but you usually ground only one of the shieldings on both sides of a cable - conventionally, at least in Germany, in the distribution rack of the patchpanel, and if you connect two distribution racks/rooms, on the "upstream" side - but you never ground both ends as that can not just cause ground loops but especially very weird issues where fault current suddenly doesn't pass back to the AC distribution panel on cables with the proper wire gauge but through the (very tiny) gauge of a network cable shielding. That's a perfect recipe for invisible fires, and even assuming there is no fire, some points of the effective "micro grid" can be at a high enough potential to shock someone.
Neutral connection losses/resistances in multi-phase grids are even worse because these aren't just a threat under fault conditions - here, "normal" operating return current makes its way back to the actual neutral/ground via whatever path it can, and that may even include water pipes [1].
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@ericandrade45/video/7051359949812731...