I remember from one university lan party (c. 2004) that there were 6-7 people who just wanted to play C&C:generals as well as some who would rather be playing UT2K3 but then that group overlapped with a couple of people who had insistent on turning up with linux (slackware? Gentoo?) boxes and hadn't got them fully working yet.
Then after a while a few from the 6-7 playing generals get bored, realise they don't have UT downloaded, so they head over to that guy who doesn't seem to play games but just shares files and watches movies to get the discs from him. He's happy amusing himself watching supertroopers for the 15th time and oblivious to the fact that it's 3 hours in and so far only 2 games of generals have managed to happen.
UT2K3 is huge (for the time), there's only one set of DVDs so while it's shared around the network is going slow as shit because everyone is piped into a single hub, but eventually after an hour or so the laggers manage to finish downloading and installing it.
By which time the people who started on UT2K3 are bored because they had envisaged an epic 6v6 with vehicles and instead had to settle for a fairly lame 3 man deathmatch, where one guy was so much better and couldn't help but dominate the other two.
So the linux nerds and slow installers (the games we'd be playing were published well in advance, please make sure you're bought up and fully patched) finally finish installing and then updating their installs and find that no one really wants to keep playing, but a larger game with vehicles does finally get under way.
"Starcraft is small, what about starcraft?" pipes up one unfortunate who's just suggesting that because his computer is too slow to actually run anything more modern. "Nah, but I've got WC3" someone else more helpfully says, but starcraft guy doesn't want to clear out his 2GB of pr0n to make space for that.
And this was in the days where getting ethernet working wasn't really problematic.