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.
Same! Love it.
The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#42Staff member of Lanwar.com here! We are still kicking it in Louisville, KY and encourage everyone to check us out!
Our next event is Lanwar 72
Thursday, July 25, 2024, 12:00 PM EDT - Sunday, July 28, 2024, 12:00 PM EDT
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#43The "whitebox" PC building company I worked for in the late 90s was owned by a gamer. That meant that the office PCs had fast CPUs and good video cards. I put a script on the PCs to rejigger the partition tables so we could reboot onto the LAN party Windows 95 install (or DOS with NDIS drivers-- thanks, CONFIG.SYS menus!) and have after-hours LAN parties on the office network. I appreciated that the PC I used for the day-job was pretty high-spec for the day along with getting to play multiplayer games (Warcraft, StarCraft, Rainbow 6, Quake... I forget what else...)
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#44I 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…
Haha I had this exact experience, we showed up for a Halo lan party (the original) and we were 15 and 16 thinking that we'd be driving out to the burbs to play some games with some people our age, we met on a local LAN forum board.
We rang the doorbell and an "older" man answered the door, and we were confused and said "uh we're here to see ____" and he was like "That's me."
For context all of our lan parties up to this point were us schlepping tube tvs around to various basements of our friends houses, occasionally getting to mooch some pizza off of someone.
Instead, we walk into the huge suburban house and there's four rooms with gigantic flat screen televisions setup for 16 player madness and the entire place is filled with adult couples, the men came to game and the women to socialize and cook and have fun.
They had an entire table of snacks and drinks and everything you could ever want as a wee gamer.
We were so blown away but they were super nice and didn't make us feel too awkward. When the game started they asked us how good we were, "uhh, we beat legendary" - they laughed and put us on the same team for the first round.
The second round we were not allowed to play on the same team, turns out the kids can game :)
We made long term friends and ended up scrimming and hanging out with people 20 and 30 years our senior, a total blast and yeah, I don't see me hanging out with 16 years today.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#45A bunch of my photos from our local LAN (QGL in Brisbane, Australia) made it into this book, it was a blast going through them again.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#46I 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…
The interesting thing that you point out to me is the indirect mentoring / support from someone ahead of you in tech you received simply based on mutual interests. Sadly there's a lot of segments where juniors want to learn much on their own, often re-learning lessons of the past that could have been put towards more meaningful progress for them in hindsight.
Sometimes it is a necessary experience for them.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#47LANAllNight in Dallas is happening this weekend, it happens twice a year now. 200ish people, good old-school vibe. Minimum red tape. Quakecon is this July or August in Dallas. Several thousand people. A sight to see, but a lot more bullshit these days, lots of security, metal detectors, etc. In fact, I'm wearing a Quakecon shirt right now! LANs even today are so much fun, just to escape reality for 2-3 days and play…
Does Helldivers 2 have a LAN mode? The first one didn't. Or does this LAN have Internet? Where I am at LAN parties are completely offline, so genuinely curious.
Not sure, but it does have a kernel level 'anti-cheat' that enjoys eating cpu cycles and hates when you remove eth0.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#48I'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
Yes! Dunno how I forgot to mention it as we have a tournament every session and the winner gets the title and a trophy.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#49I 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.
Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
#50$70/month 512Kbps SDSL from Verio/NTT at Davis CA enabled our LAN party flop house. 7 ms to Stanford.