11–20 of 172 posts
> crucial, awkward time I mean, I disagree completely about the "awkward" part. Online gaming has nothing on hanging out with a bunch of friends in the same room playing PC games together for a weekend. If you happen to be younger and you've never had a LAN party with friends, you absolutely should try it once. It's a unique experience and it's crazy fun.
He brought his PC and we took 2 of 3 days to set up the network and the help of a local sysadmin.
I went to many over the years, and it's somehow funny that LANs globally looked like ours even without widespread internet.
I had small one with 3-6 friends. We used BNC for quite some time and always missed a terminator.
I also attended big ones with 150-600 people. They were a great source of games and videos, when you didn't have internet.
I did some LANs with friends later, when everyone had laptops. Was much easier. Than the big CRTs back in the day.
Is it just me or does the last section - "what killed the LAN party" keep appearing infinitely many times? I read it at least three times before realising I'd already read it, ha.
Hah. Me too on mobile. I was reading it probably for the fourth or fifth time before it hit. Just started my coffee so wasnt awake
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Gigap... - On screen, the WON version of Team Fortress. That brings memories :)
Man, that CS image gives me such nostalgia.
There was a real magic to LANs at one time, and these photos certainly bring back memories. University and college dorms were pretty fun too, I imagine their LANs are quite locked down now and only serve as an isp to the internet, but you used to be able to find eachother on the campus LAN fairly easily once upon a time, and there was a lot of associated fun and magic, from intranet messaging to gaming to file sharing
Gaming companies contributed to the death of LAN parties too. They killed the "split-screen" gameplay that would support 2-4 players on the same machine. They wanted each player to require their own copy of the game. They killed LAN support, forcing you to play on their servers. Culturally we saw a shift towards social isolation. People are more comfortable talking over a mic.
Even during that period it was much easier to go to a lanshop and play there either as in lan or on the proto cloud servers they had.
Many fond memories of early battle.net and much fewer of steam.
