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Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
151–160 of 172 posts
Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#152Sophomore 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…
I just put together a new Ryzen system last night, which replaces a core i5-750 from 2009, (which will probably remain in service in some sort of server role). As soon as I got that bad boy running, I jumped through a few hoops to get Diablo 1 fired up to really run it through its paces.
Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#153Gaming 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.
Only 10 years ago I had two people over to LAN game.
Newly released Far Cry 3 had some co-op bits in it!
Didn't work. Despite each machine being on the same network they tried to connect via the routers external IP and failed at the UPnP/NAT traversal stage.
Honestly, a "direct connect" option solves many things.
Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#154What killed the LAN party? In short, Halo 2 and Bungie. Before Halo 2, even games on XBox Live followed the same foundations as PC games - a bunch of servers listed in a browser that you had to pick from to join, then instantly relay the details to your friends so they could also join. Bungie developed a matchmaking system that made it effortless to play with friends, and it was soon used as a bedrock for XBox Live a…
"What killed the LAN party? In short, Halo 2 and Bungie." I still played halo 2 and 3 at Xbox LAN parties. So existing groups didn't really go away, but I could see there being less of a draw to new groups forming.
Would everyone bring their TV set?
Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#155good days... I have fond memories of LAN parties.
Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#156What killed the LAN party? In short, Halo 2 and Bungie. Before Halo 2, even games on XBox Live followed the same foundations as PC games - a bunch of servers listed in a browser that you had to pick from to join, then instantly relay the details to your friends so they could also join. Bungie developed a matchmaking system that made it effortless to play with friends, and it was soon used as a bedrock for XBox Live a…
The internet killed the LAN parties.
It was too much work and decent internet gave you the games without the effort.
Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What killed the LAN party? In short, Halo 2 and Bungie." I still played halo 2 and 3 at Xbox LAN parties. So existing groups didn't really go away, but I could see there being less of a draw to new groups forming.
Would everyone bring their TV set?
Yep
Edit: each person bringing a console also brought a TV. We would have up to 4 people per console.
Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#158I really miss user-run servers. Back in the Quake 3 days I had a couple favorite servers and there were always the same couple groups of people around, known characters. You don’t get that sense of camaraderie from random matching. This is somewhat Quake 3 specific but I also really miss user generated maps that would just automatically download. Played some really interesting maps back in the day.
> This is somewhat Quake 3 specific but I also really miss user generated maps that would just automatically download.
This was (eventually) a feature of Quakeworld for the original Quake as well. You could even download an entire mod, like Threewave CTF, one asset at a time; though in practice it was much faster to download the full pak files.
Still, though, it worked well for maps, and for lightweight mods, or variants of popular mods. For example, there were many flavors of CTF that added their own runes. Anyone up for a game of Thunderwalker CTF? ;)
Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#159Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party
#160Oh, the glorious nostalgia! I never attended a LAN party, but I was spoiled beyond belief and my school had a bay if 8 terminals starting around ‘96/‘97 and my nerd buddies and I would race to them every day after class to play MUDs together. Our faces had the joy of the boys in the pictures. Such great adventure we had.
Edit: or maybe it started around ‘94/‘95. I’m getting old and my memories are fading a bit.