A Lament for the LAN Party | Hacker News Reader

A Lament for the LAN Party

rockpapershotgun.com

235 pointsyrochat154 comments

LAN parties were an interesting normative force at my high school. You always hear about the tension between jocks and geeks. But jocks like playing video games as much as geeks, who had the technical know-how to get networked games going. So the jocks at my high school were really interested in being friends with us nerds. We finally had something in common! Our LAN parties were this strange alternate universe where the captain of the football team hung out with the science fair nerds. We even had cheer leaders come to our LAN parties.

I graduated before the internet really obviated the need for LANs. From younger friends, I heard that when the Xbox 360/PS3 came out, LAN parties slowed down, and jocks ceased interactions with nerds. But there was that brief period in the early 2000s where we existed in harmony.

Call me crazy but as I understand it from kids today it's pretty cool to be a "nerd" today

The word "nerd" is so overused that a supermodel who likes Dickens considers herself a nerd.

It's really not the word it used to be.

The same goes for "hacker".

Ye olde definition implies physically attractive people can't be nerds, and unattractive people can't not be nerds.

That's only useful for making an us vs them label. It's a good thing that anyone can nerd out on Dickens.

I've heard before that it's a question of degree (“prove just how much you like Dickens!”), which is kind of an uncool way to discourage intellectual curiosity. Not everyone was forged in the pale glow of monitors in their parents' basement, some have to work at it later.

Ye olde definition implies physically attractive people can't be nerds, and unattractive people can't not be nerds.

An alternate interpretation is that 'nerd culture' has become an ugly perverted commodity of its former self to the point where the requisite "hot girl" is put in front of eyeballs with no authenticity and offers semi-humorous-because-she-doesn't-quite-get-it-but-still-tries-her-best one liners while simultaneously manifesting this new proto manic pixie dream nerd girl persona-having no real purpose or reason for being there other than to rope in the casual viewer looking for something, anything, anything but another TCP/IP joke.

Physically attractive people can be nerds. Nerds can be physically attractive. But let's not fool ourselves on those tropes that still exist and get trotted out there making everyone look like damn fools: The hot girl who tries to be nerdy with a front as transparent as saran-wrap, and the incapable, slightly awkward-looking but you can't figure out why nerdy guys who pine after her because she totally understood how heavy the ending to Empire Strikes Back was and enjoyed it.

I call "The Big Bang Theory" to the stand.

I don't think it's so much attractive in the physically attractive sense as attractive in the sense of taking care of your appearance. Nerd carries the implication that someone is so obsessed with their passion that they neglect other "unnecessary" aspects of life, the most visually obvious being their appearance, hygiene a close second.

Being "attractive" is usually more than just good looks, it takes a lot of time and commitment. Even the most naturally attractive people can be pretty unattractive if they entirely stop caring about their looks. Hell, just keeping long hair looking somewhat presentable takes a few hours a week (as I found out when I decided to grow my hair out back in highschool, didn't expect that). Add in time to go to the gym, buy groceries, cook and eat properly, find/buy well fitting clothes, etc and it adds up. If you're nerd-level passionate about something, that's all time you could be spending on your passion of choice instead.

I think his point was that demonstrating intelligence or interest in an activity bred by education used to be a normal character trait. Now, given the socially normed common denominator of minimal brain exertion, it's considered odd.

It's funny because the people I know of personally that has ended up on the cover of vogue was quite awkward in elementary/high school. Being a head taller and skinnier than everyone else wasn't exactly a recipe for being popular in the '90s.

Nah. Maker, hacker, geek, sure. But nerd is still nerd. I may well go so far as to say that geek was "introduced" so as to allow people to be interested in computers (or more correctly, web/game design) without being boxed in with "the nerds" in the computer lab.

Or it may be that it is cool to "nerd out" about fashion, sports, or anything not historically associated with the term nerd.

Not only is the computer lab cooler than being into books or playing an instrument these days, but "nerds" themselves are much "cooler" in that they enforce all sort of arbitrary social rules. When I got in to computers it was enough to be interested in technology. It's more the rule than the exception these days to hear "nerds" talk derogatory about things people are interested in that don't make enough money, other highly technical industries or whichever technology isn't "cool" enough.

Sounds like a SV mentality...

My girlfriend had that experience with her high school friend group. Nearly all of them went to the same college for Computer Science but she chose Electrical Engineering to study computer hardware. They poked fun of her major and talked down to her for not learning to program until her second semester in college. It wasn't as "cool" as CS to them. She still gets the occasional derogatory remark when she sees them because they chose jobs in SV after college but she went to graduate school.

Not really. "Nerd/geek" have expanded to include basically anyone who enjoys pop culture or has a technical skill--obviously those guys are cool, right? But the original subjects--socially awkward kids who enjoy the wrong things too much--are still left out in the cold.

It's cool to be a "nerd" if you're attractive with quirky yet charming social skills.

Portlandia did a good bit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EMXRAWWiBw

Yeah i think games with integrated voip kinda killed the need to share a room to coordinate.

That said, i think the jocks were more into the "reflex" games like shooters and real time strategy. Sit them down with a slower paced game and they would riot.

Likely why we are seeing more and more online games that used to be somewhat slower paced introduce more and more "twitch" mechanics to placate the jocks.

I always thought it was just a movie stereotype to have 'jocks', 'nerds' and 'cheer leaders'

It was at my school. Our jocks and nerds were very intermixed and hung out together in different groups, and our cheerleaders were mostly losers. The "popular" girls didn't really do any sports or activities to speak of, except for some resume-padding stuff like Key Club.

At other schools, I honestly think the stereotypes in movies became self-fulfilling prophecies. The terminology came from movies, and perhaps some of the division did as well.

If you read "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", [0] then look at these photos by pg, [1] and then ask yourself, "who is in the chess club?" then "who is the in the weight lifting/track team?"

    "The kind of things we were interested 
    in didn't count for much in our high school." -- pg

Having gone to HS around about the same time and a mathlete, I recognise similar dynamics, even though I was 10,000 Ml away. It's no myth.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

[1] http://paulgraham.com/gateway.html

A meta-comment on the whole discussion: this whole jock/nerd business is very very American.

I am about the age and had a very similar experience, but it went beyond LAN parties. In retrospect, I went to a very quirky school. It was public, but you need to apply to go there--it was no one's default school.

Despite that, we had some of the best sports teams in the state, debate teams, and engineering teams. It was a culture of excellence and it was difficult to even classify geeks and jocks because so many individuals fit into both groups.

I'm not sure what this school did to get it right, but it's sad to see it not replicated many times over.

> I'm not sure what this school did to get it right, but it's sad to see it not replicated many times over.

> but you need to apply to go there

It sounds to me as if the school had a filter function to sort the unmotivated (or disadvantaged) out at the gate. If your strategy is to sift though the general population to find exceptional individuals, pretty much by definition you will not be making all schools in the same manner.

I think that's why successful charter schools are so hard to replicate. For every successful charter school, there are some number N that aren't.

Oh the LAN party... Me and my mates in Rio, around '99, would carry our PC towers, monitors, and backpacks of cables, keyboards and tech paraphernalia to our one of our apartments in Ipanema and set up wherever we could. There'd be maybe 4-6 of us.

We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network. At first we used coaxial cables and T plugs with a terminator at the last computer, what a nightmare. Then eventually I think someone brought a switcher and we used the regular rj-45s.

We still talk about epic Starcraft battles, insane coop quake run throughs and the day Diablo II came out and we played 12 straight!

Usually at the end, in the early Saturday or Sunday morning we'd go get a cheap breakfast go home to get changed and meet back up at the beach to debrief last night's shenanigans.

This reminds me so much of my own youth, except for the beach debriefing :). Especially the 4 hours trying to get all computers to "see" each other brings back memories. I remember a particularly puzzling problem where my computer and a friend's computer were unable to communicate directly, but could otherwise talk to everyone else. After half a weekend, we found out that the on-board network devices on our motherboards (which were identical brand and model, ordered from the same place) had been manufactured with identical MAC addresses. After all the black magic that we had applied to the problem, without luck, throughout the LAN, it gave a great sense of joy and relief to fix the problem by simply spoofing the MAC and changing one digit :). We had an epic 8 hour long Age of Empires session afterwards ...

I can't imagine how you guys eventually found that out! We usually resorted to abandoning Windows Network and just hoping we could ping everyone and "see" each other's servers hosted on a computer. Often computer A and B could see C but couldn't see each other. Never ending mess of installing/removing tcp/ip and the other LAN protocols and fudging around with ip addresses etc!! Took forever but when it worked and that first game started rolling everyone was up

I was very fascinated by networks and network protocols back then, so often at LANs I would play around with a tool called "netXray" which could capture network packets (basically a proprietary equivalent of Wireshark).

I could spend a lot of time trying to decipher the data that games would send on the network, and I also tried to mess with my friends by replaying modified UDP packets (rarely had an effect, though). As far as I remember, I found the MAC address issue while playing around with netXray :).

>>We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network.

Me too! It was only when I did a CCNA that it occurred to me why you can't just give every machine an arbitrary IP like 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.8. And the mystery of what "Subnet Mask" meant caused a few facepalms as well.

"Did you all double check so that WINS is enabled??"

I remember from one university lan party (c. 2004) that there were 6-7 people who just wanted to play C&C:generals as well as some who would rather be playing UT2K3 but then that group overlapped with a couple of people who had insistent on turning up with linux (slackware? Gentoo?) boxes and hadn't got them fully working yet.

Then after a while a few from the 6-7 playing generals get bored, realise they don't have UT downloaded, so they head over to that guy who doesn't seem to play games but just shares files and watches movies to get the discs from him. He's happy amusing himself watching supertroopers for the 15th time and oblivious to the fact that it's 3 hours in and so far only 2 games of generals have managed to happen.

UT2K3 is huge (for the time), there's only one set of DVDs so while it's shared around the network is going slow as shit because everyone is piped into a single hub, but eventually after an hour or so the laggers manage to finish downloading and installing it.

By which time the people who started on UT2K3 are bored because they had envisaged an epic 6v6 with vehicles and instead had to settle for a fairly lame 3 man deathmatch, where one guy was so much better and couldn't help but dominate the other two.

So the linux nerds and slow installers (the games we'd be playing were published well in advance, please make sure you're bought up and fully patched) finally finish installing and then updating their installs and find that no one really wants to keep playing, but a larger game with vehicles does finally get under way.

"Starcraft is small, what about starcraft?" pipes up one unfortunate who's just suggesting that because his computer is too slow to actually run anything more modern. "Nah, but I've got WC3" someone else more helpfully says, but starcraft guy doesn't want to clear out his 2GB of pr0n to make space for that.

And this was in the days where getting ethernet working wasn't really problematic.

Board games are the LAN party now, at least for my social circle. I still meetup with the now 15 years older LAN gaming crowd. And I understand board games have been around forever but now we live on screens I think they have a more special place than 15+ years back. Plus the mechanics/quality of games coming out these days is at another level. If you think of board games as Monopoly/Risk, I would strongly suggest checking out what is available these days.

I still miss LAN parties though...

With most of the eurogames, I wonder why a computer isn't doing all the busy work they seem to require.

Check out games like the tabletop version of X-Com. They've integrated a smartphone app into the gameplay extremely well.

Probably about 4 times per year on a long weekend, my mates and I still get together in someone's warehouse or garage and have a 3 day LAN. There's normally between 15-20 people, and we play a mix of CS:Source, Warcraft 3 custom maps, AoE, Dota 2, and whatever else the fashion is at the time. A recent one has been Spintires, which is a blast with 4 people!

That said, the amount of sleep and the quality of the food we eat has definitely improved in the last 15 years or so - no more fast food for all meals.

Also, the advent of broadband and routers now mean networking is literally plug and play, not spending 2-3 hours trying to either set up a DHCP server, or assign static IPs and trying to figure out why it's not working, only to find out that someone mistyped it.

I remember buying a networking kit at Best Buy in the late 90s and then with 3 of my friends spending hours just trying to get the computers to ping each other.

There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.

I laughed hard at this... The one poor guy who had family computer and required a large amount of work to be playable....

This resonates so much! In our group who started with IPX networks to play Doom there was always one less technical kid whose PC was so loaded with viruses the rest of us would spend a few hours helping troubleshoot his issues. A reformat always came next.

Pat, you were a legend.

Looking back I find it hard to believe it was necessary to format and reinstall windows all the time. But I guess I haven't used Windows in about 10 years either. When everything is a black box and broken as hell there's not much you can do other than wipe the slate clean and start again.

> There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.

Oh god that was me one time. It was at one of those larger LAN-parties with thousands of people. I remember bugging people on IRC (or whatever we used to chat) to see if anyone had an ISO of windows and a CD burner with him. Then looking around the crowd to see where exactly he was located.

Fun times.

When Wolfenstein 3D (or was it Doom?) came out, I spent a month writing a socket library for DECnet, so we could play the game in network mode at a defence lab in which I was working. We had some great times, as in 1992 (1993?) it was uncommon to have a high speed connection between that many computers. Never did get around to releasing that winsock driver (no sourceforge then), which is a pity, as it may well have predated DEC's own socket implementation.

---

edit: winsock -> socket, as it was actually written for DOS, before winsock.

Futher edit: Thinking about it, the game might have been Doom and the year 1993, as I don't think Wolfenstein 3D had a multiplayer mode

It must have been DOOM because Wolf 3D didn't have multiplayer. Was your software an IPX emulator? That's how Kali worked, since DOOM was written to use IPX.

It could well have been IPX. As you can tell by the number of edits, my memories of the technical details are a bit fuzzy.

LAN parties are still a thing among tight-knit gaming communities where the personal relationships are strong.

For example, I still play Descent [0] competitively, along with perhaps a few hundred others off-and-on. There's a group of about 20 of us who have become really close friends in the last few years, and we try to have a big LAN party every summer. We've also had quite a few small get-togethers where a handful of people will fly or drive out for a weekend. Last month, a friend drove out from a couple states away, and joined my wife and I at my grandparent's old cabin, at 9200 feet in elevation, with no running water but with electricity, and we played a bunch of matches.

In the past, I've been to Descent LANs at such unusual locations as a hog farm and a Dominican monastery. My wife and I also took our laptops on our honeymoon and played Starcraft: Brood War in a tiny trailer next to a lake in northern Idaho.

I'm also a part of a small Christian gamers group [1], and there are regular discussions about who would be able to get together in various parts of the country this summer.

People are willing to travel to meet friends. Lugging along a computer isn't all that unusual.

[0] http://descentchampions.org/ is the competitive site

[1] http://www.solidrockgamers.com/

Wow. Descent? I haven't even thought about that game in a decade and a half. I feel like the hardware required to play that game doesn't really require lugging, these days.

Most people run a newer .exe in higher resolution and a high framerate. You can run it moderately well with reduced settings on a Raspberry Pi, and we have people bring mini-PC's to LANs. A big CPU tower is no longer necessary.

What almost everybody lugs is their preferred controller (gaming keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc.) and a good monitor.

It makes me sad that everyone is acting like they're no longer a thing. If you can get a few friends together then it's still great fun, possibly more so than it used to be.

There's a big organised LAN party here that runs three-four times a year, with space about 80 people in a big school hall, and then some friends of mine get together now and again at each other's homes. With modern kit you can just turn up, plug in, and be playing.

Our most recent LAN party was a friend's stag night, a full weekend of gaming, drinking, and general craziness. Also the first one we've done and explicitly left space to use the TV which was great fun later on once everyone was over Counterstrike.

Yup.

My high school (graduated last year, but I doubt it's changed since) would host a LAN party 1-2 times per year, pulling probably 2/3 of the school.

My little brother still arranges ~10-man LAN-parties, and has now managed to get the municipality to arrange smaller LAN parties weekly.

And of course, the huge ones, like Dreamhack and The Gathering are still well and alive.

For anyone that likes this sort of thing, I found a few videos of old LAN parties from 1998-2001:

https://youtu.be/ch__Ah2iCtQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X43soJt7jI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6bzgl6vKA

Also, this is much more recent but really captures the whole LAN party spirit. It's a basically bunch of guys playing sudden-death Minecraft.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUNF3_hO_no

There are some other LAN games on their channel that are fun as well.

I'm loving the 10Base2 in video #3 :) Those were some great times.

That third video was awesome. That footage of the guy playing q3test must've had the best computer at the LAN, it was running sweet!

Shameless plug.

Can't speak too much for it just yet (working through sponsorships, etc), but some friends and I are setting up a 160p LAN in Chicago later this year. It's particularly neat since we're not the only ones to have similar goals. LANs are coming back ;).

We also do ~monthly LANs out in Wauconda (Chicago suburbs) area if anybody's interested.

Here's just some preliminary stuff we've been working on. The switch we have is the same as LHC's: http://imgur.com/a/BICDK

That's awesome.

What's your approach to internet connectivity and wifi? How much power are you budgeting for?

I can't speak much for the power setup since I'm on the networking/infrastructure side, but it's pretty hefty and accounted for with tons of wiggle room. The switch alone is a decent chunk of the power. Back when we were setting it up in winter, it was able to heat a full house while sitting idle :).

For bandwidth, I'll be setting up an http cache server this weekend so that steam downloads (at least) can be retrieved locally as often as possible. The internet we have is 100Mb/s, which I personally think is more than plenty if managed correctly. We'd like the network and its capabilities to pretty much be as open as possible with a noticeable disclaimer that traffic can easily be intercepted and that Bad Stuff won't be tolerated. Ideally, we'd want the network to be as old school LAN-y as possible, which means that we unfortunately have to make some security compromises. We're going to place heavy restrictions on southbound traffic coming in, but northbound is going to be pretty limited. That said, we haven't set it up entirely yet, so we'll probably change a lot as we go.

We haven't really talked about wifi that much, but I've heard more and more that ubiquiti routers are incredible for the price. We'll probably buy two or three decent ones.

Ubiquiti APs are nice if you want to use PoE or if you need a pre-packaged solution to manage a large number of them. They won't offer better wireless performance than cheaper consumer routers running OpenWRT/LEDE that use the same radios.

Ubiquiti's routers are overrated.

> Ubiquiti's routers are overrated.

Why say that?

I'm a pfSense fanboi but was planning on recommending Ubiquiti kit for those not happy about spending the money to get pfSense capable hardware.

Ubiquiti's wired-only routers tend to be more expensive than a consumer wireless router with the same or better processor that can also be an access point. The EdgeRouter products are highly reliant on relatively inflexible packet processing hardware offloads that make it impossible to do things like use QoS/AQM techniques that are more modern than the CPU design, so their impressive specs won't necessarily translate to competitive real-world performance. (Not that it would matter when you use a BSD-derived router OS that hasn't been keeping up with those advancements.)

As a fellow northern suburbanite (Grayslake), I'd love to hear about the Wauconda LAN parties.

Other opinions welcome. Here's mine:

LAN parties were implementations "instant messaging", "VOIP","video conferencing" and maybe some other things I'm omitting. Before these things even had a "market".

Gamers solved all these challenges when the web was still a blatently crude hack and the internet was dog slow by today's standards.

Then they successfully and reliably pierced NAT to play games over the internet. Even when the internet was painfully slow. Before Napster, before Bittorrent, before Kazaa/Skype, etc.

Others outside of gaming seemed to be struggling with coming up with solutions for these basic but obviously valuable "services". There is a wasteland of failed/abandoned "VOIP" projects from the 90's that still boggles my mind.

Except for some well-funded research labs, gamers did it first. LAN over internet. (Ethernet frames in UDP packets.) It might be ugly to some people, but it does work.

Now, I will let you all tell me how my opinion is misinformed.

Oh yeah, I remember buying a license for kali.net (which apparently the service and website are both still up) to play Warcraft II. It allowed IPX protocol gaming over the Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_%28software%29

My wife and I played games together on Kali before we ever met in person (we didn't meet on Kali, but on a message board for Descent.)

If you ever played Descent on Kali, there's a facebook group full of your old friends: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kalikahn/

Hm, what nobody seems to have mentioned yet: We've all grown up. In that time I used to play 6 hours every week day and maybe 12 hours every weekend day. Now I'm happy if I can make it to 5 hours a whole week combined. If you would organize a LAN party with all my old friends from back then and all the games, I would still need to look in my calendar if I can make it there.

Not just times have changed. We have changed as well.

I'm 32, with a kid, as are most of the guys I LAN party with. We still manage to make it happen, although admittedly with quite a lot more notice than we used to need.

I also seem to recall having a LAN party New Years Eve...

Those were the days. We would spend all night doing the LAN party and all day either hunting or paying paintball.

Andy, I'll never forget your first LAN party: showed up with 7GB porn on your 8GB hard drive and refused to delete any to make space for the games because you only had 33.6k dialup.

For us it was and ever shall be Age of Empires. Wololo!

Warcraft II for us!

Also, right when Doom came out, I remember my dad setting it up on work computers after work, and he would play deathmatches against his coworkers Dave and Mike, and they'd let an 8-year-old me play! Such fun times.

My LAN career started with StarCraft and ended with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Anyone play that?

W:ET was a ridiculous amount of fun.

I love ET! Have you heard of ET: Legacy? It's a modern implementation of the client and server and works great ( had a server running on FreeBSD).

https://www.etlegacy.com/

What's the population like? I fired up the original a couple of years ago, and most servers were either dead or filled with bots.

Sadly that's the main problem in my opinion. As far as I know there are still some rare events which can bring players back but it has been stagnating for years now.

I loved Enemy Territory! Used to lead a UK clan back in 2004 or so - fond, fond memories!

AoE1 and 2 were such great games.

I owe some of my high school social life to the fact I could beat anyone there at aoe, so I made friends with some of the older kids by teaching them good builds.

For us Age of Mythology, Age of Empires 2 and of course CS 1.6 :D

Command and Conquer, followed by Starcraft here.

Also, one of the early GTAs had networked multiplayer, and I remember doing a fair bit of that when I was younger.

Forever! Actually I recently found out that there's still an active (semi-)professional scene which blew my mind. Amazing game, I've started playing a lot again and thinking about hosting some LAN parties for it.

Come join us at reddit.com/r/aoe2 , it's fun!

Last fall some friends and I tried to set up a LAN party with Age of Mythology. The networking code on the Windows 8-compatible version was truly terrible but it was still a blast to play. Wish we could have done Empires, too!

Last year I worked for a startup that did regular AOE LAN parties at the office. I no longer work there but I still go to their AOE LAN parties :)

The LAN party is still well and alive in the demoscene, in the form of demoparties which are basically LAN parties plus computer art. Some of them have become extremely large:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assembly2004-areena01.jpg

http://www.ozone3d.net/public/jegx/201308/asm2013.jpg

Oh man, the room full of CRTs brings back so many memories of nights spent playing chicken with a heart attack from the cocktail of energy drinks we consumed in the glow and buzz of CRTs on every surface in the room that could actually support them.

Do you happen to have any more resources about the demoscene community? It's something I've wanted to get into ever since I had my mind blown by a no-cd crack that somehow added a 9 minute high res intro video to a 25k launcher exe.

I guess I'm feeling pretty nostalgic today.

Demo parties even predate LAN parties, so it's no surprise they're still around when LAN is no longer much of a draw.

Don't forget about Dreamhack.

Growing up, my way to make money for the summer was playing RTS games competitively at LAN parties and regional/national tournaments - way before e-sports were a thing outside of South Korea.

I met people from the internet at big LAN parties, I got introduced to the demoscene, wargames / CTFs and a whole lot of other things that shaped my career; I even ended up dating girls from that world.

Is there anything equivalent to the old internet cafe for kids these days? Or (active) IRC channels, for the matter.

Yes. Come to Defcon and/or QuakeCon in the US. There are others around the world, but I'm assuming you're in the US. It all still exists and young people are still into it. The tech scene is just huge now so this stuff is kinda considered niche / underground, but it's still definitely a thing.

I'm so glad to have been a part of this (short) era. Video games and junk food from sunset to sunrise with a bunch of people connected by CAT5 cables! While technology makes things easier and more convenient, sometimes the effort and lack of accessibility leaves better memories.

In middle school, I helped organize a weekly "computer club" that met after hours in a school computer lab. It quickly degenerated into a giant Starcraft lan party every week, and became much more popular as a result.

In early high school, I played a lot of Tribes 1 (with some mod that I don't remember the name of) and Aliens vs Predator.

In later high school, CS 1.6 and Deus Ex multiplayer, still with Starcraft mixed in.

In college, it was "flavor of the month". We had a crazy file-sharing network, so the common in-dorm games switched around all the time. Warcraft 3, Counterstrike, Halflife 2-based mods, various open source FPSes, tons of Halo 2+3, and locally-hosted WoW servers are what stick in my mind.

I loved lan parties. I hated moving my 17" CTX crt monitor to them. It was as deep as it was wide and must have weighed damn near 40 pounds.

The future ain't all bad.

I had a 19" CRT which was terrifying to transport. Later I met a friend in college with a insane 21" CRT. Transporting that thing was like a proper move.

I had a big 21" CRT that would go to LAN parties with me. It took me and a friend to move it, and it once broke the table it was put down on with its weight.

Amazing monitor though.

Heh, during college I bought a pallet of 500 Eizo monitors and resold them for a nice profit (covered my fees that year). I cherry picked the three nicest Eizo T965 monitors. Man was that a sweet setup.

Damn near broke my back, my desk and cooked my bedroom in Summer running it though. Needless to say LAN parties were hosted at my house since no way I'd be lugging that setup around!

When I was a senior in high school, Cisco offered their NetAcademy program to a few high schools around the nation. It was a pretty sweet deal: for a relatively small price, you could earn your CCNA as an optional elective. You had to get approval to take the class; basically, the 10 of us were the most technically minded and computer literate students in the school.

So, of course within a few weeks many of us were staying after school to use the top-of-the-line (circa 1999) computer equipment to play games. :) Half Life and the various mods (particular Action Half Life [0]) were favorites. Even the teacher eventually got in on the fun.

"You shot me! If you shoot me again I'll fail you!"

A lot of times a few folks would come over to my house in the evenings because we had a blazing fast (again, circa 1999) 128k ISDN line in the house, supposedly to do "homework" but really gaming, surfing the web, playing MUDs. Sometimes we'd kick on a movie like Army of Darkness while gaming.

Such great memories and an awesome time to be alive. I still keep up with a few folks from back then but I'd love to know what happened to everyone else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Half-Life

Same timeframe, my highschool in Arizona was one of the first netacademy programs. Your stories sound just like my stories, isdn included. Something about that time just had this fresh, wild frontier feeling to it when it came to computers. I miss it often.

I credit so much to the head of the computer dept, and industry guy who left the industry and was teaching us kids, but kept his industry contacts. I consider him my mentor, because he taught me the power of curiosity and tinkering.

One of my favorite stories when I first started netacademy, we would do capture the flags in a big circle of routers and wires, and one day in the middle he walked over and switched physical connections and said "the rules today didnt say anything about physical security" and walked away. 16 year old mind blown.

Did you do VICA competitions too?

I really got emotional when I first read the article. LAN parties were that epic moment when you felt you were part of something new, we were initiating the new socialization process we are all now accustomed to. Nerds kind of disappeared in my mind

Oh how I hated to set up the network: We've usually gathered around saturday morning, everybody hauling up their gear and waving their parents goodbye. The oldes guy in our group had removed all network cards from the PCs at his office and we spend the next six hours installing the network, hooking up BNC cables, trying to get the IPX to work, executing all kind of arcane rituals in order to get the games to work.

Later on network cards got cheaper so we had our cards pre-installed. Still the expensive 3com cards didn't mix well with the cheapest Planet ones. (We had to keep the cheap cards on one side of the BNC part and the the others on the other side...)

Ethernet was a godsend.

A couple of years later Laptops made spontaneous LAN parties possible. I wouldn't wanna go back.

This was even before LAN parties became a thing, but I still remember playing 'hunt' (IIRC) on pre-Solaris Sun 3/50 workstations in the math department computer lab.

Nothing quite like those slime bombs.

Found a bit more on this impossible to search for game: http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/255131/the-internet-s-forgott...

And: http://www.acquerra.com.au/personal/bird/hunt/

I sometimes wonder whether hackathons are in some way an evolution of the LAN party (or the demo party).

It does depend a lot on the hackathon - many these days are very business-oriented. :(

...but there are still some where people show up just to experiment with technology - to prototype something quickly and understand whether a technical idea has potential and where the dragons are.

(These are definitely my favourite hackathons. If anyone knows of any like this around London, let me know. I'm hopeful that http://www.hackthesenses.com/ might be one!)

Like the author's group of friends, mine has stopped throwing LAN parties. I think our last ones were around early WoW time.

However, large LAN parties are far from being dead. There's Dreamhack and the like, and my alma mater runs a huge 2000+ players LAN event every year (https://lanets.ca/). It seems like it's become more of a grand event, as opposed to the couple times a year gathering with a handful of friends.

As a guy in his late 20s, it's really interesting to see how gaming has evolved and democratized itself during the past couple decades.

Seems the spirit here is more smaller events, but we still run a 720-864 person event every 3 months here in Perth, Western Australia

www.rflan.org

That's a peculiarly specific range...

We still get together to play a variety of games from AOE2 to CS to BFBC2. The last time we got together we had way too much fun with Blockstorm which is like Minecraft meets Quake.

I remember Doom, Decent, and Aces of the Pacific were popular too.

Duke Nukem 3D and Starcraft, great times :)

The first time I played StarCraft was on a Friday afternoon at my new job. It was an insurance company that had all their PCs on a 10/100 network and the owner and head of IT coaxed people into playing so they could have a frag fest. I still hate that game.

I remember playing the original TF Quake 1 mod... that was a lot of fun back then... same for Doom 2, gkdm3 was my all time fav wad.

My old highschool colleagues and I still meet once a year for a LAN party. Still playing the same old games like Quake, UT and Enemy territory. Last year I flew extra from New Zealand to Austria. And it was worth it.

> The LAN party, where you and six mates cram yourself into a dining room for a weekend, hook up your PCs with a complex series of switches, routers and CAT9 cables, somehow became quite the thing.

What is a CAT9 cable?

Judging by a Google image search, cat9 would have made for an interesting addition to a LAN party.

I will admit I have rigged up Tribes 1 over a null modem cable back in the day for local lan play.

The first time I played Quake multiplayer was over modem with my neighbor. His dad had one of those USRobotics V.everything modems and I had a USR Sportster 28k. They negotiated some proprietary protocol like v42 because we had a 140k connect. It was insane at the time.

I vaguely recall that there was a "shotgun" set of modems you could pair up and get 128k over two 56k connections. I had just the one, but it felt so, so good to get sub-200 ping in Action Quake 2 and CS.

I remember a trick of connecting at a standard speed and then running a certain AT command that reduced the latency considerably - from 250ms down to 180 or so. Can't remember what it was but it made a very big difference to Quakeworld. The client prediction made it very playable on a sub-200 ping.

Possibly turning off compression or error correction; both of those would be toggled with an AT command and add latency.

I think you're right - AT%C0 once you're connected didn't drop the line, it just reduced the communications overhead between the modems. Good days :)

No idea, I remember playing around with 10-base-t coax a few times...

10base-2, we had some localtalk phonenet mac lan parties too.

To clarify vt240's reply: If you were playing with coax, that would have been 10base-2. 10base-T is twisted pair Cat3 cable that used the same 8P8C connectors we use today.

Sorry. Just to mention it is going to give me nightmares about big AUI media converters sticking out, loose, not fitting right, falling off, ahahhaa. Novell Netware. Tree. Booting from floppy disks. ISA Cards!

http://genecatlow.keenspot.com/d/20000721.html

You are correct... :-)

It's when you have to splice a cat4 and a cat5 together with scotch tape because your longest cable wont reach from the hub on the table to the couch where you had to set up because you got there late.

I'm still actively using a LAN party spliced cat5e from over a decade ago, though I've properly soldered and heat-shrinked it since.

I think he meant DB9

True story circa late 1990s:

As a high school student in a religious affiliated private college prep environment, the Senior/Junior class members could be a part of a nearly "free study" computer course, contingent on acting as the school's basic IT resource. I was among a team of about 6 total, and we were very close knit. There was a 'brother' who ran the computer lab, about 30 networked PCs, and along a back wall, we had our array of about 7 machines on a separate network.

So what did we do with our unchecked, unmonitored machines?

Installed Duke Nukem 3D, natch!

When the Brother eventually noticed we were playing against each other instead of, you know, doing work related stuff, he came over and the discussion went as follows:

"Hey I don't think you guys are supposed to be playing games."

"It's okay Brother J, we wrote this one."

"Oh! Wow, that's pretty good. Okay then."

Not sure who it was who threw that Hail Mary but it landed and we couldn't believe it.

...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is but a sliver of my life that would eventually be dominated by Half-Life until finally putting down the mouse for a guitar pick once and for all.

The most epic multiplayer Starcraft game I ever played was still on the Blood Bath map. We mined out everything, and when my battlecruisers tried to attack my friend's base, he stole them using his dark archon's mind control. Total battle of attrition.

Thomas, kudos to you for being able to play 2 different Starcraft games at the same time on battle.net and win!

Blood Bath was an awesome map.

Some of my best memories are LAN parties. I've spent many times more time playing online with strangers, but it's so not the same.

- In my early days at a major chip manufacturer, they used to allow people to use the demo hardware. We'd come in on a Saturday and play Age of Empires for the entire day, on state-of-the-art machines. It's still a major talking point among that group of friends.

- The alternative history provided by Civilization games is more vivid than actual history. I still talk about the strategy of building a discrete city on Svalbard (looking forward to nukes), which my Europe-dominating friend discovered to his chagrin. Him and the other guy I was playing with were my best men.

- Another group of friends was cemented when someone's parents were out for a week, leaving the whole house to a dozen or so guys. Counterstrike and AoE seemed to balance out who got to win. Which is good, because I was getting murdered a bit too often by the younger kids.

My first LAN gaming experience was during the last 30 minutes of a double-period computer class on Fridays in São Paulo when our teacher let us play Doom in the school's computer lab. This was in 1994 or 1995. I also used those machines to send my first email to a girl I had a crush on who lived on another continent.

I also remember many evenings playing [Space War][1] on an IBM machine with a friend and waking up at 6am to play [Sopwith][2] before heading to school when sleeping over another friend's place.

[1]: http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2006/06/spacewar/ [2]: http://www.sopwith.org/

Okay, anybody connect two Windows 95 PCs together via serial port to play Warcraft II? That was 10 year old me!

Serial was a bit tricky to get synced as I recall.

I have nostalgic memories of null modems and IPX/SPX to play old Westwood games.

Oh the memories. My first "lan" party was in my parents garage right after Quake 1 came out. We had two computers connected with a null modem adapter, since neither of us could afford network cards. Everyone took turns playing 1v1 games.

My best friend and I got our first apartment when we were still in High School, which ended up turning into an almost 24/7 lan party. Friends would find space for their PC's and leave them there for weeks, dropping by to play games when they had the time. One weekend we had so many people, there were two PCs setup on the kitchen counter. Internet access? A socks proxy letting everyone share our 33.6 dialup connection.

Just going to pitch in Diablo 1&2 and Myth: the Fallen Lords and Myth 2: Soulblighter.

So many hours.

Mmm... Myth aka revenge of the pyromaniac dwarf sappers!

These days I like the sub-LAN, a.k.a. calling 1→3 friends to enjoy Steam couch party games supporting 2→4 xbox controllers. Here's my selection, sorted from most to least approachable to non-gamers and marking with * my personal long-time gamer favorites:

* Gang Beasts, http://store.steampowered.com/app/285900/

* Nidhogg, http://store.steampowered.com/app/94400/

* Hidden in Plain Sight, http://store.steampowered.com/app/303590/

* Mario Kart Wii, non-Steam, played on www.dolphin-emu.org

- Sportsfriends, http://store.steampowered.com/app/277850/

- B.U.T.T.O.N., http://store.steampowered.com/app/92400/

- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, http://store.steampowered.com/app/341800/

- Kalimba, http://store.steampowered.com/app/324140/

- Mount Your Friends, http://store.steampowered.com/app/296470/

- Starwhal, http://store.steampowered.com/app/263020/

* Lethal League, http://store.steampowered.com/app/261180/

* Clusterpuck 99, http://store.steampowered.com/app/337960/

- Broforce, http://store.steampowered.com/app/274190/

- Crawl, http://store.steampowered.com/app/293780/

* TowerFall Ascension, http://store.steampowered.com/app/251470/

- Monaco, http://store.steampowered.com/app/113020/

- Blur, http://store.steampowered.com/video/42640/5707

- Distance, http://store.steampowered.com/app/233610/

- Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, http://store.steampowered.com/app/212480/

* A Fistful of Gun, http://store.steampowered.com/app/229810/

- Jamestown, http://store.steampowered.com/app/94200/

- Sky Force Anniversary, http://store.steampowered.com/app/355050/

Fantastic list! Commenting in part just so I can find it later.

Same here. I feel couch co-op is really having a small revival the last years.

You should try Duck Game!

Duck Game is good! Buuuut although funnier, not as gameplay-rich as TowerFall IMHO :)

You should add Screencheat to your list. Amazing fun.

Oh man this takes me back. I remember lugging steel case builds and CRTs around to many 2-3 day cs 1.6 LAN parties in high school. So many cases of bawls were consumed; so much time was spent sitting in #findscrim

The author mentions software piracy but I think other varieties were often a driving force. Nowadays with good legitimate digital music/video/software services there's much less need for that.

In-person gaming is still something special, but I don't blame people for not going to all the logistical effort when you can just sit down at home in the evening with zero pre-planning and get most of the same experience online.

I had a resurgence of the LAN party while in Iraq (07/08): the internet access was sufficiently slow, so we played C&C Generals quite a bit.

CnC generals was the best! Those chinese mammoth tanks were pretty OP though.

I remember lan parties fondly. In the late 90's I worked as a computer lab technician. After closing all the lab techs would get together to play games. The most fun was playing DOOM with a 3 screen setup (Left,Center,Right) with 3 PCs per person. A sort of poor man's VR.

Those days are long gone but so very fondly remembered.

We still do LAN parties once in a while.

Much easier today with laptops, haha.

But yeah, I remember the times back then, when we had to carry our PCs around town.

Always the guy with the 21" CRT that weighted a ton.

I was a cool guy when getting one of the first 17" TFTs :D

We also organised bigger events. Once a party for 500 people, with competitions and whatnot.

Yeah but now I don't do this big stuff anyore...

Setup was always such a time consuming pain. Just tonight I tried to co-op a retro game which still went bad despite two (modern) source ports and hours of tweaking.

Steam can help--for a price.

Back in the day the first LANs I attended also took hours of preparation in the school AV lab. Still, being in person was interesting.

Consoles with split screen make it so much easier.

Wow, this thread is full of terms and experiences I had long forgotten: IPX/SPX, null model, T plugs and their terminators, trying to make computers "see each other", hauling around CRT monitors (oh, how I envied the guy with the 21" Triniton!) and backpacks full of cables!

Nice times :)

I used to play Warcraft II in LAN parties during college.

But now I play Euro board games... JUST AS GOOD! Agricola anyone?

This brings back so many good memeories. Back to middle school when we had monthly LANS playing Counter-Strike and DOTA. Then to fill in the time between LAN parties we'd frequently go the LAN center next to our school.

Ugh, those things were always so gross. I don't understand why liking computers is so correlated with, well.... hygiene issues.

Awesome timing: I am hosting a LAN party in two weeks, and I'd really love to hear as many tips and suggestion as you HNers can give me.

Thanks in advance!

What size? Make sure you've enough room is my first generic piece of advice. Then I'd suggest a list of games people want to play so that everyone is patched and ready to rock.

And Saturday night is pizza night. No exceptions. Rock band/console multiplayer highly encouraged.

Depends on the size. IMHO parties ~10-20 people are the best. If you go bigger, it gets more complicated and anonymous. Didn't like those very much.

For a run-of-the-mill LAN you don't need much. Make sure there's

* enough chairs

* enough tables

* enough drinks, food

* enough power outlets (know where the fuse is)

* possibility to shade the windows

* somewhere to sit and chat without necessarily gaming

* possible sleeping quarters?

We got a vive set up for our last lan (in halifax, UK), it went down well.

People will forget cables (power, network). Get people to bring extra joypads for the people who don't have them for when its time for a game of rocket league...

Anybody remember Snipes on the old Novell LANs?

Yes! The first company foolish enough to employ me as a junior dev would have Snipes games on Friday afternoons between anyone who wasn't fielding a customer support call.

Sometimes I would be on the phone to someone while navigating around the maze trying to bounce a few stars round the corners at people - and then have to explain what the screams were in the background.

Ah, back when gaming was fun :-) Best gaming I ever had was back at university where we rented out a floor of the student union, setup 8 bitchin' PCs in each of two separate rooms, wired it all together with a huge projector in the central room, and invited players from all over the state for a 16-team bracket playoff of Quake 1 CTF. That was a hell of a good weekend.

NetTrek in the high school computer lab was way too much fun.

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