Lan parties were basically the highlight of my highschool career. I learned how to set up and configure complex networks just so I could be 'that guy' that knew how to fix problems at lan parties. Sitting in someone's garage all night with 12-16 sweaty, sleep deprived people playing Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament or Worms Armageddon was the absolute pinnacle of good times in a rural small town.
A bunch of people in the same room beating Serious Sam from start to finish while someone played an eclectic playlist of hiphop on the aux for over 24 hours. Those were the halcyon days.
Halcyon & on & on...
I never really experienced this, I was mostly a console gamer.
Curious what you do for work now? Related to IT or games in any way...?
We used to do 12-hour, all-night Empire Earth games!
Aww, man - I'd forgotten about Empire Earth, that game was absolutely the shit at the time. Wish it'd gotten more attention and credit.
Funny enough duct tape ceiling guy is playing on an LCD monitor.
Probably they were the best player and they gave them all the handicaps available. 😅
The entirety of my career was founded on my ability to build stable network and systems to run Duke Nukem 3d at lan parties using 10base2 networks and Rendition Verite video cards with a side of 3dfx.
at lan parties using 10base2 networks and
"Anyone have another BNC terminator? Oh, also the IPX network number we're using is 11111111."
Rendition Verite video cards
Nobody could afford the Canopus, it was a room full of Sierra Screamin' 3D cards at best
with a side of 3dfx.
A dedicated 3D card in addition to a good 2D card?! We'd dream, but didn't have that kind of cash.
I had one with a weird pass through cable. Mainly played EF2000 on it.
Full disclosure: I was in my mid 20's and a factory worker in the later 90's, so I had a little more cash to afford my hobby. It still hurt though.
So, I missed LAN parties, but me and my buddies used to all get together (normally at my house) and play console games and d&d, and I feel like it has pretty similar vibes.
Some seriously amazing times. The thing I remember most distinctly, though, is the smell. A dozen 12-15 year old boys who don't yet understand the necessity of deodorant, all crammed into a bedroom, basically sitting on top of each other. The smell was loud. My room used to reek of it for 5 or 6 days, just in time for next Saturday to roll around and stink it up again. Lol.
Me and my pals were pretty good about hygiene, regularly showered when we all spent the weekend at our pal's, but good God, when someone would forget a bowl of some food or other over the weekend, or it'd get shoved back behind a wall of empty soda cans and bulky monitors for the whole week? 🤢
I mean, I don't think any of us were particularly bad about hygiene? It was more just sort of boy-stink. Lol. In fairness, it was coastal Virginia, summer time, in an un air conditioned room, with the only time the door got opened being when one of us had to pee. Lol. To be honest, I remember it almost fondly. Like, the stale smell of it when every one was gone was horrid, but the smell of the room, the hot TV and console, and all my buddies crammed together wasn't bad when it was going on. Just during the week afterwards. Lol.
That said, I have some unique opinions on smells, so grain of salt and all lol
But also, yes, God, the moldy Chinese food-- yuck
We played Unreal Tournament mostly because it ran really well on Linux. Rarely had LAN parties but it worked fine over dial-up. Kinda wild. Miss those days. We did a lot of dumpster diving because people would just throw everything out when they left college.
We played the hell out of q3 starting with beta because it ran on Linux, macOS classic and windows, and my crew had all those. Riva tnt, g3 tower, amd k6-2, 10-base-T hub.
The TNT was a beast! I ran it on a k6-2 also. Unfortunately it crapped out and I replaced it with an MX400 which I still have (I have a problem). We all played with a myriad of platforms. One guy was on a friggin' Alpha that he warmed his feet with under his desk (not sure if he actually played on that but it was a running joke). We also played Quake but for some reason we were obsessed with the silliness of UT. MMMMM MONSTER KILLL.
Bro did u even kali
Kali did not exist my son
First game that caused me to accidentally stay up until the sun rose (multiple times).
Back in the early aughts, I worked for a company that did tech support for Adobe products. The company lost the contract to Adobe, and we all were laid off. For the couple of months before our final day we would play Quake while doing tech support. Our numbers were never better.
Yo even homies headphones are a throwback.
You know he was using that with this on his trips to and from school every day.
Can you imagine how bad his neck must hurt by the end of the night? They could have at least spared another loop to keep his forehead supported
He’s the only one with a flat screen: serves him right
Oh, give him a break it's probably a dual scan passive. He's playing Doom through a gray smeary mess. But you didn't have to log a CRT to the basement... So there is that
I had some of those headphones like hat guy has. They were uncomfortable. Strange design.
Damn I miss LAN parties. Ultimately it was World of Warcraft that killed them in my social circles.
I had a pair too. They were roughly finished and would dig into your skin. Also didn't sound very good. Cool idea though..
Weirdly, WoW was like a constant, ongoing lan party for us.
We would all lug our rigs over to one guys house and play, even if we were in separate raid groups
On the shelf next door is still the box with the hundreds of coax ethernet cables, the T-connectors, and 50 Ohm terminators from the LAN parties in the 90s. Before they were called "LAN parties" and used for gaming.
I remember making a serial cable so my friend and I could play command and conquer against each other. Good times.
Oh yes! We had those, too (as my friend had no networking card), and playing with the red and blue CDs was fun! This must have been somewhere '95 or '96.
And BTW: I made those networking cables myself, too. They had bright yellow sleeves, and the terminators and T-pieces had been painted yellow to tag them as mine.
What if the guy had to pee?
diaper
Most logical.
There's a bucket on the floor
Give this party some good smells
I was once so broke that I couldn't afford a case for a computer I had.
So I brought my computer to a LAN in a trash bag and set it up on the host's electric stove.
I feel ancient that I was an adult when this was happening.
It is crazy how fast time goes by, especially if you deal with some kind of trauma. I swear, my divorce was almost a decade ago and I’ve been with my current wife almost as long. Feels like a year maybe. It just slips through your fingers.
I was around 20 when that pic started circulating. I was definitely addicted to counter-strike at that time.
Oh you said it. I am still struggling with the fact Covid lockdown began six years ago. Or that my kids are almost the age I was when they were born.
The LANs I went to tended to be Rainbow Six, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 3, and then Aliens vs. Predator 2000. That fuckin' ping sound, before we all had headsets, coming out of three speakers at once, was wild.
Buying a router from Best Buy and returning it the day after the party. Memories.
https://lanwar.com/ still going strong if you need a LAN party.
that reminds me of when I was telling a friend about the kid who became lion king. he didn't believe me and when I tried to find it, any trace of the story had disappeared from this plane of existence
What?? What do you mean with a kid became lion king?
so I recalled hearing about some kid who watched the lion king and wrote about wanting to 'become lion king'. Part of the discussion where I heard about it was questioning if he meant becoming the movie or one of the lions.
Anyway, he wrote about having the movie buried with him, and maybe killed himself. I'm fuzzy on that part and never found it again to verify.
My last LAN Partay was in 2016, that one weekend where Overwatch wat F2P, and we wanted to play Dota but had a party of 6. It was fantastic
Providing my weekend LAN party with the Warcraft 3 beta was the highlight of my early nerd career
one of my great regrets (Of a great many, I'l concede) is that I never had the opportunity to attend a lan party in my younger days.. In these days of the photo.
I have always looked at this picture with a mixture of jealousy and admiration.
Wrapped in plastic and the heat rising from all those monitors - I bet that guy was sweating.
I bet his arms had fallen sleep from dangling for hours.
Even if he was floating up in the sky in the most comfortable high tech invisible fluff pillow levitator, just being 3f/1m higher then everyone else will already feel quite a bit warmer. Maybe this is that one guy in your group that never wears socks and is always hot.
And just like that....I'm planning a LAN party for my birthday. Done. It's been close to 7 years but I want one.
You might be interested in this book https://readonlymemory.com/shop/book/lan-party/
