Also, right when Doom came out, I remember my dad setting it up on work computers after work, and he would play deathmatches against his coworkers Dave and Mike, and they'd let an 8-year-old me play! Such fun times.
Sadly that's the main problem in my opinion. As far as I know there are still some rare events which can bring players back but it has been stagnating for years now.
I owe some of my high school social life to the fact I could beat anyone there at aoe, so I made friends with some of the older kids by teaching them good builds.
Forever! Actually I recently found out that there's still an active (semi-)professional scene which blew my mind. Amazing game, I've started playing a lot again and thinking about hosting some LAN parties for it.
Last fall some friends and I tried to set up a LAN party with Age of Mythology. The networking code on the Windows 8-compatible version was truly terrible but it was still a blast to play. Wish we could have done Empires, too!
We still get together to play a variety of games from AOE2 to CS to BFBC2. The last time we got together we had way too much fun with Blockstorm which is like Minecraft meets Quake.
I remember Doom, Decent, and Aces of the Pacific were popular too.
The first time I played StarCraft was on a Friday afternoon at my new job. It was an insurance company that had all their PCs on a 10/100 network and the owner and head of IT coaxed people into playing so they could have a frag fest. I still hate that game.
> The LAN party, where you and six mates cram yourself into a dining room for a weekend, hook up your PCs with a complex series of switches, routers and CAT9 cables, somehow became quite the thing.
The first time I played Quake multiplayer was over modem with my neighbor. His dad had one of those USRobotics V.everything modems and I had a USR Sportster 28k. They negotiated some proprietary protocol like v42 because we had a 140k connect. It was insane at the time.
I vaguely recall that there was a "shotgun" set of modems you could pair up and get 128k over two 56k connections. I had just the one, but it felt so, so good to get sub-200 ping in Action Quake 2 and CS.
I remember a trick of connecting at a standard speed and then running a certain AT command that reduced the latency considerably - from 250ms down to 180 or so. Can't remember what it was but it made a very big difference to Quakeworld. The client prediction made it very playable on a sub-200 ping.
To clarify vt240's reply: If you were playing with coax, that would have been 10base-2. 10base-T is twisted pair Cat3 cable that used the same 8P8C connectors we use today.
Sorry. Just to mention it is going to give me nightmares about big AUI media converters sticking out, loose, not fitting right, falling off, ahahhaa. Novell Netware. Tree. Booting from floppy disks. ISA Cards!
It's when you have to splice a cat4 and a cat5 together with scotch tape because your longest cable wont reach from the hub on the table to the couch where you had to set up because you got there late.
I'm still actively using a LAN party spliced cat5e from over a decade ago, though I've properly soldered and heat-shrinked it since.
Growing up, my way to make money for the summer was playing RTS games competitively at LAN parties and regional/national tournaments - way before e-sports were a thing outside of South Korea.
I met people from the internet at big LAN parties, I got introduced to the demoscene, wargames / CTFs and a whole lot of other things that shaped my career; I even ended up dating girls from that world.
Is there anything equivalent to the old internet cafe for kids these days? Or (active) IRC channels, for the matter.
Yes. Come to Defcon and/or QuakeCon in the US. There are others around the world, but I'm assuming you're in the US. It all still exists and young people are still into it. The tech scene is just huge now so this stuff is kinda considered niche / underground, but it's still definitely a thing.
Probably about 4 times per year on a long weekend, my mates and I still get together in someone's warehouse or garage and have a 3 day LAN. There's normally between 15-20 people, and we play a mix of CS:Source, Warcraft 3 custom maps, AoE, Dota 2, and whatever else the fashion is at the time. A recent one has been Spintires, which is a blast with 4 people!
That said, the amount of sleep and the quality of the food we eat has definitely improved in the last 15 years or so - no more fast food for all meals.
Also, the advent of broadband and routers now mean networking is literally plug and play, not spending 2-3 hours trying to either set up a DHCP server, or assign static IPs and trying to figure out why it's not working, only to find out that someone mistyped it.
I remember buying a networking kit at Best Buy in the late 90s and then with 3 of my friends spending hours just trying to get the computers to ping each other.
There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.
This resonates so much! In our group who started with IPX networks to play Doom there was always one less technical kid whose PC was so loaded with viruses the rest of us would spend a few hours helping troubleshoot his issues. A reformat always came next.
Looking back I find it hard to believe it was necessary to format and reinstall windows all the time. But I guess I haven't used Windows in about 10 years either. When everything is a black box and broken as hell there's not much you can do other than wipe the slate clean and start again.
> There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.
Oh god that was me one time. It was at one of those larger LAN-parties with thousands of people. I remember bugging people on IRC (or whatever we used to chat) to see if anyone had an ISO of windows and a CD burner with him. Then looking around the crowd to see where exactly he was located.
When Wolfenstein 3D (or was it Doom?) came out, I spent a month writing a socket library for DECnet, so we could play the game in network mode at a defence lab in which I was working. We had some great times, as in 1992 (1993?) it was uncommon to have a high speed connection between that many computers. Never did get around to releasing that winsock driver (no sourceforge then), which is a pity, as it may well have predated DEC's own socket implementation.
---
edit: winsock -> socket, as it was actually written for DOS, before winsock.
Futher edit: Thinking about it, the game might have been Doom and the year 1993, as I don't think Wolfenstein 3D had a multiplayer mode
It must have been DOOM because Wolf 3D didn't have multiplayer. Was your software an IPX emulator? That's how Kali worked, since DOOM was written to use IPX.
In middle school, I helped organize a weekly "computer club" that met after hours in a school computer lab. It quickly degenerated into a giant Starcraft lan party every week, and became much more popular as a result.
In early high school, I played a lot of Tribes 1 (with some mod that I don't remember the name of) and Aliens vs Predator.
In later high school, CS 1.6 and Deus Ex multiplayer, still with Starcraft mixed in.
In college, it was "flavor of the month". We had a crazy file-sharing network, so the common in-dorm games switched around all the time. Warcraft 3, Counterstrike, Halflife 2-based mods, various open source FPSes, tons of Halo 2+3, and locally-hosted WoW servers are what stick in my mind.
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 the captain of the football team hung out with the science fair nerds. We even had cheer leaders come to our LAN parties.
I graduated before the internet really obviated the need for LANs. From younger friends, I heard that when the Xbox 360/PS3 came out, LAN parties slowed down, and jocks ceased interactions with nerds. But there was that brief period in the early 2000s where we existed in harmony.
Ye olde definition implies physically attractive people can't be nerds, and unattractive people can't not be nerds.
That's only useful for making an us vs them label. It's a good thing that anyone can nerd out on Dickens.
I've heard before that it's a question of degree (“prove just how much you like Dickens!”), which is kind of an uncool way to discourage intellectual curiosity. Not everyone was forged in the pale glow of monitors in their parents' basement, some have to work at it later.
Ye olde definition implies physically attractive people can't be nerds, and unattractive people can't not be nerds.
An alternate interpretation is that 'nerd culture' has become an ugly perverted commodity of its former self to the point where the requisite "hot girl" is put in front of eyeballs with no authenticity and offers semi-humorous-because-she-doesn't-quite-get-it-but-still-tries-her-best one liners while simultaneously manifesting this new proto manic pixie dream nerd girl persona-having no real purpose or reason for being there other than to rope in the casual viewer looking for something, anything, anything but another TCP/IP joke.
Physically attractive people can be nerds. Nerds can be physically attractive. But let's not fool ourselves on those tropes that still exist and get trotted out there making everyone look like damn fools: The hot girl who tries to be nerdy with a front as transparent as saran-wrap, and the incapable, slightly awkward-looking but you can't figure out why nerdy guys who pine after her because she totally understood how heavy the ending to Empire Strikes Back was and enjoyed it.
I don't think it's so much attractive in the physically attractive sense as attractive in the sense of taking care of your appearance. Nerd carries the implication that someone is so obsessed with their passion that they neglect other "unnecessary" aspects of life, the most visually obvious being their appearance, hygiene a close second.
Being "attractive" is usually more than just good looks, it takes a lot of time and commitment. Even the most naturally attractive people can be pretty unattractive if they entirely stop caring about their looks. Hell, just keeping long hair looking somewhat presentable takes a few hours a week (as I found out when I decided to grow my hair out back in highschool, didn't expect that). Add in time to go to the gym, buy groceries, cook and eat properly, find/buy well fitting clothes, etc and it adds up. If you're nerd-level passionate about something, that's all time you could be spending on your passion of choice instead.
I think his point was that demonstrating intelligence or interest in an activity bred by education used to be a normal character trait. Now, given the socially normed common denominator of minimal brain exertion, it's considered odd.
It's funny because the people I know of personally that has ended up on the cover of vogue was quite awkward in elementary/high school. Being a head taller and skinnier than everyone else wasn't exactly a recipe for being popular in the '90s.
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.
Not only is the computer lab cooler than being into books or playing an instrument these days, but "nerds" themselves are much "cooler" in that they enforce all sort of arbitrary social rules. When I got in to computers it was enough to be interested in technology. It's more the rule than the exception these days to hear "nerds" talk derogatory about things people are interested in that don't make enough money, other highly technical industries or whichever technology isn't "cool" enough.
My girlfriend had that experience with her high school friend group. Nearly all of them went to the same college for Computer Science but she chose Electrical Engineering to study computer hardware. They poked fun of her major and talked down to her for not learning to program until her second semester in college. It wasn't as "cool" as CS to them. She still gets the occasional derogatory remark when she sees them because they chose jobs in SV after college but she went to graduate school.
Not really. "Nerd/geek" have expanded to include basically anyone who enjoys pop culture or has a technical skill--obviously those guys are cool, right? But the original subjects--socially awkward kids who enjoy the wrong things too much--are still left out in the cold.
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.
It was at my school. Our jocks and nerds were very intermixed and hung out together in different groups, and our cheerleaders were mostly losers. The "popular" girls didn't really do any sports or activities to speak of, except for some resume-padding stuff like Key Club.
At other schools, I honestly think the stereotypes in movies became self-fulfilling prophecies. The terminology came from movies, and perhaps some of the division did as well.
If you read "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", [0] then look at these photos by pg, [1] and then ask yourself, "who is in the chess club?" then "who is the in the weight lifting/track team?"
"The kind of things we were interested
in didn't count for much in our high school." -- pg
Having gone to HS around about the same time and a mathlete, I recognise similar dynamics, even though I was 10,000 Ml away. It's no myth.
I am about the age and had a very similar experience, but it went beyond LAN parties. In retrospect, I went to a very quirky school. It was public, but you need to apply to go there--it was no one's default school.
Despite that, we had some of the best sports teams in the state, debate teams, and engineering teams. It was a culture of excellence and it was difficult to even classify geeks and jocks because so many individuals fit into both groups.
I'm not sure what this school did to get it right, but it's sad to see it not replicated many times over.
> I'm not sure what this school did to get it right, but it's sad to see it not replicated many times over.
> but you need to apply to go there
It sounds to me as if the school had a filter function to sort the unmotivated (or disadvantaged) out at the gate. If your strategy is to sift though the general population to find exceptional individuals, pretty much by definition you will not be making all schools in the same manner.
I think that's why successful charter schools are so hard to replicate. For every successful charter school, there are some number N that aren't.
This was even before LAN parties became a thing, but I still remember playing 'hunt' (IIRC) on pre-Solaris Sun 3/50 workstations in the math department computer lab.
Yes! The first company foolish enough to employ me as a junior dev would have Snipes games on Friday afternoons between anyone who wasn't fielding a customer support call.
Sometimes I would be on the phone to someone while navigating around the maze trying to bounce a few stars round the corners at people - and then have to explain what the screams were in the background.
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 switch we have is the same as LHC's: http://imgur.com/a/BICDK
I can't speak much for the power setup since I'm on the networking/infrastructure side, but it's pretty hefty and accounted for with tons of wiggle room. The switch alone is a decent chunk of the power. Back when we were setting it up in winter, it was able to heat a full house while sitting idle :).
For bandwidth, I'll be setting up an http cache server this weekend so that steam downloads (at least) can be retrieved locally as often as possible. The internet we have is 100Mb/s, which I personally think is more than plenty if managed correctly. We'd like the network and its capabilities to pretty much be as open as possible with a noticeable disclaimer that traffic can easily be intercepted and that Bad Stuff won't be tolerated. Ideally, we'd want the network to be as old school LAN-y as possible, which means that we unfortunately have to make some security compromises. We're going to place heavy restrictions on southbound traffic coming in, but northbound is going to be pretty limited. That said, we haven't set it up entirely yet, so we'll probably change a lot as we go.
We haven't really talked about wifi that much, but I've heard more and more that ubiquiti routers are incredible for the price. We'll probably buy two or three decent ones.
Ubiquiti APs are nice if you want to use PoE or if you need a pre-packaged solution to manage a large number of them. They won't offer better wireless performance than cheaper consumer routers running OpenWRT/LEDE that use the same radios.
Ubiquiti's wired-only routers tend to be more expensive than a consumer wireless router with the same or better processor that can also be an access point. The EdgeRouter products are highly reliant on relatively inflexible packet processing hardware offloads that make it impossible to do things like use QoS/AQM techniques that are more modern than the CPU design, so their impressive specs won't necessarily translate to competitive real-world performance. (Not that it would matter when you use a BSD-derived router OS that hasn't been keeping up with those advancements.)
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.
Same timeframe, my highschool in Arizona was one of the first netacademy programs. Your stories sound just like my stories, isdn included. Something about that time just had this fresh, wild frontier feeling to it when it came to computers. I miss it often.
I credit so much to the head of the computer dept, and industry guy who left the industry and was teaching us kids, but kept his industry contacts. I consider him my mentor, because he taught me the power of curiosity and tinkering.
One of my favorite stories when I first started netacademy, we would do capture the flags in a big circle of routers and wires, and one day in the middle he walked over and switched physical connections and said "the rules today didnt say anything about physical security" and walked away. 16 year old mind blown.
I had a 19" CRT which was terrifying to transport. Later I met a friend in college with a insane 21" CRT. Transporting that thing was like a proper move.
I had a big 21" CRT that would go to LAN parties with me. It took me and a friend to move it, and it once broke the table it was put down on with its weight.
Heh, during college I bought a pallet of 500 Eizo monitors and resold them for a nice profit (covered my fees that year). I cherry picked the three nicest Eizo T965 monitors. Man was that a sweet setup.
Damn near broke my back, my desk and cooked my bedroom in Summer running it though. Needless to say LAN parties were hosted at my house since no way I'd be lugging that setup around!
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.
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.
These days I like the sub-LAN, a.k.a. calling 1→3 friends to enjoy Steam couch party games supporting 2→4 xbox controllers. Here's my selection, sorted from most to least approachable to non-gamers and marking with * my personal long-time gamer favorites:
Setup was always such a time consuming pain. Just tonight I tried to co-op a retro game which still went bad despite two (modern) source ports and hours of tweaking.
Steam can help--for a price.
Back in the day the first LANs I attended also took hours of preparation in the school AV lab. Still, being in person was interesting.
Consoles with split screen make it so much easier.
My first LAN gaming experience was during the last 30 minutes of a double-period computer class on Fridays in São Paulo when our teacher let us play Doom in the school's computer lab. This was in 1994 or 1995. I also used those machines to send my first email to a girl I had a crush on who lived on another continent.
I also remember many evenings playing [Space War][1] on an IBM machine with a friend and waking up at 6am to play [Sopwith][2] before heading to school when sleeping over another friend's place.
I also seem to recall having a LAN party New Years Eve...
Those were the days. We would spend all night doing the LAN party and all day either hunting or paying paintball.
Andy, I'll never forget your first LAN party: showed up with 7GB porn on your 8GB hard drive and refused to delete any to make space for the games because you only had 33.6k dialup.
Oh man this takes me back. I remember lugging steel case builds and CRTs around to many 2-3 day cs 1.6 LAN parties in high school. So many cases of bawls were consumed; so much time was spent sitting in #findscrim
160 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadAlso, right when Doom came out, I remember my dad setting it up on work computers after work, and he would play deathmatches against his coworkers Dave and Mike, and they'd let an 8-year-old me play! Such fun times.
https://www.etlegacy.com/
I owe some of my high school social life to the fact I could beat anyone there at aoe, so I made friends with some of the older kids by teaching them good builds.
Also, one of the early GTAs had networked multiplayer, and I remember doing a fair bit of that when I was younger.
Come join us at reddit.com/r/aoe2 , it's fun!
I remember Doom, Decent, and Aces of the Pacific were popular too.
What is a CAT9 cable?
I'm still actively using a LAN party spliced cat5e from over a decade ago, though I've properly soldered and heat-shrinked it since.
I met people from the internet at big LAN parties, I got introduced to the demoscene, wargames / CTFs and a whole lot of other things that shaped my career; I even ended up dating girls from that world.
Is there anything equivalent to the old internet cafe for kids these days? Or (active) IRC channels, for the matter.
That said, the amount of sleep and the quality of the food we eat has definitely improved in the last 15 years or so - no more fast food for all meals.
There was also always someone who would have to reformat and reinstall Windows.
Pat, you were a legend.
Oh god that was me one time. It was at one of those larger LAN-parties with thousands of people. I remember bugging people on IRC (or whatever we used to chat) to see if anyone had an ISO of windows and a CD burner with him. Then looking around the crowd to see where exactly he was located.
Fun times.
---
edit: winsock -> socket, as it was actually written for DOS, before winsock.
Futher edit: Thinking about it, the game might have been Doom and the year 1993, as I don't think Wolfenstein 3D had a multiplayer mode
In early high school, I played a lot of Tribes 1 (with some mod that I don't remember the name of) and Aliens vs Predator.
In later high school, CS 1.6 and Deus Ex multiplayer, still with Starcraft mixed in.
In college, it was "flavor of the month". We had a crazy file-sharing network, so the common in-dorm games switched around all the time. Warcraft 3, Counterstrike, Halflife 2-based mods, various open source FPSes, tons of Halo 2+3, and locally-hosted WoW servers are what stick in my mind.
I graduated before the internet really obviated the need for LANs. From younger friends, I heard that when the Xbox 360/PS3 came out, LAN parties slowed down, and jocks ceased interactions with nerds. But there was that brief period in the early 2000s where we existed in harmony.
It's really not the word it used to be.
That's only useful for making an us vs them label. It's a good thing that anyone can nerd out on Dickens.
I've heard before that it's a question of degree (“prove just how much you like Dickens!”), which is kind of an uncool way to discourage intellectual curiosity. Not everyone was forged in the pale glow of monitors in their parents' basement, some have to work at it later.
An alternate interpretation is that 'nerd culture' has become an ugly perverted commodity of its former self to the point where the requisite "hot girl" is put in front of eyeballs with no authenticity and offers semi-humorous-because-she-doesn't-quite-get-it-but-still-tries-her-best one liners while simultaneously manifesting this new proto manic pixie dream nerd girl persona-having no real purpose or reason for being there other than to rope in the casual viewer looking for something, anything, anything but another TCP/IP joke.
Physically attractive people can be nerds. Nerds can be physically attractive. But let's not fool ourselves on those tropes that still exist and get trotted out there making everyone look like damn fools: The hot girl who tries to be nerdy with a front as transparent as saran-wrap, and the incapable, slightly awkward-looking but you can't figure out why nerdy guys who pine after her because she totally understood how heavy the ending to Empire Strikes Back was and enjoyed it.
I call "The Big Bang Theory" to the stand.
Being "attractive" is usually more than just good looks, it takes a lot of time and commitment. Even the most naturally attractive people can be pretty unattractive if they entirely stop caring about their looks. Hell, just keeping long hair looking somewhat presentable takes a few hours a week (as I found out when I decided to grow my hair out back in highschool, didn't expect that). Add in time to go to the gym, buy groceries, cook and eat properly, find/buy well fitting clothes, etc and it adds up. If you're nerd-level passionate about something, that's all time you could be spending on your passion of choice instead.
Or it may be that it is cool to "nerd out" about fashion, sports, or anything not historically associated with the term nerd.
Portlandia did a good bit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EMXRAWWiBw
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.
At other schools, I honestly think the stereotypes in movies became self-fulfilling prophecies. The terminology came from movies, and perhaps some of the division did as well.
[0] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
[1] http://paulgraham.com/gateway.html
Despite that, we had some of the best sports teams in the state, debate teams, and engineering teams. It was a culture of excellence and it was difficult to even classify geeks and jocks because so many individuals fit into both groups.
I'm not sure what this school did to get it right, but it's sad to see it not replicated many times over.
> but you need to apply to go there
It sounds to me as if the school had a filter function to sort the unmotivated (or disadvantaged) out at the gate. If your strategy is to sift though the general population to find exceptional individuals, pretty much by definition you will not be making all schools in the same manner.
I think that's why successful charter schools are so hard to replicate. For every successful charter school, there are some number N that aren't.
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 other LAN games on their channel that are fun as well.
Nothing quite like those slime bombs.
Found a bit more on this impossible to search for game: http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/255131/the-internet-s-forgott...
And: http://www.acquerra.com.au/personal/bird/hunt/
Sometimes I would be on the phone to someone while navigating around the maze trying to bounce a few stars round the corners at people - and then have to explain what the screams were in the background.
So many hours.
www.rflan.org
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 switch we have is the same as LHC's: http://imgur.com/a/BICDK
What's your approach to internet connectivity and wifi? How much power are you budgeting for?
For bandwidth, I'll be setting up an http cache server this weekend so that steam downloads (at least) can be retrieved locally as often as possible. The internet we have is 100Mb/s, which I personally think is more than plenty if managed correctly. We'd like the network and its capabilities to pretty much be as open as possible with a noticeable disclaimer that traffic can easily be intercepted and that Bad Stuff won't be tolerated. Ideally, we'd want the network to be as old school LAN-y as possible, which means that we unfortunately have to make some security compromises. We're going to place heavy restrictions on southbound traffic coming in, but northbound is going to be pretty limited. That said, we haven't set it up entirely yet, so we'll probably change a lot as we go.
We haven't really talked about wifi that much, but I've heard more and more that ubiquiti routers are incredible for the price. We'll probably buy two or three decent ones.
Ubiquiti's routers are overrated.
Why say that?
I'm a pfSense fanboi but was planning on recommending Ubiquiti kit for those not happy about spending the money to get pfSense capable hardware.
But now I play Euro board games... JUST AS GOOD! Agricola anyone?
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
I credit so much to the head of the computer dept, and industry guy who left the industry and was teaching us kids, but kept his industry contacts. I consider him my mentor, because he taught me the power of curiosity and tinkering.
One of my favorite stories when I first started netacademy, we would do capture the flags in a big circle of routers and wires, and one day in the middle he walked over and switched physical connections and said "the rules today didnt say anything about physical security" and walked away. 16 year old mind blown.
Did you do VICA competitions too?
The future ain't all bad.
Amazing monitor though.
Damn near broke my back, my desk and cooked my bedroom in Summer running it though. Needless to say LAN parties were hosted at my house since no way I'd be lugging that setup around!
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.
* Gang Beasts, http://store.steampowered.com/app/285900/
* Nidhogg, http://store.steampowered.com/app/94400/
* Hidden in Plain Sight, http://store.steampowered.com/app/303590/
* Mario Kart Wii, non-Steam, played on www.dolphin-emu.org
- Sportsfriends, http://store.steampowered.com/app/277850/
- B.U.T.T.O.N., http://store.steampowered.com/app/92400/
- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, http://store.steampowered.com/app/341800/
- Kalimba, http://store.steampowered.com/app/324140/
- Mount Your Friends, http://store.steampowered.com/app/296470/
- Starwhal, http://store.steampowered.com/app/263020/
* Lethal League, http://store.steampowered.com/app/261180/
* Clusterpuck 99, http://store.steampowered.com/app/337960/
- Broforce, http://store.steampowered.com/app/274190/
- Crawl, http://store.steampowered.com/app/293780/
* TowerFall Ascension, http://store.steampowered.com/app/251470/
- Monaco, http://store.steampowered.com/app/113020/
- Blur, http://store.steampowered.com/video/42640/5707
- Distance, http://store.steampowered.com/app/233610/
- Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, http://store.steampowered.com/app/212480/
* A Fistful of Gun, http://store.steampowered.com/app/229810/
- Jamestown, http://store.steampowered.com/app/94200/
- Sky Force Anniversary, KVFinn ↗ Fantastic list! Commenting in part just so I can find it later. clydethefrog ↗ Same here. I feel couch co-op is really having a small revival the last years. ronjouch ↗ Duck Game is good! Buuuut although funnier, not as gameplay-rich as TowerFall IMHO :) icen ↗ You should add Screencheat to your list. Amazing fun.
You should try Duck Game!
Steam can help--for a price.
Back in the day the first LANs I attended also took hours of preparation in the school AV lab. Still, being in person was interesting.
Consoles with split screen make it so much easier.
I also remember many evenings playing [Space War][1] on an IBM machine with a friend and waking up at 6am to play [Sopwith][2] before heading to school when sleeping over another friend's place.
[1]: http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2006/06/spacewar/ [2]: http://www.sopwith.org/
Those were the days. We would spend all night doing the LAN party and all day either hunting or paying paintball.
Andy, I'll never forget your first LAN party: showed up with 7GB porn on your 8GB hard drive and refused to delete any to make space for the games because you only had 33.6k dialup.