So I'm younger than the person who posted this, but my high school did do something called LANfest where we all set up the computers on campus to connect to play games over the local network. But proper LAN parties sound like they were amazing, it's a shame they're not really a thing anymore.
> If you’re using a 10 Mbit hub and copy the same directory to two Windows SMB hosts simultaneously it is somehow smart enough to make the transfers coincide so it can transmit the same data to both at once. To this day I have no idea what heuristic it used but honest to god, it slowed down the earlier transfer and then went in lockstep file by file for the remainder.
I think it was more likely an emergent effect of rubbish file system and disk cache behaviour, little or no prefetching, etc, than any coordinated activity in SMB?
It's neither an accident nor planned mechanism. It had nothing to do with network, the transmission wasn't switching to multicast.
Probably the author observed that reading different files from disk simultaneously was slower, until the copy process catches up to read the same files.
Seek time on mechanical hard drives sucks, and was much worse back in the prime LAN party days.
System RAM or Drive cache REALLY helped, so yes, the lagging copy would drag down the leading one until they both caught to within that buffer and things zipped along.
Im that case, how does one transfer catch up to the next one? Shouldn't the seek time from switching files have the same impact on both and keep the first one in the lead?
The disk cache is what lets the second one catch up. It would only happen if the copies were started at nearly the same time; soon enough that what's been copied so far is still in the cache.
I've observed this same behavior on modern operating systems with big rsync jobs and spinning drives. If you have lots of small files then reading the metadata and directory structure takes a while but fits in the cache, so a second rsync will catch up very quickly to the first.
I'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".
Easyly solvable by booting some very early linux flom floppy disk(s), doing that 192.168.x.x/255.255.255.0 shit, pinging and arping around, making notices. Rebooting into Windoze and resetting shit according to those notices. Done in 30 mins max.
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.
I worked at a computer repair place that had a bunch of 16 port hubs (not switches) collecting dust. Naive teenage me thought "that's a lot of ports!" and I begged the owner to let me have them for my LAN parties. He gave me a funny look and said sure why not. The chaos that ensued having those things involved, not understanding collisions, really kickstarted my networking career.
I remember the same issues but don't know why we had to enable IPX/SPX over TCP/IP. I have a specific memory of troubleshooting for an hour and then clicked IPS/SPX and StarCraft worked.
Does anyone remember a specific reason why? I was too young to know or care.
For a while, before TCP/IP really became "the" network protocol, IPX/SPX was also around and a lot of games used it. Red Alert 2, Descent 1 & 2, etc all used IPX/SPX.
Yeah, setting up IPX circa 2010 to play Dungeon Keeper 1 in multiplayer 15 years late was quite the puzzle ! Especially since I didn't have admin access to those computers... at first.
The last time I did a LAN party was in the 90s and you would spend at least an hour diagnosing network issues before you could play a single game with everyone.
Finland still large LAN event going called Assembly. There is summer (demo scene + gaming) and winter (gaming focused). You just buy a ticket and go. https://assembly.org/en
I 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 several days, most lasted upwards of 12 hours.
People didn't game with laptops. You had to bring you whole case, your monitors, accessories. It was great when LCDs came about. Lots of people had intricate setups too, heavy Thermaltakes with watercooling shit.
ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and that annoying Windows service that let you send pop-up messages to any IP if you hadn't disabled the service.
Once upon a time, I owned a 19" CRT that weighed less than a typical 17" CRT. Such good fortune. Still, I never did have the courage to carry my tower on one hip and my monitor on the other (and everything else in a backpack), so I guess it didn't really benefit me that much after all.
> most lasted upwards of 12 hours.
You're damn right. Imagine carting a CRT around and then only staying for half a day. Ha!
A lot of people also got into case modding and added physical LAN handles to their rigs (always called "The Beast"; along with Perspex and cathode tubes https://tinyurl.com/LANhandles ). Good times :')
Might as well get the metal trolley to go with that bag then. And their elastic band + hooks to hold stuff inside.
I use these regularly for big groceries, even the bag itself lasts years when the usual flimsy mostly plastic trolleys tend to break after half a year.
For years my monitor was a 22” Sony CRT which took two people to carry, which went with my to LAN parties. That thing was terrifying to carry down a flight of stairs.
Novell had a similar messenger util. Each message popped up in it's own window. When you sent a message, the input box didn't clear automatically.
Net effect: Hold down enter and full your target's screen with a hundreds of windows faster than they could clear them.
We called it bombing, so we usually just wrote the word "bomb" when doing it.
The one time I was ever really disciplined in school was after I accidentally targeted a service account instead of my friend's account. Every screen in the school was filled with the word bomb and my username was on each window title.
I dunno, I think Adderall was pretty easily available back then
our crew never really did illegal or prescription drugs
But we'd drink booze and/or achieve Adderall-like effects with caffeinated energy drinks. None of us drank coffee so we had like... zero caffeine tolerance. If you have zero caffeine tolerance and you slam multiple energy drinks the effect is NOT subtle
of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune to caffeine I can chug coffee directly before a satisfying REM nap lol
> of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune to caffeine I can chug coffee directly before a satisfying REM nap lol
Going on a tangent: it takes a while for the caffeine you drink to make it through your digestive system, so even for someone without any tolerance at all, they could take a few shots of espresso on a full stomach and then have about a 30 minute window to have a nap, before the jitter starts.
Okay, I always read this. And my brother is a proponent of the nap technique you mention!
BUT: On an empty stomach, or even if I've had a little bit of food, it feels like caffeine works fairly instantly for me? I'm the stereotypical "can't function until I've had a little coffee in the morning" type of guy. Is this purely psychosomatic?
The speed that caffeine starts hitting your body depends very strongly on how full you are when you consume it and how much food/water you’ve already had throughout the day. The timing after a meal will be very different than an empty stomach, which is probably just minutes. People are more used to noticing the same effects with alcohol.
We were young and would never even consider illegal drugs - I remember before a LAN we'd send someone, extremely nervous they'd be "caught"(?), going into a pharmacy to buy a pack of caffeine pills!
> that annoying Windows service that let you send pop-up messages to any IP
Winpopup. I loved that tool, showed it to my entire class in school so we could comfortably cheat during exams. I was hailed as a super hacker with mad skills.
> Remains one of the few contexts where nerds would do drugs
Leaving aside the nitpicking of "umm actually, caffeine is a drug" (I infer from context that you mean "hard"/illegal drugs, which is reasonable), this one doesn't quite ring true for me. There's a particularly flavour of nerdery that views drugs as a means of hacking one's own body - "bio-hacking" is already a bit cringey and over-used, but it's not inaccurate. There's significant intersection between the nerdier people I know, and those who are interested in chemically expanding their experiences and perceptions. Maybe that's a more-recent development? (For context, I'm in my early 30's)
A switch might explode by using the wrong power adapter and still work afterwards somehow.
At my high school, every computer was on unrestricted LAN divided by floors. Four classrooms playing Armagetron (the open source tron clone) was a LAN party I didn’t expect.
At mine, we had Warcraft 3 installed on the macs in my programming class. The greybeard teacher didn't really care, but his TAs would fuck with us because they were upper classmen. So they'd uninstall it.
We had admin creds, though, so screw you Jordan and Phil.
Our teacher actually gave us the keys, because he knew our "type" (ie the same kinda geek as him). We'd play cS1.6 etc (almost) every lunchtime, it was great.
I feel like this spanned at least a decade, but still got me right in the feels. Nobody had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ while BNC was still running around.
> If someone has shared their installation of Warcraft III over SMB it will run much faster if you copy it to your local machine first rather than execute it directly from the network folder.
This one made me laugh. I'm really surprised it started that way at all.
I think my LAN party time was a little later than most of what the author is describing (mostly Windows XP era), but I also remember the networking problems I had at the start of _every_ LAN party.
Once I also accidentally turned off a handful of PCs when I had to leave a party early, because I didn't notice my multiple socket outlet was powering several other PCs.
It's a pity that kids these days grow up without LAN parties.
We used to connect our hard drives to a "golden" PC to grab all the files and then reconnect them to our locals. Back in the IDE/SATA era this was pretty easy to do as some of us had controllers that could hot swap. About half of the time something would go wrong with this and we'd wind up teaching someone how to reinstall windows.
> but I also remember the networking problems I had at the start of _every_ LAN party.
Oh of course. It wasn't a LAN party until you spent hours fiddling with networking settings that you could make heads or tails of, just so computers could talk to each other.
Oh man, Hamachi somehow felt like borderline malware (I guess being owned by LogMeIn does that to you). But hey, it allowed your friend who had a good rig but didn’t know the first thing about networking to host a Minecraft server. :)
Around 10 years ago, I think there weren’t any other popular options despite its shadiness (well, either that or we didn’t know any better as teenagers). Of course nowadays, there are multiple good options.
It's 2011. You have 8 Steam accounts with Civilization V. Coronas are coming out the fridge. It's 4:30pm. Someone shows up with a macOS device. The first turn began at 8:05pm. You know the deadline is at 3am, because that's when they do last call at the Korean BBQ place that one of the guys looks forward to all night. There's only diplomacy rule: "No alien governors," you can't just walk over to some amateur's screen and fix everything wrong with their civ.
It's 2pm, October 18th, 2004. You have a hacked Xbox and the leak of French Halo 2. The line to play at the Holiday Inn for DECA State wraps around the hallway. A second hacked Xbox materializes. You play the first 8 player game at 2am.
It's the basement of the collectibles shop in 1999. You're hiding behind a plant in Zaphod's Estate. Someone notices you and you die instantly. It's still only 5pm. The 8 player match of Broodwar is 15 minutes in. Your beautiful base patrolled by battleships, it's untouched. You're 8 years old. Someone who is actually good is eliminated, and takes over your screen.
Even after a half dozen lan parties, my group of friends could never figure out how to get windows file sharing working reliably. Eventually I set up an http server so people could download patches and stuff. Worked great. I put a sign on the wall with my IP address, 10.1.1.32.
I had created a program in Delphi to remove and recreate network shares with a single click because someone copying files from your computer would wreak in-game performances.
And, before widespread broadband, LAN was 50% exchanging files :)
I remember being the first of my friends to owning an SSD, which was 60GB. Any game we played, my computer showed "ready" in mere seconds while the others needed upto a whole minute.
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.
It'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.
I remember the day I jumped ship to Steam. it was such a cool Trainwreck. got the boxed upgrade thing for HL2 /TF2 or whatever and I could finally game without ISO cd images or a folder of cracks for nocd
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
We had a friend like that too, actually. We all made some mumbling explanation about "electrostatic discharge" so that we felt less uncomfortable being so superstitious, but yeah people would leap in front of him to avoid him touching their stuff. But yeah, he was one of the crew, so it's not like we were gonna not-invite-him.
Still dont know how it managed to work, but my buddy had an XP box that he was gonna use for our lan party, but it went sideways. The only thing i had was a win 2k cd. We repaired using the 2k cd, got the system up, in a really fubar hybrid mode, where parts of the system acted like XP, and other parts acted like 2k
Ah, yes, the manual repairs in the primitive recovery console. Look for .SYS and .DLL files with suspicious dates (unlike the others), overwrite them with EXPAND'ed originals from the setup disk, try booting the system. Had to do it recently on an old XP system after testing early 2000s tool that had no idea service packs existed, and “updated” system files.
> Also managing to have everyone on the same patch for $GAME could waste hours.
This one hits close to home.
IIRC, in some games it was not even that obvious that someone had a different version (e.g. maybe they just wouldn't be able to see the server in the list), which made everything take even more time.
That just reminded me that circa 2010 I created a Google Sheet with a list of all the games we used to play, which patches to download and from where. By that time it was getting quite hard to find some patches to older games.
I 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!
This was THE prank we played at Uni in the computer labs. This was late 90s, when girls from the social sciences schools would go into the computer labs to check their email and shit.
So you turned their screen upside down, opened their tray and whatnot , then you would go their place and pretend to fix it (while your friend that was in charge of the lab actually fixed it).
It gave us nerds our 5 mins of "fame" with the ladies.
It was a 90s and we met through our BBS systems. there was no debate what to play, doom. Warcraft came soon after. The Internet sounded cool, too bad actually kind of destroyed everything. some of us had pagers. we made plans, over land lines, and everyone actually showed up.
we didn’t take photos because that would be stupid. our parents would find out what we were doing. which was mostly drinking and smoking way too much and playing video games until the sun rose.
also, we didn’t get bored of it. we figured out how to make custom maps. yes including our school, and picked appropriate demon for each classroom to represent our fabulous teachers. Columbine hadn’t happened yet. even if someone found out, you weren’t gonna go to jail.
I made an Unreal map of my high school. Was really awesome and had pretty much all the nooks and crannies. Even had that weird stairway hidden in a crevasse of a hidden tunnel. Hadn't been opened in decades with the amount of rust. I mean, I did a hell of a job.
Next month, Columbine happened. That put an end to me releasing that map anywhere.
One of my finest memories was at a lan of around 150 people. We had everyone install Natural Selection half life mod and had a full match going for hours.
Similar happened at another even a few years later. Had about 30 people playing that revolutionary war half life mod on LAN. I think it was called BG mod or something. Good times.
In the early 90s, my LAN parties were going to the school where my dad was principal and playing with my friends in the computer lab. They had a bunch of Mac Classics and we would play Bolo. So much fun.
Oh heck yeah, I put Bolo (and a custom HyperCard stack to circumvent At Ease and launch the game) onto floppy disks for my friends and I and we'd sneak into the Mac lab and play during lunch. We only did so a few times but.. so fun!!
265 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadWhereas IPX works just perfectly.
DHCP was a god send that proved me wrong. Well, until someone, somewhere forgot to disable its own server...
That is really cool.
Probably the author observed that reading different files from disk simultaneously was slower, until the copy process catches up to read the same files.
System RAM or Drive cache REALLY helped, so yes, the lagging copy would drag down the leading one until they both caught to within that buffer and things zipped along.
I've observed this same behavior on modern operating systems with big rsync jobs and spinning drives. If you have lots of small files then reading the metadata and directory structure takes a while but fits in the cache, so a second rsync will catch up very quickly to the first.
Playing 90s games, that are rather cheap nowadays.
Btw, most of the 90s are about 30 years away now. So you could play games from the 2000s, too, even if nothing from the last decade works in a LAN.
As for recent games that do not have normal IP support, better to ignore them.
[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".
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.
Does anyone remember a specific reason why? I was too young to know or care.
https://www.insomniagamingfestival.com/lan
Still manages to capture some of that "old school" LAN feel if you bring your own PC.
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 several days, most lasted upwards of 12 hours.
People didn't game with laptops. You had to bring you whole case, your monitors, accessories. It was great when LCDs came about. Lots of people had intricate setups too, heavy Thermaltakes with watercooling shit.
ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and that annoying Windows service that let you send pop-up messages to any IP if you hadn't disabled the service.
Once upon a time, I owned a 19" CRT that weighed less than a typical 17" CRT. Such good fortune. Still, I never did have the courage to carry my tower on one hip and my monitor on the other (and everything else in a backpack), so I guess it didn't really benefit me that much after all.
> most lasted upwards of 12 hours.
You're damn right. Imagine carting a CRT around and then only staying for half a day. Ha!
I forget if they actually sold the blue ones back then. I remember taking a few yellow ones (that weren't supposed to leave the store)
I use these regularly for big groceries, even the bag itself lasts years when the usual flimsy mostly plastic trolleys tend to break after half a year.
- 'portable' old 14" for safety and ease of transport
- 'shiny' new 19" for showoff and ease of gaming
I don't think I've ever played Quake without a bunch of dudes on speed.
Net effect: Hold down enter and full your target's screen with a hundreds of windows faster than they could clear them.
We called it bombing, so we usually just wrote the word "bomb" when doing it.
The one time I was ever really disciplined in school was after I accidentally targeted a service account instead of my friend's account. Every screen in the school was filled with the word bomb and my username was on each window title.
our crew never really did illegal or prescription drugs
But we'd drink booze and/or achieve Adderall-like effects with caffeinated energy drinks. None of us drank coffee so we had like... zero caffeine tolerance. If you have zero caffeine tolerance and you slam multiple energy drinks the effect is NOT subtle
of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune to caffeine I can chug coffee directly before a satisfying REM nap lol
Going on a tangent: it takes a while for the caffeine you drink to make it through your digestive system, so even for someone without any tolerance at all, they could take a few shots of espresso on a full stomach and then have about a 30 minute window to have a nap, before the jitter starts.
BUT: On an empty stomach, or even if I've had a little bit of food, it feels like caffeine works fairly instantly for me? I'm the stereotypical "can't function until I've had a little coffee in the morning" type of guy. Is this purely psychosomatic?
Winpopup. I loved that tool, showed it to my entire class in school so we could comfortably cheat during exams. I was hailed as a super hacker with mad skills.
Leaving aside the nitpicking of "umm actually, caffeine is a drug" (I infer from context that you mean "hard"/illegal drugs, which is reasonable), this one doesn't quite ring true for me. There's a particularly flavour of nerdery that views drugs as a means of hacking one's own body - "bio-hacking" is already a bit cringey and over-used, but it's not inaccurate. There's significant intersection between the nerdier people I know, and those who are interested in chemically expanding their experiences and perceptions. Maybe that's a more-recent development? (For context, I'm in my early 30's)
A switch might explode by using the wrong power adapter and still work afterwards somehow.
At my high school, every computer was on unrestricted LAN divided by floors. Four classrooms playing Armagetron (the open source tron clone) was a LAN party I didn’t expect.
We had admin creds, though, so screw you Jordan and Phil.
Anyway, we played a lot of Warcraft 3.
This one made me laugh. I'm really surprised it started that way at all.
I think my LAN party time was a little later than most of what the author is describing (mostly Windows XP era), but I also remember the networking problems I had at the start of _every_ LAN party.
Once I also accidentally turned off a handful of PCs when I had to leave a party early, because I didn't notice my multiple socket outlet was powering several other PCs.
It's a pity that kids these days grow up without LAN parties.
Oh of course. It wasn't a LAN party until you spent hours fiddling with networking settings that you could make heads or tails of, just so computers could talk to each other.
Then Hamachi came along :)
It's 2pm, October 18th, 2004. You have a hacked Xbox and the leak of French Halo 2. The line to play at the Holiday Inn for DECA State wraps around the hallway. A second hacked Xbox materializes. You play the first 8 player game at 2am.
It's the basement of the collectibles shop in 1999. You're hiding behind a plant in Zaphod's Estate. Someone notices you and you die instantly. It's still only 5pm. The 8 player match of Broodwar is 15 minutes in. Your beautiful base patrolled by battleships, it's untouched. You're 8 years old. Someone who is actually good is eliminated, and takes over your screen.
And, before widespread broadband, LAN was 50% exchanging files :)
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.
That, plus of course the obligatory blue/green cold-cathode tubes :-)
Never a truer phrase spoken.
I remember resisting XP for awhile and instead editing INF files so drivers would install on 2k for me.
And yes, they started as the same kernel and drivers.
Also managing to have everyone on the same patch for $GAME could waste hours.
This one hits close to home.
IIRC, in some games it was not even that obvious that someone had a different version (e.g. maybe they just wouldn't be able to see the server in the list), which made everything take even more time.
That just reminded me that circa 2010 I created a Google Sheet with a list of all the games we used to play, which patches to download and from where. By that time it was getting quite hard to find some patches to older games.
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!
Those games have such amazing soundtracks. Unreal Tournament's music instantly brings back memories of frenetic LAN multiplayer.
https://youtu.be/7MSFW8pZ-_4
https://youtu.be/3otKIBNqciw
https://youtu.be/eEcPakW42JU
So you turned their screen upside down, opened their tray and whatnot , then you would go their place and pretend to fix it (while your friend that was in charge of the lab actually fixed it).
It gave us nerds our 5 mins of "fame" with the ladies.
Reminds me of serials.ws . It was pretty good at the time.
we didn’t take photos because that would be stupid. our parents would find out what we were doing. which was mostly drinking and smoking way too much and playing video games until the sun rose.
Things went downhill fast after that.
Next month, Columbine happened. That put an end to me releasing that map anywhere.
It definitely has something do with: * We spent a lot of time there (every day for school) * We were intensely familiar with the spaces
It would be interesting to research the psychological reasons why making a space like that as a map is so appealing!
It was Doom on 8-10 school computer network PCs for me, absolutely fantastic times!
Similar happened at another even a few years later. Had about 30 people playing that revolutionary war half life mod on LAN. I think it was called BG mod or something. Good times.
Many of the people captured in this video still play today and have enduring friendships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE