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Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

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Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#141

Post by gdprrrr »

fxtentacle wrote: post #127
jwie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitley think it's on the product side that LAN parties died. The relationship between the player and the game, and the LAN community and the game were way different. Gradually the companies figured out how to inject themselves into the social structure. Your relationships became mediated by these products. Rather than a social lubricant they became the relationship itself. They monetized that social capital. Yo…

Fully agree. I still regularly organize LAN parties with the same crew as back then. 24 years and counting... Family has made finding a suitable date much more difficult. But the biggest obstacle is finding LAN-capable games. 10 people joining Dota 2 from the same IP results in instant ban for everyone. StarCraft 2 is horribly laggy when 10 PCs compete for UDP traffic to the internet server. GTA 5 keeps load-balancin…

And then there's Anno 2070 which fails at login (it requires an account and an internet connection) for a second player in the same home network.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#142

Post by pests »

prawn wrote: post #44
Mistletoe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the greatest gaming experiences of my life is when I and my three younger brothers hooked up two original Xboxes with a network crossover cable and played the original Halo 2v2 split screen in separate rooms. Split screen LAN may not have been the norm but it is fantastic.

We had four on a projector in a room, and then another couple down the corridor on a TV. Glorious. Lots of yelling between rooms. After each game, the stats screen would motivate all sorts of trash talking. 20 years later, we still talk about the time someone called out at the friend with the lowest shots fired count: "You know the bullets don't cost anything, right?" I can never understand why modern CoD lacks so ma…

Apparently the new COD doesn’t even have a career stats page.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#143

Post by robryan »

TravHatesMe wrote: post #8

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.

Probably after they were already dead but also Discord. Online communication is so easy and good now. My friends have talked about having some LANs again but it is so easy to just play online that it never happens.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#144

Post by xattt »

agrippanux wrote: post #52

Sophomore year in college (‘97) was the height of LAN parties for me. Our dorm building wasn’t wired for internet yet so about 12 of us got together and took it upon ourselves to create our own network. We cajoled the NetOps dept at UCSD to give us old repeaters and bought a ton of BNC wire to connect everyone. Of course the facilities dept didn’t like rogue wiring running all over the massive dorm complex so they wo…

My university had adopted a no-wifi policy for about a decade, based on flawed research on safety of wireless communications by the individual who was the university president at the time. Fortunately, the whole university benefited from being wired with 100 and 1000 MBit anywhere you went.

There was a lot of Civ games played with my group.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#145

Post by bane »

agrippanux wrote: post #52

Sophomore year in college (‘97) was the height of LAN parties for me. Our dorm building wasn’t wired for internet yet so about 12 of us got together and took it upon ourselves to create our own network. We cajoled the NetOps dept at UCSD to give us old repeaters and bought a ton of BNC wire to connect everyone. Of course the facilities dept didn’t like rogue wiring running all over the massive dorm complex so they wo…

It was the late 90s, and I remember going to a LAN party in a guy's garage where we all played various games, swapped pirated software, and second most importantly of all, an absolutely terrible VCD pirated copy of the theatrical release of the Matrix that somebody copied off of a PC that came into the repair store they worked at.

One guy realized we could hook the whole ensemble up to a dial-up ISP connection and he could share his connection out to all of us with network gear and we suddenly could access the internet...sorta...very slow and highly unreliable.

When we finally got it sort of working, a few of us all joined demoscene and gaming IRC channels and tried to sorta build a "meta" LAN party across the globe with everybody at their own local party all coordinated and joked around in the shared chat.

We'd send somebody off every few hours for a pizza run, and it being autumn, got pretty chilly by around 2-3am. Lots of caffeine, soda, coffee, and most importantly community and fun.

Days like those, where we were connecting to each other on the very edges of technology may never really come again sadly.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#146

Post by dusted »

bane wrote: post #145
agrippanux wrote: post #52

Sophomore year in college (‘97) was the height of LAN parties for me. Our dorm building wasn’t wired for internet yet so about 12 of us got together and took it upon ourselves to create our own network. We cajoled the NetOps dept at UCSD to give us old repeaters and bought a ton of BNC wire to connect everyone. Of course the facilities dept didn’t like rogue wiring running all over the massive dorm complex so they wo…

It was the late 90s, and I remember going to a LAN party in a guy's garage where we all played various games, swapped pirated software, and second most importantly of all, an absolutely terrible VCD pirated copy of the theatrical release of the Matrix that somebody copied off of a PC that came into the repair store they worked at. One guy realized we could hook the whole ensemble up to a dial-up ISP connection and he…

Thrown together LANs were the best! I remember one we had at an old (cleaned up) barn, it was during the winter, pretty cold, so someone had the bright idea of using an industrial direct fired gas heater/blower thing in there, we sure got cooking :D luckily, place was also so drafty that we didn't suffocate :D

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#147

Post by dusted »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #114
LtWorf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games explicitly allowed you to play in like 3-4 using the same CD code. Now you need all the friends to buy the same (usually expensive) game.

I don't know if they explicitly allowed it, it seems more likely the CD code was only checked locally so there wasn't much the game could do to stop code sharing.

For instance, the Diablo CD, it could be installed either as "full" or "multiplayer", if you had the multiplayer install, you could only join games, but not start a single or multiplayer yourself. It was very cool.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#148

Post by dehrmann »

LtWorf wrote: post #111
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LAN parties used to be the only way to play together because playing over the Internet wasn't practical. Once that changed, it was so much more convenient to just play over the Internet, that the demand for LAN parties dropped quickly. From my memory, companies ending LAN support came long after LAN parties were mostly done for the experience and mostly by people who had done them before.

Games explicitly allowed you to play in like 3-4 using the same CD code. Now you need all the friends to buy the same (usually expensive) game.

I remember Starcraft had installation mode that was basically meant for LAN parties so you didn't even needed to share the code.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#149

Post by sydney6 »

I never even heard about piracy on lan-parties.. A friend once told me, even if he were to strip the soundtrack from the first GTA, that the resulting zip-file would still span over like 60 3.5-inch floppy disks and that everything would be to no avail, if even a single floppy were to become corrupt. It's not like today, were almost everbody has access to an iomega 100 zip drive.
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