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Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

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Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#121

Post by wil421 »

agrippanux wrote: post #52

Sophomore 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…

In 2004 every dorm at my college was wired and we could play in our own rooms. They blocked the outside but we would have massive Halo brawls all day. I still remember hating a couple players and meeting them in person later, oh you were that guy!

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#122

Post by jasonlotito »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #119

LAN parties don't have to be dead! I went to at least a few during High School (~7 years ago) where we'd bring our towers to the library and stay after school playing games for a few hours. The librarian was very kind to sacrifice his Friday evening so that we could play video games. Aside from that, I hosted a LAN party just a couple of months ago and plan to do another. Last time we played League of Legends, the ol…

They aren't. Twice a year, for a weekend, I go to a LAN party that has 20-30 some odd people. People have brought kids, we are all adults, it's fun. LAN parties only died out because people stopped wanting to run them.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#123

Post by polynox »

Surprised not to see mention of some of the massive LAN parties that were/are combined with tournaments. Some larger on the tournament side (DreamHack) and some larger on the party side (LPANE Nor'Easter).

https://hothardware.com/reviews/lpane-noreaster-2005-lan-par...

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#124

Post by ZeWaren »

My dorm in 2006 didn't have any wired network (nor wifi).

So what we did is we wired one ourselves through the walls of every room, running ethernet cables from one balcony to the other. Every 6 room, we'd install a cheap fast-ethernet switch.

Eventually, we managed to connect almost all 300 rooms together in a giant single VLAN.

You can still see part of that mess in the history of Google Street View: https://goo.gl/maps/AQriNEJViMELQw8MA

That dorm ended up being a giant eternal LAN party. People would play games all the time, either from their own individual rooms, either after moving their PC using stolen supermarket shopping carts to other rooms for more conviviality.

You'd turn on your PC, and some custom scripts would tell you which games were currently being played, and the only thing left for you was to join the game of your friends, or the game of the total strangers from two floors down.

Fun times!

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#125

Post by fetzu »

It is just incredible looking at these pictures: I keep on searching for known faces to see if a picture of one of our LANs ended up in there. So much nostalgia. I have gone from being an avid gamer (first at LANs, then over broadband in the early 2000’s) to gaming barely a couple of hours a month.. but these memories just make me want to ring up the whole crew again, rent some cabin in the middle of nowhere and go insane in AoE, CS and Wolfenstein all over again!

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#126

Post by danielodievich »

I went to a LAN party on Microsoft campus in 1997, which was held in one of the bigger conference rooms. Amount of networking equipment that the hosting microsofties brought in was truly staggering, at least to me at this time. We played a lot of Quakeworld and other adjacent games with low, low pings I've not seen before, having played largely on dial-up. Fun times.

I recently hosted what is essentially a LAN party with my two teenagers inviting their friends to play various games. There was ~10 kids crammed into my TV room, organically switching between multi-person arcade controller games around our big gaming PC (glad I have like 16 USB ports in this sucker to connect them all), Elden Ring'ing with their various PCs, and then I don't know what. They had a lot of fun. Smelled just like the LAN party from 1997, too!

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#127

Post by fxtentacle »

jwie wrote: post #51
TravHatesMe wrote: post #8

Gaming 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.

I definitley think it's on the product side that LAN parties died. The relationship between the player and the game, and the LAN community and the game were way different. Gradually the companies figured out how to inject themselves into the social structure. Your relationships became mediated by these products. Rather than a social lubricant they became the relationship itself. They monetized that social capital. Yo…

Fully agree. I still regularly organize LAN parties with the same crew as back then. 24 years and counting... Family has made finding a suitable date much more difficult. But the biggest obstacle is finding LAN-capable games.

10 people joining Dota 2 from the same IP results in instant ban for everyone. StarCraft 2 is horribly laggy when 10 PCs compete for UDP traffic to the internet server. GTA 5 keeps load-balancing us into different lobbies. Most new games just cannot handle a LAN party anymore. And yeah, I remember the time when I paid for a WoW account despite not playing because the WoW guild chat was the quickest way to reach all of my real-life friends.

Warcraft 3 fun-maps, Left 4 Dead 2, Flatout 2 are the games that reliably work well.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#128

Post by rakkhi »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #59
TravHatesMe wrote: post #8

Gaming 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.

LAN parties used to be the only way to play together because playing over the Internet wasn't practical. Once that changed, it was so much more convenient to just play over the Internet, that the demand for LAN parties dropped quickly. From my memory, companies ending LAN support came long after LAN parties were mostly done for the experience and mostly by people who had done them before.

This. I remember lugging even a midi tower but a 17 inch crt in my car to my friend's house each week and back. It was so much fun when you were there but the logistics were a pain. As soon as the Internet was fast enough to allow people to play from home and still have a lot of the interaction via video and voice that to me was the death of the Lan party not so much game support.

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#129

Post by rakkhi »

coldpie wrote: post #100
elif wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. All but a handful of the smallest LAN parties I attended I the 90's and early 00's included console gaming. It was pretty much assumed there would be consoles at a LAN. Halo, which was arguably the first professionally competitive game, had it's entire birth at LAN parties as it did not support online play at all and had to be done with a LAN. Smash brothers had a similar Genesis story at LAN pa…

> To get everyone at the LAN to play the same game no longer meant passing the CD around Pretty sure I spent more time installing games and fighting with cracking software than I did playing games at LANs :)

There was always one person at least that needed to reinstall windows..

Re: Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party

#130

Post by evolve2k »

no_time wrote: post #62
TravHatesMe wrote: post #8

Gaming 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.

The fact that fucking AGE OF EMPIRES II/III DE doesn't have LAN is ridiculous. Atleast for AoE III DE there is a server emulator because MS servers only do matchmaking.

Yeah that’s rubbish.

Not exactly the same but I’ve had a few LAN parties with 0ad. It’s still in alpha and lags up during the mega battles , but that’s been pretty fun too, watching armies crash together is slow motion when u finally throw everything at each other.

I’d definitely recommend 0ad for a small 3-4 player LAN party.

0ad.com

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