Inside the World's Largest LAN Party

MrSeb writes "Last weekend, over 12,000 LAN party goers turned up at DreamHack Winter 2011 in Jonkoping, Sweden with a PC under the arm, on their back, or packed carefully in the trunk of their car. Every single attendee is squeezed into just three massive halls — the largest holding 5,000 computers — or four days, only taking brief breaks to sleep or check out one of the many stages (including some of the largest e-sport tournaments of the year). Being the largest LAN party in the world, DreamHack's infrastructure is suitably monumental: it takes days to lay the thousands of cables, and at the heart of the network is tower of Cisco routers that interface with a 120Gbps internet connection provided by Telia."

Re:Recipe For Disaster

[icebike]

The power requirements alone must be enormous. Most buildings are simply not wired to handle an inrush of 12000 monitors, and the computers they are hooked to.

It must have required totally separate power structures and a totally separate power feed separate from the building mains. This wasn't held at a typical office building, but rather in an empty-shell type of auditorium.

Check out the air quality in picture 2 vs picture 3.

Wow. some truly happy people there.

[unity100]

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/107245-inside-the-worlds-largest-lan-party/16 [extremetech.com]

check out the eyes of the guys laughing. thats a real laugh, and their eyes are shining with real happiness. been a while since i saw such people in media images.

Re:Again scandinavia.

[Ethanol-fueled]

I don't know why you were modded down for that unfortunate truth. Hell, I'm a true American patriot, and I was just about to respond to all of the "lack-of-hygiene" top posts with the fact that Scandinavians aren't fat, doughy, yeasty, disgusting pigs like Americans are - Scandinavians actually respect their bodies and take fitness very seriously, and that's where I plan to move when America finally goes all Third-Reich on the world.

I was going to try to prove Scandinavian fitness with event pictures, but of course, there were too many fat-ass non-Scandinavians reinforcing bad stereotypes about gamers. For instance, the Pot-bellied pig [expo2010.se] seen at the front right of that pic. Does he really need another Sprite?

Re:Oh my! All those sweaty geeks in one place.

[compwizrd]

My guess is picture 3 is the aftermath of the smoke generator you can see is running in picture 1.

Re:Again scandinavia.

[Ethanol-fueled]

That's because the Scandinavian definition of happiness doesn't include being jobless and in tens of thousands of dollars of debt, buying big screen TV's and ridiculously huge pickup trucks with money they don't have.

They are doers. Not in the sense that they blow the shit out of anybody they don't like, because they are not greedy grabby dreamers supporting a Ponzi-esque economy built around the war machine and monetary voodoo as Americans are. And that, with all of Scandinavia's evil socialism and double-up gas prices, is why the Nords are happy with a high standard of living.

But keep spending all of your soon-to-expire unemployment money on lottery tickets while watching Cribs, you will win big before you have to move back in with momma. You can almost smell the money now.

Re:120 gbps

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone from Sweden question some of your claims. Sure, we're a relatively small area compared to some other countries, but our population is only 9 million so the population density isn't all that high. You have cities with more than 9 million in them. I'd also question your claim that we have a lot of money. We're not too bad off but not that different most other western countries. Or maybe you meant that the government has a lot of money due to the high taxes.

You are right however in that the government subsidized a network of fiber going to to all major populated areas in the mid 1990s, and ever since then we've been pretty close to the top when it comes to internet speed. I'm glad they had the foresight to do that.