Four years ago I attended a LAN party where I was the youngest one (26 back then).
All others already had kids but swore to keep the old spirit alive.
Never have I seen such a well organised party with actually working games :D.
They used the "eti-launcher"
I remember showing up at my first LAN party, ~20 years younger than my online friends. They just couldn’t believe I was actually 13. They were really nice. One woman had a son my age that I went to a music festival with when I was 20. Another got me my first job as a programmer.
Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
The interesting thing that you point out to me is the indirect mentoring / support from someone ahead of you in tech you received simply based on mutual interests.
Sadly there's a lot of segments where juniors want to learn much on their own, often re-learning lessons of the past that could have been put towards more meaningful progress for them in hindsight.
This seems specific to your family. My family would never allow that unless they knew the parents of atleast a few people at the place I was sleeping over.
In North Branch MN there was an old movie theater with the seats taken out and tables setup - The BattleShack. parents would dump kids there and they'd be there for days or weeks just gaming and hanging out at the Denny's in town. My buddy had a workshop addon to their house where the same thing would occur. Summers around us were just a solid LAN Party.
> Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
Parents were sane back then, it's today that they've gone crazy. They watch too much news and keep their kids caged up, and end up doing far more harm than what they're trying to prevent.
The massive irony here is that the internet itself has become a much more dangerous place for kids than itself or going outside ever was. Particularly when it comes to mental health, parents don’t let their kids go out but the same parents put no parental controls or at the very least, screen time limits on their devices.
I'm happy to report that the internet is still safer than what "going outside" meant for me as a kid. Mostly we were blowing things up or seeing which roofs we could get on.
All that freedom was good for my head though, so I'll give you that one.
Sleep in a gym hall? I don't remember sleeping much at lan partys. Besides, there were more kids than computers, if you fell asleep you lost your seat.
I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).
> I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).
I guess what gp is saying is that not everyone that attends the LAN party is able to sling along their computer to the venue so there are more people than machines and of course limited seating for folks without a machine.
BTW, the gp said you might lose your seat and not that your seat gets stolen since there aren’t enough seats to go round, there will always be someone who has been standing for while ready to take you seat.
Correct. Everyone knew everyone, so stealing is the wrong way to look at this. A lot of people had no PC and were just hanging around, looking at other people playing mostly Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. We tended to e.g. switch the PC between players when they got fragged.
Some people played until total exhaustion, so around 3AM you started to see people fall asleep while playing. That's the moment the hopefull looker in the next seat would gently grab they keyboard and mouse and 'borrow' the sleeper's PC and finally join the game.
Good times. Don't ask about the smell of the room after a 2 day fragfest.
Internet has become a crazier place now than it was during the 1990s. Also, the smart phone revolution (with the cameras) has led to a whole bunch of crazies taking over the internet via their mobile devices.
We built these things so the important voices would no longer be isolated from us by distance.
But now to maintain those connections you either have to put in almost the same amount of work as going to your neighbors house and talking to them OR you have to go into a massively networked social media site and scream into the void and hope you get a response through all of the ads and noise of everyone else screaming at the same time.
Haha I had this exact experience, we showed up for a Halo lan party (the original) and we were 15 and 16 thinking that we'd be driving out to the burbs to play some games with some people our age, we met on a local LAN forum board.
We rang the doorbell and an "older" man answered the door, and we were confused and said "uh we're here to see ____" and he was like "That's me."
For context all of our lan parties up to this point were us schlepping tube tvs around to various basements of our friends houses, occasionally getting to mooch some pizza off of someone.
Instead, we walk into the huge suburban house and there's four rooms with gigantic flat screen televisions setup for 16 player madness and the entire place is filled with adult couples, the men came to game and the women to socialize and cook and have fun.
They had an entire table of snacks and drinks and everything you could ever want as a wee gamer.
We were so blown away but they were super nice and didn't make us feel too awkward. When the game started they asked us how good we were, "uhh, we beat legendary" - they laughed and put us on the same team for the first round.
The second round we were not allowed to play on the same team, turns out the kids can game :)
We made long term friends and ended up scrimming and hanging out with people 20 and 30 years our senior, a total blast and yeah, I don't see me hanging out with 16 years today.
When I was 19, I used to meet up with people of all ages from various torrent trackers (we were all staff from various sites, forums, affiliated 'radio' stations, IRC channels, etc.) and it was awesome. People paid for me to fly to Amsterdam with them to hang out with even more people and I think the oldest was a guy in his 50s, but back then we were like, I don't know, Internet People and that was what we were centered around. I miss those days like crazy now.
> Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
Back then, I can't imagine parents letting their daughters do that either. The kind of freedom to roam at 12yo that you describe was what allowed me access to people and computers we didn't have the money for; but I've always been very conscious that my sisters would have never been given that kind of opportunity.
My sisters definitely did have the same kind of freedom I did. Say, my little sister took her first intercontinental flight (with two plane changes I think) alone around age 14.
I took my first 300 km train ride alone at the age of 7.
My parents told me the name of the destination train station, and that my grandmother would be waiting on arrival.
The train staff knew I was travelling alone and checked up on me a few times and gave me free drinks.
Two years later the train stopped being a direct path, so I had to switch trains halfway.
I remember all the little unknowns made me very anxious that I'd get lost somewhere.
For example, they changed the second departure platform so it didn't match the one on my ticket. And the departure platform was located elsewhere on the train station, not in direct connection with the national lines.
When coming back, I remember they'd announce my city as the next stop, and then I'd see these other city names fly by. I remember thinking "They must have forgot to stop!" because I didn't understand that those city names were suburbs of the capital city that I lived in, and that the national train went directly to the train station.
30 years later I still remember all of these. It all worked out fine.
I loved lan parties. Putting all my heavy gear in my cheap old little car. Big ass 19 inch crt and a big tower full of useless buttons and knobs. Spend the entire day and evening setting everything up. Of course everything broke to the point windows had to be reinstalled. Driver issues, network issues, hardware issues. But then finally at 1am we started playing serious sam, unreal tournament, dune 2000, 1nsane, moha, quake 2 or 3, team fortress 1 and many more. Good old times.
always had that one friend who bought a tower case with a handle on it, and the other friend that had a little handcart for their CRT and tower.
I bought a silverstone desktop case (like a 4U but the same size as a midsize tower laid down, so not as "long") that i would bring to LAN parties. That held a large variety of machines until they started requiring larger (longer) PSUs. I wonder if i still have that case in a closet somewhere.
Recently, my friends and I recreated our old LAN parties. Went up to a cabin in the woods, brought some cheap network switches, and had everyone install OpenRA (https://www.openra.net/, open red alert), and had a blast, even with everyone on laptops (mac/win). You can still do this in 2024 and it's worth it!
My son (8) and I have a ton of fun playing OpenRA together! Runs surprisingly well on his old MacBook Air 11" running Manjaro and me on an M1 MacBook Pro.
> For others to join your game, you must forward a port in your router for them to connect to. By default, OpenRA uses TCP port 1234. You can test this on sites like canyouseeme.org yourself.
I'm part of a group that still holds 3-4 LAN parties a year with ~16-24 seats. We play mostly older stuff and it's still as fun as it was back then.
Gaming has changed dramatically, but it's not like that old stuff disappeared. Sure, some games don't hold up well in the slightest, but the good ones have. Some favorites are AoE2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Re-Volt, C&C, Natural Selection, Call of Duty, and oh god so much more.
Not at the moment. We use recycled 4-6th gen i5 all-in-ones so everything runs off the iGPU. It basically limits us to games that were released up until 2006. We _do_ play Far Cry, though.
When my brother was getting married ~6 years ago, we ended his Bachelor Party with a LAN party.
Sure, we played games we would have normally played at our respective homes (Mostly League of Legends back then), but there's something different about having everyone in one place.
Now, we go to a semi-annual LAN event called PDXLAN [0]. It's an 800+ seat event in Ridgefield, WA (Just outside Portland, OR...it used to be held in Portland, but we out-grew the venue), sponsored by NVIDIA, Intel, MSI, and over a dozen other PC gaming hardware manufacturers. I've been going since 2016 and it's an absolute blast. There are gaming tournaments, but they really try to appeal to casual gamers as much as hardcore competitors. They've been running a Golf With Your Friends tournament at every event for a couple years now, and it's their most participated tournament.
I started attending a monthly Halo 3 LAN party last year. It's all flatscreens and current-gen consoles running MCC, and we all have to juggle the schedule around our adult responsibilities now, but it's still such a blast to get together with ~30 people and yell at each other from throughout the house.
LANAllNight in Dallas is happening this weekend, it happens twice a year now. 200ish people, good old-school vibe. Minimum red tape.
Quakecon is this July or August in Dallas. Several thousand people. A sight to see, but a lot more bullshit these days, lots of security, metal detectors, etc.
In fact, I'm wearing a Quakecon shirt right now!
LANs even today are so much fun, just to escape reality for 2-3 days and play games, even single-player sometimes while you wait for friends to wake up. I can't stay up til 7am like I used to, no amount of BAWLS will help it.
Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake Live/Quake Champions, Risk of Rain 2, Left 4 Dead 2. Golf With Friends is a fun casual game to unwind with after dinner (pizza) and before hitting the hard stuff.
I can’t speak for other events, but QuakeCon and Dreamhack have had internet access (and quite good access all things considered) for a decade or more now.
Yeah the LANs I go to are online. Steam and many of the games have global browsers. Also, unfortunately, I don't think even the smaller one is literally one LAN. it's a routed network.
No LAN mode but on PC the "host" actually hosts the game (not sure how they do TURN/STUN but it does work most of the time), so if you have all four people in the same building it should run as though it's LAN. There are server side checks for the items you find in the game so it has to run partially through a central server.
battlefield bad company 2 is a similar experience to helldivers 2, IMO, and that is LAN-able.
I found out about this LAN-party-optimized house (https://kentonshouse.com/) from a previous discussion on HN, and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
I finished the new, bigger, better one a few months ago. (The old one was actually very small -- photo angles are deceiving.) Not published on the internet yet, maybe later this year...
Recently held my 28th Annual New Year's Eve LAN Party, as well as a big party around the solar eclipse (we had totality at the house). Both were attended by some of the same friends as the first one (and many new friends obviously). Gonna keep doing this for a long time, it's so much more fun having everyone in person vs. over the internet.
Just hope my kids don't decide they hate video games...
That's wonderful! Would love hear about it / see some photos if you do decide to publish. Sounds like you've built a real community which is priceless.
I went to so many LAN parties at friends houses during high-school in the mid 2000s. Without this experience, I doubt I would have pursued electrical engineering and moved to silicon valley.
It's amazing than reading the comments here makes me realize that even in "1st world countries" we all play the same ol' games (one flavor of UT, Other game that became a must for that specific LAN Party like Delta Force, and some other strategy game).
I used to be "the young guy" in my local group back in the late 2000's and I often wondered what games we would play if everyone had access to a top class PC back in the day.
Best memories ever - 30 years ago was just fun and games - literally and wires! To all that are appreciative of this old school style of gaming - have a great day.
Being part of one of the biggest in the world back in 2002 was also very cool.
I still manage to attend lots of LAN parties in the UK!
The major one - several thousand - Insomnia (although I volunteer for that), and a host of smaller ones with a much more community feel, such as StratLAN.
Is the feeling slightly different to what I imagine it used to be? Yes, as if the Internet goes down, then many games stop working - but then at the smaller ones (ie Strat), I find I spend more of my time chatting to like-minded people, playing board games, etc. I even have a friend that comes over from NL for it sometimes!
I ordered a copy Merritt K's book for a longtime friend who organized many LAN parties for our friend group in high school and college. He had nice things to say about it, so pick up a copy I guess!
121 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadMore anecdotes and discussion of the book LAN Party from it's early stages
Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party (2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680678
And more recently a review last year:
Berlin Review: LAN Party
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36898833
CNN last month:
A nostalgic look back at when the Internet still felt joyful
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805005
Four years ago I attended a LAN party where I was the youngest one (26 back then). All others already had kids but swore to keep the old spirit alive. Never have I seen such a well organised party with actually working games :D. They used the "eti-launcher"
Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
Sadly there's a lot of segments where juniors want to learn much on their own, often re-learning lessons of the past that could have been put towards more meaningful progress for them in hindsight.
Being able to navigate first principles concepts and learning to use them gets to what's novel is more a little quicker.
Parents were sane back then, it's today that they've gone crazy. They watch too much news and keep their kids caged up, and end up doing far more harm than what they're trying to prevent.
All that freedom was good for my head though, so I'll give you that one.
There used to be a joke about the Internet:
Where men are men, women are men, and kids are FBI agents.
It seems that this is no longer true, and with the massive influx of kids, that itself has increased risk.
It wouldn't make much sense to be a child predator on the Internet in 1998. There just weren't that many kids.
And these days, there are still plenty of parents that let their kids run wild.
I don’t think anything has changed.
I guess what gp is saying is that not everyone that attends the LAN party is able to sling along their computer to the venue so there are more people than machines and of course limited seating for folks without a machine.
BTW, the gp said you might lose your seat and not that your seat gets stolen since there aren’t enough seats to go round, there will always be someone who has been standing for while ready to take you seat.
Some people played until total exhaustion, so around 3AM you started to see people fall asleep while playing. That's the moment the hopefull looker in the next seat would gently grab they keyboard and mouse and 'borrow' the sleeper's PC and finally join the game.
Good times. Don't ask about the smell of the room after a 2 day fragfest.
We built these things so the important voices would no longer be isolated from us by distance.
But now to maintain those connections you either have to put in almost the same amount of work as going to your neighbors house and talking to them OR you have to go into a massively networked social media site and scream into the void and hope you get a response through all of the ads and noise of everyone else screaming at the same time.
It's crazy.
We need a filter to lower the noise floor again.
We rang the doorbell and an "older" man answered the door, and we were confused and said "uh we're here to see ____" and he was like "That's me."
For context all of our lan parties up to this point were us schlepping tube tvs around to various basements of our friends houses, occasionally getting to mooch some pizza off of someone.
Instead, we walk into the huge suburban house and there's four rooms with gigantic flat screen televisions setup for 16 player madness and the entire place is filled with adult couples, the men came to game and the women to socialize and cook and have fun.
They had an entire table of snacks and drinks and everything you could ever want as a wee gamer.
We were so blown away but they were super nice and didn't make us feel too awkward. When the game started they asked us how good we were, "uhh, we beat legendary" - they laughed and put us on the same team for the first round.
The second round we were not allowed to play on the same team, turns out the kids can game :)
We made long term friends and ended up scrimming and hanging out with people 20 and 30 years our senior, a total blast and yeah, I don't see me hanging out with 16 years today.
Back then, I can't imagine parents letting their daughters do that either. The kind of freedom to roam at 12yo that you describe was what allowed me access to people and computers we didn't have the money for; but I've always been very conscious that my sisters would have never been given that kind of opportunity.
My parents told me the name of the destination train station, and that my grandmother would be waiting on arrival.
The train staff knew I was travelling alone and checked up on me a few times and gave me free drinks.
Two years later the train stopped being a direct path, so I had to switch trains halfway.
I remember all the little unknowns made me very anxious that I'd get lost somewhere.
For example, they changed the second departure platform so it didn't match the one on my ticket. And the departure platform was located elsewhere on the train station, not in direct connection with the national lines.
When coming back, I remember they'd announce my city as the next stop, and then I'd see these other city names fly by. I remember thinking "They must have forgot to stop!" because I didn't understand that those city names were suburbs of the capital city that I lived in, and that the national train went directly to the train station.
30 years later I still remember all of these. It all worked out fine.
This was before mobile phones.
I bought a silverstone desktop case (like a 4U but the same size as a midsize tower laid down, so not as "long") that i would bring to LAN parties. That held a large variety of machines until they started requiring larger (longer) PSUs. I wonder if i still have that case in a closet somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Hornet_(CV-12)
I think that would be the pinnacle.
> For others to join your game, you must forward a port in your router for them to connect to. By default, OpenRA uses TCP port 1234. You can test this on sites like canyouseeme.org yourself.
This however concerns me.
Gaming has changed dramatically, but it's not like that old stuff disappeared. Sure, some games don't hold up well in the slightest, but the good ones have. Some favorites are AoE2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Re-Volt, C&C, Natural Selection, Call of Duty, and oh god so much more.
* A few gallons of Code Red = $40
* Having a drive full of the latest cracked games = awesome
* Owning your friends face to face = better than awesome
* Given every game in existence, still playing a 4 hour Risk game because computer dice are bullshit = priceless
We played Deathmatch Dimension[1] which is a very recent map pack that's better than anything I played back in the day.
We use the Quakespasm Spiked source port.
[1] https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/dmd.html
Sure, we played games we would have normally played at our respective homes (Mostly League of Legends back then), but there's something different about having everyone in one place.
Now, we go to a semi-annual LAN event called PDXLAN [0]. It's an 800+ seat event in Ridgefield, WA (Just outside Portland, OR...it used to be held in Portland, but we out-grew the venue), sponsored by NVIDIA, Intel, MSI, and over a dozen other PC gaming hardware manufacturers. I've been going since 2016 and it's an absolute blast. There are gaming tournaments, but they really try to appeal to casual gamers as much as hardcore competitors. They've been running a Golf With Your Friends tournament at every event for a couple years now, and it's their most participated tournament.
[0] https://www.pdxlan.net/
Quakecon is this July or August in Dallas. Several thousand people. A sight to see, but a lot more bullshit these days, lots of security, metal detectors, etc.
In fact, I'm wearing a Quakecon shirt right now!
LANs even today are so much fun, just to escape reality for 2-3 days and play games, even single-player sometimes while you wait for friends to wake up. I can't stay up til 7am like I used to, no amount of BAWLS will help it.
Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake Live/Quake Champions, Risk of Rain 2, Left 4 Dead 2. Golf With Friends is a fun casual game to unwind with after dinner (pizza) and before hitting the hard stuff.
I predict Helldivers will be popular this year.
Or does this LAN have Internet? Where I am at LAN parties are completely offline, so genuinely curious.
The excuses by the company are foolish, too. It's PvE, period. Get out of my system.
That eti launcher looks neat, though.
battlefield bad company 2 is a similar experience to helldivers 2, IMO, and that is LAN-able.
I finished the new, bigger, better one a few months ago. (The old one was actually very small -- photo angles are deceiving.) Not published on the internet yet, maybe later this year...
Recently held my 28th Annual New Year's Eve LAN Party, as well as a big party around the solar eclipse (we had totality at the house). Both were attended by some of the same friends as the first one (and many new friends obviously). Gonna keep doing this for a long time, it's so much more fun having everyone in person vs. over the internet.
Just hope my kids don't decide they hate video games...
Being online just hasn't the same feeling when you could hear screaming within earshot when your plan executed to perfection...
I miss the raw simplicity of IPX. Not the NE2000 IRQ hell, though
I wonder if that person ever got to meet Lowtax lol
I used to be "the young guy" in my local group back in the late 2000's and I often wondered what games we would play if everyone had access to a top class PC back in the day.
Being part of one of the biggest in the world back in 2002 was also very cool.
The major one - several thousand - Insomnia (although I volunteer for that), and a host of smaller ones with a much more community feel, such as StratLAN.
Is the feeling slightly different to what I imagine it used to be? Yes, as if the Internet goes down, then many games stop working - but then at the smaller ones (ie Strat), I find I spend more of my time chatting to like-minded people, playing board games, etc. I even have a friend that comes over from NL for it sometimes!
LANs aren't dead quite yet :)