i think remembering LAN parties is my sign of me becoming a greybeard. i would say missing from this list is that feeling of just tribal yelling in close proximity with your team and screensniping by turning around. i'm sorry for all the gamer kids that grew up without that in their lives.
Memories from old LAN parties
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Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#22It's 2023 and AMD couldn't run a Halo Infinite tournament at Quakecon properly. And one of the teams was out getting pizza anyway because they were off by an hour. My friend won a 7800X3D though.
Cases must be windowed, very small or very large to be "credible" these days!
Alcohol120 and a hard drive full of ISOs was the only way to get a large group of people playing the same game. Such as UT2004.
Having Internet almost makes the LAN worse because unless you really plan it with your buddies, it has felt like a lot of people just do their own thing. So go into a LAN with friends having agreed on at least two games everyone is interested in.
My first LAN was in a church gym playing Battlefield Vietnam on 128MB RAM and a Celeron 1.1ghz (the family computer before I got into building). I drank 7 bottles of Bawls. I weighed 140lbs at the time.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#23> Having a PC with a window in the side of the case does in fact give you credibility.
That, plus of course the obligatory blue/green cold-cathode tubes :-)
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#24>A LAN isn’t legitimate unless at least one person has to reinstall Windows along the way.
Never a truer phrase spoken.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#25I worked at such venues and helped friends who worked at such venues back in the day. What I remember mostly is having to move from one computer to another setting IP addresses and the annoyance of having to restart Win 98 after setting an IP. I still don’t understand why that was a requirement.
Later during Win XP days, most places started having a dedicated set of machines and you didn’t need to lug your computer along anymore, those were actually the days I remember I had most fun, playing UT and C&C Red Alert 2, god damn the music was exciting!
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#26I remember writing a tool that blared a siren wav every time someone connected to your network share. It would be quiet at the start of a round, and then as people died you'd hear sirens going off left and right. Remains one of the few contexts where nerds would do drugs. Speed mostly. You ever played Quake with a bunch of dudes on speed? It's fucking nuts. The smells. Some LANs would go on for a week. Lots spanned s…
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Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#27I've only done a few LAN parties in the last handful of years, and they weren't quite as magical as doing it as a teenager where you spend 75% of the time deciding on what to play and then figuring out how to crack it so everyone can play.
Don't forget getting 10BaseT, NetBEUI and IPX to work on all players' computers [1]. Easily half a day was lost every time, but it was part of it, and almost fun. [1] Extra points if a player had participated in another LAN party with other people and had changed some or the other Windows network setting for that LAN party. "It worked last month and I did not change anything!" was always only true until the "and".
I was fortunate that kids I grew up with had computers all over their house. network cables up and down the stairs.
one family had a room built on their garage setup for band practice and tables around the thing for lan parties since their dad was some high end coder or unix wizard or something.
later we took over an old single theater in north branch MN (the battle shack) and kids just lived there for the summer. 24/7 lan party and movies and music and just wild stuff going on. you'd show up with your PC and hook up and wander around trying to organize games, check out people's crazy setups (kids with crazy workstation CRT monitors for each color in as coax) and stuff like that.
After I got out of highschool we went to AWOL lans which I think died over the pandemic finally but they had like two days of games organized in a hotel with a huge arcade, laser tag, go karts.
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#28>A LAN isn’t legitimate unless at least one person has to reinstall Windows along the way. Never a truer phrase spoken.
A buddy of ours has the nickname gremlin to this day. If he touched your PC it was guaranteed to bsod or just die. he spent lan parties trying to get his PC working, reinstalling windows...etc
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#29installing Back Orifice on people's computers so you could open and close their CD drives remotely...
Re: Memories from old LAN parties
#30I remember writing a tool that blared a siren wav every time someone connected to your network share. It would be quiet at the start of a round, and then as people died you'd hear sirens going off left and right. Remains one of the few contexts where nerds would do drugs. Speed mostly. You ever played Quake with a bunch of dudes on speed? It's fucking nuts. The smells. Some LANs would go on for a week. Lots spanned s…
> You ever played Quake with a bunch of dudes on speed?
I don't think I've ever played Quake without a bunch of dudes on speed.