This looks like a TV for his XBOX. Back in my days, we all had a CRT. I remember using the shotgun place in my car just for my CRT screen with integrated subwoofer and speakers. This thing was huge.
The thing about that photo is how it wasn't even an exaggeration of lan parties at the time. Fire code be damned, you get every single person in that room you physically can, no matter how poor the ventilation. Stick one guy in the closet sitting his screen on a file cabinet with a nightstand for a seat. The guy with the smallest monitor sets up on the window sill, with the window holding the monitor in place like a window unit. One guy sets up in the hallway where the power strip barely reaches and everyone for damn sure was screaming so he didn't miss a call out. Everyone memorized where to step over his six cables because absolutely nobody will turn on a light. There was the guy with the real full tower atx case stuffed with all the hdds and cd drives passing around 3 full binders of burned games and mods and maybe a spindle full of porn if you asked. Anyone who needed to sleep would do it straight on the floor under the folding tables with rigs blowing hot air in their face. When someone gets the last kill in the match and half the room screams WHAT?!, and then everyone steps outside for the council meeting as the AC struggles to make the room almost bearable before next match.
It for sure looks like the basement of someones home. Best guess someone borrowed chairs from their church or something. Same with the tables. But I could be way off.
“This was at a house my parents owned. They were renting it out and the previous tenant had left a few weeks prior to this so in exchange for getting the house cleaned up for the next tenant, they let me host a LAN party in the house! It was a great weekend!”
I'm thinking It's someone's house, but knowing they're are likely to throw a LAN party they opportunistically found a community centre/doctors office/gathering place that was throwing out the old chairs and grabbed as many as they could carry.
I grew up in a house that hoarded chairs. Between Dad hosting card nights, mum hosting social clubs, and me and my brother throwing LAN parties, any time any 4 of us were walking home and we saw an old chair on the curb, we'd carry it home with us because we always felt like we could never have enough chairs.
Our side shed had like a 60 mismatched chairs all stacked up in it. And at Christmas time we'd use them all when extended family came for a BBQ.
My brother and I would throw LAN parties in the garage. As if LAN parties weren't already stuffy and sweaty enough, we had a corrugated iron box on a concrete slab in the Australian summer. Often my parents would throw a party of their own at the same time because they knew they weren't getting any sleep with 20 kids in their late teens screaming cues in the backyard, so more chairs was more good.
Plus dad never slept during a LAN party because he was so paranoid about his garage catching fire, which I'm still surprised we never did . (at least, not an electrical fire. Every friend group has the one guy who's obsessed with fire and is always burning stuff.... That person was me, I may have set fire to my own pants and hair one party, but nothing else took damage)