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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

#71

Post by pkphilip »

lmm wrote: post #35
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 m…

Internet has become a crazier place now than it was during the 1990s. Also, the smart phone revolution (with the cameras) has led to a whole bunch of crazies taking over the internet via their mobile devices.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#72

Post by rickdeckard »

I think it shouldn't be left out that the audience of LAN-parties were not people who just played games.

It was a "PC-community", people really focused on their PC. Its hardware, its OS, how to squeeze as much power as possible out of it. The perfect CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for each game, which hardware to use/buy next etc.

And THEN they played games. But they also hung out with like-minded people, exchanged alot of knowledge, data and content which would have been impossible to get by just going online with some modem.

The more this complexity of HW/SW was reduced, the more this breed of "consuming" gamers grew who only wanted to play games and didn't know/care that much about the hardware running it (other than wanting it to look colorful and pretty some years later).

--> If all you want to do is play games, the huge effort of hosting/joining a LAN-party is even more of a burden than it was for the PC-community...

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#73

Post by katzenversteher »

Happy memories. I started with just 1:1 multiplayer games using the serial port (GTA, Dogfight, Doom). GTA (or our serial port config) had horrible problems with de-synchronization. The game just went on but players where in completely different locations in the game. As a workaround we yelled the scores to each other from time to time because that was one the best ways to notice the games where out of sync.

Later we used 10BASE5 coaxial bus connections with ~5 people. At that time we had no internet access and not much information about the IP protocol. IP address / subnet configuration was only known to a few people (including me) but we also did not really understand what they where doing.

So this was kind of similar to what I imagine tech priests do in Warhammer 40k. We entered the sacred numbers (192.168.0.X and 255.255.255.0) and did some other things we thought where necessary (but weren't) and somehow got it running.

Also, for some reason we often got electric shocks when we touched the coaxial connectors, I guess it happened because the different players connected their PC do power outlets connected to different phases.

After that with Ethernet everything became much smoother except for cable issues. Ethernet hardware at the time did not sense the cable type so we had to be careful if the players brought crossover or patch cables and use adapters if necessary.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#75

Post by bionsystem »

hyperman1 wrote: post #66
lmm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

Sleep in a gym hall? I don't remember sleeping much at lan partys. Besides, there were more kids than computers, if you fell asleep you lost your seat.

I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#76

Post by sgt »

I remember my first LAN party more than the subsequent ones. It was so memorable. We were a bunch of guys (obviously, no girl would be seen dead at a LAN party in those early days), all struggling to set up our network using BNC connectors and a coaxial network based on 10base2.

Whenever the guy at the end left the network and forgot the terminator, the whole network grinded to a halt. Oh yeah, we had no Internet access.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#77

Post by sgt »

rickdeckard wrote: post #72

I think it shouldn't be left out that the audience of LAN-parties were not people who just played games . It was a "PC-community", people really focused on their PC. Its hardware, its OS, how to squeeze as much power as possible out of it. The perfect CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for each game, which hardware to use/buy next etc. And THEN they played games. But they also hung out with like-minded people, exchanged alo…

The bizarre world of a bunch of friends bragging about who had the best AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files. Those were the days.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#78

Post by ayewo »

bionsystem wrote: post #75
hyperman1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sleep in a gym hall? I don't remember sleeping much at lan partys. Besides, there were more kids than computers, if you fell asleep you lost your seat.

I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).

> I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).

I guess what gp is saying is that not everyone that attends the LAN party is able to sling along their computer to the venue so there are more people than machines and of course limited seating for folks without a machine.

BTW, the gp said you might lose your seat and not that your seat gets stolen since there aren’t enough seats to go round, there will always be someone who has been standing for while ready to take you seat.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#79

Post by distances »

Jare wrote: post #64
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…

> Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both. Back then, I can't imagine parents letting their daughters do that either. The kind of freedom to roam at 12yo that you describe was what allowed me access to people and computers we didn't have the money for; but I've always been very conscious that my sisters would have never been given that kind of opportunity.

My sisters definitely did have the same kind of freedom I did. Say, my little sister took her first intercontinental flight (with two plane changes I think) alone around age 14.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party

#80

Post by kennyadam »

hobs wrote: post #44
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…

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 t…

When I was 19, I used to meet up with people of all ages from various torrent trackers (we were all staff from various sites, forums, affiliated 'radio' stations, IRC channels, etc.) and it was awesome. People paid for me to fly to Amsterdam with them to hang out with even more people and I think the oldest was a guy in his 50s, but back then we were like, I don't know, Internet People and that was what we were centered around. I miss those days like crazy now.
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