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The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

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Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#31

Post by pathartl »

Nextgrid wrote: post #13
pathartl wrote: post #12

I'm part of a group that still holds 3-4 LAN parties a year with ~16-24 seats. We play mostly older stuff and it's still as fun as it was back then. Gaming has changed dramatically, but it's not like that old stuff disappeared. Sure, some games don't hold up well in the slightest, but the good ones have. Some favorites are AoE2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Re-Volt, C&C, Natural Selection, Call of Duty, and oh god so much…

Any love for Crysis (the first one, not the subsequent abominations)?

Not at the moment. We use recycled 4-6th gen i5 all-in-ones so everything runs off the iGPU. It basically limits us to games that were released up until 2006. We _do_ play Far Cry, though.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#32

Post by random3 »

yesimahuman wrote: post #9

Recently, my friends and I recreated our old LAN parties. Went up to a cabin in the woods, brought some cheap network switches, and had everyone install OpenRA ( https://www.openra.net/ , open red alert), and had a blast, even with everyone on laptops (mac/win). You can still do this in 2024 and it's worth it!

That’s awesome. I have some friends that I get together with every 1-2 years and always make time for a few hours of StarCraft

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#33

Post by n8henrie »

yesimahuman wrote: post #9

Recently, my friends and I recreated our old LAN parties. Went up to a cabin in the woods, brought some cheap network switches, and had everyone install OpenRA ( https://www.openra.net/ , open red alert), and had a blast, even with everyone on laptops (mac/win). You can still do this in 2024 and it's worth it!

My son (8) and I have a ton of fun playing OpenRA together! Runs surprisingly well on his old MacBook Air 11" running Manjaro and me on an M1 MacBook Pro.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#34

Post by SebFender »

Best memories ever - 30 years ago was just fun and games - literally and wires! To all that are appreciative of this old school style of gaming - have a great day.

Being part of one of the biggest in the world back in 2002 was also very cool.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#35

Post by lmm »

sshine wrote: post #5

I remember showing up at my first LAN party, ~20 years younger than my online friends. They just couldn’t believe I was actually 13. They were really nice. One woman had a son my age that I went to a music festival with when I was 20. Another got me my first job as a programmer. Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a g…

> Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.

Parents were sane back then, it's today that they've gone crazy. They watch too much news and keep their kids caged up, and end up doing far more harm than what they're trying to prevent.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#36

Post by quadyeast »

pathartl wrote: post #12

I'm part of a group that still holds 3-4 LAN parties a year with ~16-24 seats. We play mostly older stuff and it's still as fun as it was back then. Gaming has changed dramatically, but it's not like that old stuff disappeared. Sure, some games don't hold up well in the slightest, but the good ones have. Some favorites are AoE2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Re-Volt, C&C, Natural Selection, Call of Duty, and oh god so much…

q3 arena

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#38

Post by kentonv »

yayitswei wrote: post #21

I found out about this LAN-party-optimized house ( https://kentonshouse.com/ ) from a previous discussion on HN, and thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Hey that's me! Thanks!

I finished the new, bigger, better one a few months ago. (The old one was actually very small -- photo angles are deceiving.) Not published on the internet yet, maybe later this year...

Recently held my 28th Annual New Year's Eve LAN Party, as well as a big party around the solar eclipse (we had totality at the house). Both were attended by some of the same friends as the first one (and many new friends obviously). Gonna keep doing this for a long time, it's so much more fun having everyone in person vs. over the internet.

Just hope my kids don't decide they hate video games...

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#39

Post by TreeInBuxton »

I still manage to attend lots of LAN parties in the UK!

The major one - several thousand - Insomnia (although I volunteer for that), and a host of smaller ones with a much more community feel, such as StratLAN.

Is the feeling slightly different to what I imagine it used to be? Yes, as if the Internet goes down, then many games stop working - but then at the smaller ones (ie Strat), I find I spend more of my time chatting to like-minded people, playing board games, etc. I even have a friend that comes over from NL for it sometimes!

LANs aren't dead quite yet :)

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