A Lament for the LAN Party • Hacker News Board

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#41

Post by ra1n85 » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:45 AM UTC

bpchaps wrote: post #40

Shameless plug. Can't speak too much for it just yet (working through sponsorships, etc), but some friends and I are setting up a 160p LAN in Chicago later this year. It's particularly neat since we're not the only ones to have similar goals. LANs are coming back ;). We also do ~monthly LANs out in Wauconda (Chicago suburbs) area if anybody's interested. Here's just some preliminary stuff we've been working on. The s…

That's awesome.

What's your approach to internet connectivity and wifi? How much power are you budgeting for?

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#42

Post by jetsnoc » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:54 AM UTC

barbs wrote: post #23

For anyone that likes this sort of thing, I found a few videos of old LAN parties from 1998-2001: https://youtu.be/ch__Ah2iCtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X43soJt7jI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6bzgl6vKA Also, this is much more recent but really captures the whole LAN party spirit. It's a basically bunch of guys playing sudden-death Minecraft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUNF3_hO_no There are some othe…

I'm loving the 10Base2 in video #3 :) Those were some great times.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#43

Post by digi_owl » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 2:03 AM UTC

beggi wrote: post #30

ModernMech wrote: post #22

LAN parties were an interesting normative force at my high school. You always hear about the tension between jocks and geeks. But jocks like playing video games as much as geeks, who had the technical know-how to get networked games going. So the jocks at my high school were really interested in being friends with us nerds. We finally had something in common! Our LAN parties were this strange alternate universe where…

Call me crazy but as I understand it from kids today it's pretty cool to be a "nerd" today

Nah. Maker, hacker, geek, sure. But nerd is still nerd. I may well go so far as to say that geek was "introduced" so as to allow people to be interested in computers (or more correctly, web/game design) without being boxed in with "the nerds" in the computer lab.

Or it may be that it is cool to "nerd out" about fashion, sports, or anything not historically associated with the term nerd.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#44

Post by ricree » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 2:05 AM UTC

djrogers wrote: post #2

For us it was and ever shall be Age of Empires. Wololo!

Command and Conquer, followed by Starcraft here.

Also, one of the early GTAs had networked multiplayer, and I remember doing a fair bit of that when I was younger.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#45

Post by adamredwoods » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 2:05 AM UTC

I used to play Warcraft II in LAN parties during college.

But now I play Euro board games... JUST AS GOOD! Agricola anyone?

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#46

Post by digi_owl » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 2:05 AM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #22

LAN parties were an interesting normative force at my high school. You always hear about the tension between jocks and geeks. But jocks like playing video games as much as geeks, who had the technical know-how to get networked games going. So the jocks at my high school were really interested in being friends with us nerds. We finally had something in common! Our LAN parties were this strange alternate universe where…

Yeah i think games with integrated voip kinda killed the need to share a room to coordinate.

That said, i think the jocks were more into the "reflex" games like shooters and real time strategy. Sit them down with a slower paced game and they would riot.

Likely why we are seeing more and more online games that used to be somewhat slower paced introduce more and more "twitch" mechanics to placate the jocks.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#47

Post by peckrob » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 2:06 AM UTC

When I was a senior in high school, Cisco offered their NetAcademy program to a few high schools around the nation. It was a pretty sweet deal: for a relatively small price, you could earn your CCNA as an optional elective. You had to get approval to take the class; basically, the 10 of us were the most technically minded and computer literate students in the school.

So, of course within a few weeks many of us were staying after school to use the top-of-the-line (circa 1999) computer equipment to play games. :) Half Life and the various mods (particular Action Half Life [0]) were favorites. Even the teacher eventually got in on the fun.

"You shot me! If you shoot me again I'll fail you!"

A lot of times a few folks would come over to my house in the evenings because we had a blazing fast (again, circa 1999) 128k ISDN line in the house, supposedly to do "homework" but really gaming, surfing the web, playing MUDs. Sometimes we'd kick on a movie like Army of Darkness while gaming.

Such great memories and an awesome time to be alive. I still keep up with a few folks from back then but I'd love to know what happened to everyone else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Half-Life

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#48

Post by noonespecial » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 2:06 AM UTC

I loved lan parties. I hated moving my 17" CTX crt monitor to them. It was as deep as it was wide and must have weighed damn near 40 pounds.

The future ain't all bad.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#49

Post by pwny » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 2:08 AM UTC

Like the author's group of friends, mine has stopped throwing LAN parties. I think our last ones were around early WoW time.

However, large LAN parties are far from being dead. There's Dreamhack and the like, and my alma mater runs a huge 2000+ players LAN event every year (https://lanets.ca/). It seems like it's become more of a grand event, as opposed to the couple times a year gathering with a handful of friends.

As a guy in his late 20s, it's really interesting to see how gaming has evolved and democratized itself during the past couple decades.

Re: A Lament for the LAN Party

#50

Post by honkhonkpants » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 2:18 AM UTC

Ah, back when gaming was fun :-) Best gaming I ever had was back at university where we rented out a floor of the student union, setup 8 bitchin' PCs in each of two separate rooms, wired it all together with a huge projector in the central room, and invited players from all over the state for a 16-team bracket playoff of Quake 1 CTF. That was a hell of a good weekend.