New Book Remembers LAN Parties and the 1990s 'Multiplayer Revolution' (cnn.com) 74
CNN looks back to when "dial-up internet (and its iconic dial tone) was 'still a thing..."
"File-sharing services like Napster and LimeWire were just beginning to take off... And in sweaty dorm rooms and sparse basements across the world, people brought their desktop monitors together to set up a local area network (LAN) and play multiplayer games — "Half-Life," "Counter-Strike," "Starsiege: Tribes," "StarCraft," "WarCraft" or "Unreal Tournament," to name just a few. These were informal but high-stakes gatherings, then known as LAN parties, whether winning a box of energy drinks or just the joy of emerging victorious. The parties could last several days and nights, with gamers crowded together among heavy computers and fast food boxes, crashing underneath their desks in sleeping bags and taking breaks to pull pranks on each other or watch movies...
It's this nostalgia that prompted writer and podcaster Merritt K to document the era's gaming culture in her new photobook "LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution." After floating the idea on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, she received an immediate — and visceral — response from old-school gamers all too keen to share memories and photos from LAN parties and gaming conventions across the world... It's strange to remember that the internet was once a place you went to spend time with other real people; a tethered space, not a cling-film-like reality enveloping the corporeal world from your own pocket....
Growing up as a teenager in this era, you could feel a sense of hope (that perhaps now feels like naivete) about the possibilities of technology, K explained. The book is full of photos featuring people smiling and posing with their desktop monitors, pride and fanfare apparent... "It felt like, 'Wow, the future is coming,'" K said. "It was this exciting time where you felt like you were just charting your own way. I don't want to romanticize it too much, because obviously it wasn't perfect, but it was a very, very different experience...."
"We've kind of lost a lot of control, I think over our relationship to technology," K said. "We have lost a lot of privacy as well. There's less of a sense of exploration because there just isn't as much out there."
One photo shows a stack of Mountain Dew cans (remembering that by 2007 the company had even released a line of soda called "Game Fuel"). "It was a little more communal," the book's author told CNN. "If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..."
They adds that that feeling of connecting to people in other places "was cool. It wasn't something that was taken for granted yet."
It's this nostalgia that prompted writer and podcaster Merritt K to document the era's gaming culture in her new photobook "LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution." After floating the idea on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, she received an immediate — and visceral — response from old-school gamers all too keen to share memories and photos from LAN parties and gaming conventions across the world... It's strange to remember that the internet was once a place you went to spend time with other real people; a tethered space, not a cling-film-like reality enveloping the corporeal world from your own pocket....
Growing up as a teenager in this era, you could feel a sense of hope (that perhaps now feels like naivete) about the possibilities of technology, K explained. The book is full of photos featuring people smiling and posing with their desktop monitors, pride and fanfare apparent... "It felt like, 'Wow, the future is coming,'" K said. "It was this exciting time where you felt like you were just charting your own way. I don't want to romanticize it too much, because obviously it wasn't perfect, but it was a very, very different experience...."
"We've kind of lost a lot of control, I think over our relationship to technology," K said. "We have lost a lot of privacy as well. There's less of a sense of exploration because there just isn't as much out there."
One photo shows a stack of Mountain Dew cans (remembering that by 2007 the company had even released a line of soda called "Game Fuel"). "It was a little more communal," the book's author told CNN. "If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..."
They adds that that feeling of connecting to people in other places "was cool. It wasn't something that was taken for granted yet."
Good times (Score:3, Interesting)
This was long enough ago I seem to remember some games actually supported ipx/spx.
We had lan parties at a technical college and also at friend's house.
Quake was a little difficult to get going the first time and with enough fiddling I managed to get it working and I was the hero in that moment.
Lots of doom and quake with custom maps, and a little Descent... we didn't really feel like playing anything else
Re:Good times (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck, before IPX/SPX we were using serial ports with null modem adapters to play multiplayer games. Friends and I would race each other on our 486DX machines in Papyrus' Nascar Racing using 115K serial port connections. Good times! DOOM supported serial port connection as well.
Re: (Score:1)
Hah! Yeah I played Doom over the parallel port.
I think the last time I had an actual lan gathering was in 2008 and the game was supreme commander.
Come to think of it, I did I play a lan game of stardew valley and then factorio with my daughter a couple years ago... not quite a "party" but still!
Re: (Score:2)
I was livin' large with a pirated copy of Novell NetWare. Being a BBS SysOp in the 90s had its advantages.
SynerChat (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1993 I found a MajorBBS that supported the GameConnection add-on. It was a local 20-line BBS running on a SunSpark offering relatively cheap access subscriptions. $5 month for 6 hours a day of connection time. We played all manners of games that allowed multiplayer including Rise of the Triad, Doom2, Heretic, and Descent.
A lot of the regulars on the server really hated us because only a handful of us ever interacted with the rest of the server, but in reality, we were thankful since it kept us from joining bay area gangs and doing things that would have got us into trouble. All of us eventually got jobs in tech in roles for IT, DevOps, Software Development, Product Management, AeroSpace Engineering, at now prominent Tech companies and Defense contractors.
Gaming us kept us together and kept us interested in Tech.
Re: SynerChat (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Around 1988 we had a couple of Amiga 2000's connected via serial port , mostly for flight sim games like Jet.
Re: (Score:2)
There was a LAN package back then called Little Big LAN that allowed all kinds of crazy ways to connect computers together. Ethernet, Arcnet, Parallel, Serial, Modem, and you could mix and match these connections between various systems. It was very common to use Little Big LAN to network computers together though null modem cables and LapLink cables to create an ad-hoc network. It was a pain in the ASCII to set up but it did work very well. Once NE2000 compliant network cards became more common the need fo
Re: (Score:2)
ipx kinda sucked, don't miss it. I do miss DFI Lanparty motherboards though.
Re: (Score:1)
For my group, we kind of had two eras of LAN parties. There was the Mechwarrior era where we mostly played against each other. Then there was the Starcraft and WoW era where we mostly played with each other. While both those games had fine online support, being in the same room and communicating was so much better. Later on, Ventrilo (or team speak for some people) was nice but it wasn't the same.
Transporting a mid-tower and 21" CRT sucked, kids these days could have it so easy as gaming laptops are pre
Loved this era so much (Score:5, Interesting)
I graduated high school in 1994, so this was my era! Hardly a weekend went by without lugging around my PC to a friend's house or to work, all the way till 2004 or so, when DSL finally killed it off.
Little did we know the glorious times we lived in, eating pizza, TRULY hanging with friends, not sitting at home, but truly socializing. It was literally the most fun I ever had and I miss it so damned much!
I remember the absolute bliss that was Quake at the time more than any other game, as it was my first LAN game. After that, Tribes was amazing, and later on HL2 Multiplayer around 2003!
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yeah, we'd go out riding bikes on weekends with the neighborhood kids, hang out wherever, play paintball sometimes, do anything we wanted really, and no cell phones to keep us in line. Ah, the exploring.
Then Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg ruined everything.
Re: Loved this era so much (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You're supposed to check the box.
Re: (Score:2)
I bought a case to build a PC back in that era and it came with a carrying strap so you could easily haul it to a LAN party.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, a Joe McMillan innovation!
Tribes was lan? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I played it on a LAN.
Re: (Score:2)
Both Starsiege Tribes and Tribes 2 have always supported UDP discovery of LAN servers (via sending/receiving packets over subnet broadcast address) then found game servers showed up in the server browser. The games also support manual direct connecting to an IP address or resolvable hostname.
Testing Network saturation (Score:3)
I recall more than a few "tests" we "had" to perform on network saturation at work "back in the day".
Best "tool"? DOOM over IPX/SPX.
Fun times.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember playing DOOM as a U.S. Marine PFC in 1997. They had made a custom "more realistic" version made, of course! For hand-eye coordination, of course!
Had a lot more to do with morale, I think. But had to sell it to the brass. :D
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yup, that was it!
Hits in the feels (Score:4, Insightful)
This hits in the feels. I used to remember everyone struggling to find rides because we didnt have licenses yet and begging peoples older brothers to take us.
The memories of cases of Bawls, filesharing boxes and dedicated servers. Finding random people running public ftp at lan parties.
I have some old photos of all of us as teens crowded around big CRT monitors with 10/100 hubs. Memories of 1am foodruns. Sleeping on random floors, waking up with marker on you from friends screwing around.
No one understood us. Did feel like we were breaching some future earlier than everyone else and it kinda hurts to realize that future never happened and we actually were doing something that truly was an era.
Sorry I think I have something in my eye.
Re: (Score:2)
The memories of cases of Bawls
I remember when CompUSA started selling that stuff, then I think it actually started showing up at my local Albertsons (which was a store within walking distance of my home). It was the tastiest carbonated liquid diabeetus ever.
Seems like you can still order it online, and some markets still have it, but as near as I can tell it dropped off the face of the Earth here in Central Florida. Probably just as well though, my old ass metabolism can't handle all that sugar anymore, and their diet version is sweet
Re: Hits in the feels (Score:2)
Weird, here it is everywhere. Supermarkets, gas stations, etc.
Where as during lan party days we ordered it off the internet in cases specifically for lan parties. Everyone would try to find someone who never ordered because you could get a free case if it was your first order.
Those were the days.
certainly don't miss those days, but they were fun (Score:4)
Re: (Score:2)
It's nice when all your friends are in IT.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's why we didn't see the enshittification coming. It was easier.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Most of the LAN parties I went to there was nothing to do except plug in and play. We had commercial grade switches, professionally made cables (we were the professionals) and computers we used regularly so we had already got them working correctly.
Sometimes there would be some game installs, whoop de doo.
Re: (Score:2)
Preach!
Re: certainly don't miss those days, but they were (Score:2)
We used to have them over a long weekend. You'd only have to setup the first day. I don't remember technical issues interfering much. There was always one guy having issues who figured his shit out the second day. Most people got up and running quickly.
Pushed the SFF form factor to new heights (Score:2)
Having a luggable desktop was nice if you were in on the LANparty scene. Shuttle made a name for itself during and after this time period. Now of course you can get SFF PCs and smaller that will run circles around anything from 20+ years ago. Many of those SFF PCs and NUCs built themselves on the shoulders of LANparty innovators.
Re: (Score:2)
Those toll booth stickers you stick on your car's windshield run an actual 8086 on solar power, baking in the sun all day. That's amazing to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Those toll booth stickers you stick on your car's windshield run an actual 8086 on solar power, baking in the sun all day.
Only ones I've ever seen here are just RFID stickers, where the source of power is the signal sent by the reader. The old toll transponders used a lithium coin cell battery.
Re: (Score:2)
Woulda been funny if someone took an old 8086 IBM PC to a LANparty years ago.
"OMG hai guyz wanna play CGA Star Wars?"
Re: (Score:2)
Having a luggable desktop was nice if you were in on the LANparty scene. Shuttle made a name for itself during and after this time period.
They made it so easy compared to everything else, plus the age of LCD monitors was taking off. I had the AMD based Shuttle in its carry bag, 15" LCD in its box (which had a carry handle!) and a backpack with KB, Mouse, headphones, cables, DVD folder, and snacks. One lightweight trip is all it took to get to the LAN.
Replaced the Shuttle with an Athlon 64 based version when that CPU and Shuttle combo became available, though after that the ARIA MicroATX case came out at less than half the price of a Shuttle
YMMV (Score:3)
I grew up out in suburbia, so to me people actually attending "lan parties" was a thing that happened in bigger cities. At home my younger brother and I had an IPX lan set up between our computers so we could play games together. I did sometimes have the friends who owned computers which were decent enough for gaming come over a few times, but most often that just resulted in hours of troubleshooting rather than gaming. We also ended up discovering that VGA cables were't really the most durable things either. Another snag happened after one of my friends upgraded to a Cyrix CPU: it absolutely sucked for running Quake.
The games we usually ended up playing were Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, Worms Armageddon, C&C Red Alert, Starcraft Brood Wars, Quake, and later on, Unreal Tournament. I'm probably also forgetting a few.
TBH, hopping on Discord and getting a few friends in a private session of GTA V is just as much fun as the old days, and no one has to haul their rigs across town to do it. Mostly it's just that we're all middle aged adults now and it's rare to all be available at the same time to sit down and play a game. I think that's mostly where the real nostalgia is, remembering a time when playing some games together as friends didn't require the damn stars to align first.
Re: YMMV (Score:2)
That's interesting. Ours were always in the suburbs because that's where there was enough space to setup 30 desktop PCs.
Re: (Score:2)
I grew up out in suburbia, so to me people actually attending "lan parties" was a thing that happened in bigger cities
I've driven to other cities for lan parties, e.g. Austin to San Marcos.
hopping on Discord and getting a few friends in a private session of GTA V is just as much fun as the old days
Nothing beats actually being together in the same room. One fun lan party experience is forming a temporary "clan" and getting on network games all together as a team where you can communicate verbally while playing. My coworkers and I at MediaX (a web and game startup I worked for until it folded up) used to play UT as a group on Friday afternoons, mostly low grav CTF. That was a hoot. Our tag was AoY for Assassins of Youth — this
Not sure I need a book to remember this, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
the LAN party was definitely one of those things I remember fondly from that time in my life. I guess I'm happy someone thought to preserve it by means of documenting stories about it in a book.
Some of the best LAN parties I attended were organized by a few friends of one of my best friends at the time. They'd email out sign-up notices and collect payment via PayPal as admission fees. It wasn't a lot ... maybe $5-10 a person. But it paid for them to buy a bunch of pizzas from Costco for everyone. They managed to convince a church pastor that letting us use the cafeteria on a Saturday night for the LAN gaming party was a good way to keep teenagers off the streets and out of trouble, so that was our standard location for them. The organizer's girlfriend would even bake us chocolate chip cookies using the school cafeteria's oven, and we had an official "intermission" period when everyone could stop gaming for a bit to mingle and eat the pizza, cookies, and whatever drinks they brought along.
I remember what a pain it was lugging a 21" CRT display in there as well as a full tower PC. But that was just what you did, to make sure you had a decent gaming rig to use. A few of us tried to get by with laptops but the CPU/GPU power just wasn't there (no true "gaming laptops" back then like you have today). So the laptop players were stuck playing only a small selection of things that ran well on them like Team Fortress.
Flashbang (Score:5, Funny)
In 2000 when Counter-strike was a burgeoning multi-player game, we all piled into one of our friends' garages in the Bay Area to play online. Some of us were fortunate enough to be students at Stanford, or Chico State where they had OC3 or T3 lines, which meant plenty of bandwidth to run CS Servers and with whatever mods we wanted. Before cybersecurity was a concern, we were able to use RDC (Remote Desktop Connection) to remotely manage our servers, host DNS, host CS Stats, and run open FTP shares easily.
During one Lan Party weekend in particular, since we all went to California Schools we frequented the bay area often during the school year to do LAN Parties, I employed a creative new tactic to gain an edge on my competitors.
If you know your history on flashlights, in 2000, it was prior to the advent of current day LED 1,000 Lumen 18650 powered flashlights. Then a 3P or 6P from SureFire was a big deal. I had a 9P which offered 105 Lumens with no artifacts, compared to the 5 and 6D Maglites of the day that offered maybe on-paper defeating specs of 120 lumens, but had tons of artifacts and just appeared less brightly, esp at close range.
I came up with a rule on the fly during one match to do a "flashbang". Instead of tossing a flashbang in my inventory, I stood up, and aimed my 9P, screamed "FLASHBANG!" and then tapped the momentary switch on the back to flash one of my friends right in the face about 5 feet away from me. We were sitting in two rows facing one another for CT vs T to prevent LAN cheating. However, that didn't stop us from pulling shenanigans.
In the dimly lit garage, he was instantly blinded and unable to see me approaching as I knifed him in the head.
Terrorists win.
I hosted so many of these (Score:2)
As one of the few parents with a working knowledge of networking and troubleshooting Windows, I became the unofficial tech support for my two son's small group. They called themselves The Sourpatch Kids and wrang!ed office space on Friday nights for 24 hour sessions of gaming, pizza, candy, and soda. Eventually I taught all of them how to set up the network themselves. I knew my work was done when all pitched in and bought a Gigabit switch without even seeking out my advice.
LAN parties became board game par
Great times before eternal summer (Score:2)
Computers were still "special" and demanding enough to gatekeep normals who subsequently beshat the internet with their presence.
That which is accessible to the masses is ruined by the masses, but it was a good time for a fairly long time.
The 1990s in college... (Score:2)
The 1990s in college I and several friends would install from CD some of the multiplayer shoot 'em ups...Doom 2 was the most popular. We'd commandeer the computer lab in the early morning, install, and then spend the next hours shooting and shouting. Until we were shooed away either by class, or the old lady with horn-rimmed glasses that was the "lab monitor."
My roommate and I both sprung for a 25" null modem, and connected our PC's and did death matches. I remember on a level a friend had created a WAD for
I was a bit late, but I miss it (Score:5, Interesting)
I was born a bit too late, and in a town a bit too small to have really known it.
By the time I was big enough to attend them, lan parties were becoming sparse and replaced by online games. But still, the de I've had the chance to attend were blissful, playing some CS for hours, then once most people have gone to bed, starting some DotA at 5am, with the occasional rage pulling the ethernet cable out.
One thing I deeply regret from that time was never have been able to attend the big lan and demo parties like Dreamhack or the Assembly, before they disappeared or became useless commercial events.
Re: (Score:2)
This may sound lame in 2024, but it's not too late to start at least with a small group of friends. No really. Back in the day what started as rolling a network cable between my house and the neighbour's ended up growing and growing to the point where we were tripping circuit breakers and moving from one small hall, to a larger hall, to a school, to a massive gym just to support what things were growing into. Those 100+ computer events (which we hosted) were fun, but 99% of the magic is being with a group o
Re: I was a bit late, but I miss it (Score:2)
Do any modern games support running on a LAN?
Re: (Score:2)
Officially, many don't. They might prioritize matchmaking two or more people from the same public IP, but unless they have some sort of lobby that can be locked to "invite only" / "friends only", it's a game of Russian Roulette as to whether or not you'll get paired up with the people physically around you.
Unofficially, practically all of them do. As long as you can control the matchmaking requests and limit them to the LAN. Certain emulators support such methods
Re: I was a bit late, but I miss it (Score:2)
I still play games with friends, but it's usually online, with voice chat, or when we do it in person, we simply get a switch and duck it out on mario kart or smash for the evening.
It's different, but still fun, so it's fine.
So true... (Score:1)
Many of the little shits you encounter in online games today wouldn't have been tolerated during the LAN party era.
you can "only"? (Score:2)
Oh but it was SO much better. Taunts are so much more effective when they're live and in person. And we used to trash talk the piss out of each other as we played - this house was fully networked and we had a good ten machines running at a time. And you had the added bonus of being able to hear other people's
Re: (Score:2)
The taunts are different, though. There are so many things said online that would rightfully earn you a fist to the face if said in real life, and so you never say it in real life.
Sure you'll mock and tease and ridicule at a LAN party, but there are lines that do not get crossed because ... well, you're going to get yourself beaten to a pulp if you cross them.
I remember lan parties... (Score:2)
I also remember that it's a real pain to fit a desktop PC (with CRT monitor) into a Nissan 350z...
Re: (Score:2)
Wait what! The 350Z came out in 2003, why did you still lug around that brick ;-)
I remember one guy who showed up at our event dragging a 21" Sony Trinitron out of his truck with great difficulty. Going back to pick up a full tower case with great difficulty, and then proceeding to go pickup his bag with the keyboard and mouse, light as a feather ... and hurting his back in the process. XD He was so annoyed.
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly you never had the experience of being a broke uni student...
These were great, until... (Score:4, Interesting)
EverCrack came out. I lost an entire huge group of friends to that game. It just gobbled them up and never let them go. Then some of them passed away, further cementing the fun was over.
I will forever hate that game and games like it. It prayed on their addictions, ruining their lives and friendships.
Re: These were great, until... (Score:2)
I only lost one friend to EverQuest, but I lost an entire social network of a dozen people to World of Warcraft.
I even played WoW for a couple years cause I had a buddy paying my subscription. But eventually he didn't want to pay, and I had no intention of paying for a game over and over again. Especially one so lame as WoW.
Tha 80-90s was amazing (Score:2)
And computer clubs was a thing.
I still miss the days when every age group who got their first home computer came to meet up once a week in my city back then.
We often didn't have much software, and what we have we shared, and we often coded stuff ourselves, I remember fondly when I got
my first commodore 64 and every guest would gratefully play my weird mix of Arcade shoot-em-up I had coded in Machine-Language/Assemby code.
My first Lan party was awesome, I remember 2509+ people with kids dragging along mum an
Re: (Score:1)
We totally need that again.
We're still around, and there are still regular events multiple times a year. Google some of the big events from the early 2000s, and you may be surprised at how many LAN events are still alive and doing well.
Good times indeed (Score:2)
When taking a class in something at a military contractor's facility, we realized that we could play Quake over the LAN in our classroom. Pure awesomeness!
Our hearts sunk into our boots when the instructors called us up front and showed us the screenshots of what we were doing. Fortunately, they were kind-hearted civilians and just told us to knock it off.
No Ebook (Score:1)
Doom room and conventions (Score:2)
I remember the anime cons back than featuring a "Doom Room", which was usually just a single PC or a couple PCs networked and playing Doom over IPX.
I was living large when I showed up with my 486 laptop and ugly 3com dongle PCMCIA ethernet adapter to play.
Call Center LAN Parties (Score:2)
Christmas DOOM (Score:2)
A group of friends developed the tradition of playing DOOM at Christmas. One year I was volunteered to go and fetch some computers. After loading an assortment of 486 and pentium machines into may crappy old car, I wondered whether my insurance would cover the cost if all was lost in a crash - the PCs were worth way more than the car.
But the car did not crash, and many happy hours of DOOM were played.
Damn... those were the days.
How the hell did I get so old?
Online Play killed all the fun (Score:1)
Remembering the "Good 'ole Days" (Score:2)
It was '98 and being on good terms with the Computer Science Department in general, and being a Senior, I was able to get the job of helping to install and later administrate their new Graphics Lab. Twenty plus Gateway 2000 desktops, Pentium II (i think) processors clocking around 400 MHz, I can't remember exactly how much RAM they had but it was a lot for the day, with 3dfx Voodoo II video cards, and 17" Trinitron flat-screen CRTs running 1024 x 768 @ 60 Hz.
After installing their rendering software, whic
As the organizer of three such annual events (Score:1)
I hosted a handful (Score:2)
I hosted a handful of LAN parties with my friends in high school. We all have some good memories and pictures. My favorite story is the one time I planned a LAN but my parents wouldn't allow it. We completely cleaned and re-organized the attic and quietly snuck our battlestations in. Naturally, we called this event "LAN Frank" since we were hiding from the nazis.