The outdoor lan parties that quickly popped up in the Netherlands is where I have my best memories of. Also, modding levels of Shadow Warrior or Quake and then telling your friends that they had to copy this newer version as it had a patch and then pranking them for an hour in game by completely destroying them with hidden passages and explosions… all the while hearing them in disbelief.. and then sharing the secret… also FTP Servers with more music, movies and games you could ever put on your own hard drives..
Memories from old LAN parties
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Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#112>A LAN isn’t legitimate unless at least one person has to reinstall Windows along the way. Never a truer phrase spoken.
A lot of drama with graphic card drivers as well (for the people too poor to have a 3dfx).
Also managing to have everyone on the same patch for $GAME could waste hours.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#113Me and some friends host a pretty weird event, the name of which loosely translates to "Field Lan". We set up tents, generators and an antenna in the middle of a field in Estonia and compete in various games for 72 hours straight on an open field in fresh air. We sleep in tents. Its a private event once a year, but we have 30 - 50 people there every year. Next year is the 10th year we do this.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#114So many found memories of Red Alert 2 and Quake 2 playing at lan parties in the 90s. I was lucky enough in the early 2000's where I could use my love of video games and lan parties as part of my job. I was responsible for the Flash community at Macromedia, and we would set up 4 xboxes with split screen for 8 player Halo 2 and 3 tournaments in conference rooms (which has multiple plasma screens already set up). I quic…
I miss Macromedia, Adobe is just a corporate grey blob. Macromedia had character and good products.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#115The OP is younger than me. You haven’t been to a LAN party until you’ve shocked yourself by unplugging a BNC connector.
Author here - I did have that problem in the distant past while battling a dodgy BNC terminator but luckily we were mostly on CAT5 by the time I was doing networks with friends. I won't put in writing the ill-advised technique I used to avoid getting shocked.
Lol! Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#116I went to LAN party where everyone had lugged their CRTs, except one kid who had a 15” TFT LCD screen, which were super rare and expensive at the time. It had a huge crack right down the center, but was still just about usable. I asked him how that happened. He said he was playing online (Counterstrike I think?) and lost a match, causing him to punch the screen in frustration.
That screen must have cost >$1000 at the time.
Sure enough, the guy was a tool - the kind of gamer that gloats over every win and questions the opponent’s sexuality after every loss. And he was every bit as toxic right there in the room with us.
The experience completely put me off online versus-stranger gaming forever, and in retrospect I’m very grateful to him for this.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#117> If someone has shared their installation of Warcraft III over SMB it will run much faster if you copy it to your local machine first rather than execute it directly from the network folder. This one made me laugh. I'm really surprised it started that way at all. I think my LAN party time was a little later than most of what the author is describing (mostly Windows XP era), but I also remember the networking problem…
I had created a program in Delphi to remove and recreate network shares with a single click because someone copying files from your computer would wreak in-game performances.
And, before widespread broadband, LAN was 50% exchanging files :)
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#118Memories of sleeping on floors! But oh those were fun weekends.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#119Irrespectively of the number of participants, there will only be a maximum of 1 terminators available for the BNC network.
It will take years until you can use Ethernet at a LAN party, because of the one poor guy who can't afford to upgrade from BNC.
There is always that one pr0n addict who watches it the whole weekend.
Everyone says they won't sleep the entire weekend, but at the first night all but one person are sound asleep.
At private LAN parties, there is only one person who has basic understanding of networking; it's never the person with the best PC, albeit the rich dude will talk like he knows more than the poor ones.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#120I went to LAN party where everyone had lugged their CRTs, except one kid who had a 15” TFT LCD screen, which were super rare and expensive at the time. It had a huge crack right down the center, but was still just about usable. I asked him how that happened. He said he was playing online (Counterstrike I think?) and lost a match, causing him to punch the screen in frustration. That screen must have cost >$1000 at the…
Haha, I had a 17" TFT in 2000.
Was at a 600 people LAN and only one other dude had one.