The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

This really doesn't capture the core element of early 2000s LAN parties. You spent hours debugging basic networking issues. There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine. Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives. Passing around CDs to install games and the crack for it, since no game was ever owned by all.

Fun fact: you could make a Starcraft license key on the fly by randomly entering numbers and then altering the last digit until it worked. It wouldn't get you on Battle.net but it could get you to IPX.

God do I miss those days sometimes.

> The defining element of a LAN party, however, is the social factor. Playing a game with others in the same physical space, sometimes huddled side-by-side on the same large table, is an intimate affair. Cries of joy and frustration fill the air.

That's really the major thing that made LAN parties so special. Being in the same room is so, so different than online gaming together and hanging out on discord.

It also forces you to compromise when choosing games and maps, because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people. You end up playing games you're not as familiar with (and not as dominant in), so your friends will play your game with you later. This brings you into situations, where the person next to you frantically gives you the crash course in rush build orders while building their own base, making the payoff so much better when it actually works out.

LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :)

I am moderately obsessed with LAN parties, so I built a file sharing tool for LAN parties specifically, if you want to check it out https://justinbecker.dev/blog/2026/05/16/why-i-built-lanbuck...

I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3

It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experience possible for participants :3

[1]: https://tg.no (no English site exists unfortunately)

As kids me and my friends used to muse over the fact that growing old, eventually moving into a care home would be awesome. Pension, you say? Well, what's that if not an unending LAN party!

It turns out reality is different - the older I get, the less interested I have in computer games. It feels like I've seen it all at this point, and I'd rather see grass twice than a virtual anything.

When me, and my generation, are old enough where people start getting shipped into care homes, I suspect there won't be any interest at all, save perhaps a nostalgia trip every now and again.

Lan? Still awesome.

For my kids' parties I have 3x OG xboxes. Each has 4 controllers. Plug them into a router.

12 player lan. Halo, Nascar, (6 player) crimson skies, mechassult.

https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/wiki/Xbox sort by per console and total players.

I promise they have vastly more fun all being in the same room playing each other all at once than anything with modern graphics.

Our high school computer science team did a StarCraft LAN party on a flight coming back from a coding competition. We felt like the coolest kids in the world when we did that.

My core memory of LAN parties was the one I organized at my university and there was so much power draw it threw the breaker for the entire student lounge building.

Had to run a massive extension cord across to the next building to spread it out a little so we wouldn’t keep tripping it.

The last enjoyable LAN party I went to took place in the summer of 2004.

The next year, most of the guys that would frequent these parties were completely engrossed in World of Warcraft. They just weren't interested in playing any LAN games, or any of the socialization. Many of them were in WoW guilds with people that lived in completely different time zones, so they weren't even there when the few of us others tried to play something.

At least to me, that was a watershed moment. To me the magic was gone, and I more or less lost interest in multiplayer gaming for years.

To me LAN wasn't just about gaming, but also shooting the breeze, talk abut techy or gaming stuff. When two thirds of the people were glued to their screens 24/7 grinding WoW, a lot of that died.

EDIT: Not saying that WoW single handedly killed LAN, but I feel like it was final nail in the coffin.

I was reminiscing with some mates about LAN parties when we were younger — pushing mattresses against the wall to make room for folding tables so you could pack 20 people into a house. Cat5 running from daisy-chained switches (since this was pre-WiFi). Hunking over large beige monitors. Slamming network shares as everyone tried to download the same game ISO.

Then we realised we're the adults now, we can do what we want. So about once or twice a year, we'll block out a weekend and do an old-school LAN. Maybe just 4-5 of us. Order in nice take-away, drink nice whiskey, try and squeaze in as much game time as possible. Its harder now that we have kids, but worth it! Hardware is different, games are different, but still the same experience!

This is still very much alive in the fighting game scene. At least in the US, every major city has at least one local running a bracket and casual sets regularly. This has many of them, not all: https://sk-tekken.com/tracker

I'd say the primary benefit of LAN parties now is how capable "old" hardware is. I have several laptops I configure with Linux and several games and environments loaded up. Smoke test the whole thing before anybody gets here. This year we played UT2004 with custom maps and characters. That game ran flawlessly on a 10 year old laptop with no dGPU. Emulation as well, but I actually still have most of those systems still.

My teenage son has held multiple LAN parties this past year at our house. They are far from dead, just maybe not quite as widespread as they used to be when I was his age.

Me and some other friends used laptops (think they were IBM ThinkPads), PCMCIA Ethernet adapters (maybe from Xircom?) and thin Ethernet (coax) to play multiplayer DOOM on a Reno Air or AA flight from San Jose to Austin once. I think we were using IPX for networking and we just strung coax between the seats.

Needless to say this was before 9/11 and the flight attendants took it in their stride.

Studios have "forgotten" even more than players. My friends and I regularly have Age of Empires 2 LAN parties, and you can't even connect to each other without an internet connection and steam or Xbox account.

It feels a bit dystopian considering that 25 years ago the very same game let me pop the CD out and put it in another computer to set up a LAN.

I think LAN parties made sense in a context where internet speeds weren't what they are today, where pirated software and games were distributed in these environments, and where you could get together in groups to play CS, Starcraft, or Age of Empires. But nowadays, with internet access and resources so widespread, and peer-to-peer networks offering countless more than eMule, they've lost their original purpose. Perhaps a pivotal shift for these events is needed, focusing more on building social networks than on the simple idea of eating pizza and sleeping on inflatable mattresses on the floor.

The article opens by saying LAN's chief advantage was "nearly eliminating latency" and closes by saying revival is as easy as sharing your Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi and a wired switch are not the same thing. The one thing that made LAN parties technically distinctive is the one thing the revival pitch quietly removes.

"Who's that LAN guy and why is he throwing so many parties?" was running joke in our group of friends back in the days ...

For those in Australia, there are regular LAN parties held in most cities still: https://dadlan.au/ (held monthly) and https://www.thebiglan.com/ (~5 a year).

We always hold one at $WORK at the end of the year. I am not a fan of racing nor CS (prefer UT) so I went and made a retrogaming corner last year.

The year before that the Among Us was the highlight. I landed on imposter so many times they started ejecting me habitually. :-D

I think this year I'll finally play some AoE2 with my wife. We're going to Wololo the shit out of my colleagues. Well, mostly her. I'll just send her some tribute I guess.

My own efforts in this area amount to creating the game, Space Nerds in Space[1], which is a LAN game in which everyone gathers in a room with their computers, and each computer acts as one of the stations on the bridge of a starship: navigation, weapons, science, comms, engineering, damage control, etc. Multi-bridge is supported as well, so if you can overcome the insurmountable task of gathering enough people together, you can indulge in that luxury. This is in the same genre as such games as Artemis: spaceship bridge simulator and Empty Epsilon, but with the additional hurdle that it's linux only. Good luck mustering enough spacenerds. If there are missing features, well, it's open source, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.

[1] https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space

I used to get invited just to debug networking issues which seems to have foreshadowed much of my career.

Someone posted these photos a while back which seem to capture the spirit: https://issung.com/posts/lanphotosarchive/

The hardware people would bring was amazing.

"Here's a 24-port BaseT100 hub" "I built my computer in this flight case, may I place it atop your tower?" "The network card in my PC has an integrated switch, so we can easily reach the other end of that table"

We did the LAN party for a while then converted it to magic the gathering game nights because we could sit around the table, see and talk to each other instead of through the screen.

Both were fun. The magic the gathering was akin to a guys poker night.

Quake Arena and LAN parties during college created some of the best memories I have related to computer games.

I think lan parties are set for resurgence since we're almost at the point where a small handheld can run almost any game. What killed lan parties wasn't the internets. It's having to schlep a CRT to my friend's house.

In wired LAN mode you can play Mario Kart 8 deluxe with up to 12 players, or Mario Kart World with up to 24 players.

(picture of original/SNES Mario Kart reminded me of this; note you can also play it on the Switch)

Attended Dreamhack in the late 90s. Fun times! I was always AMAZED by the demoscene.

They are far from dead, just less popular. We would host small gatherings regularly when we were young (mid 30s now). Things died down a bit when the internet hit and we would stay up all night at home playing CS 1.6 looking for 5on5 server on in quakenet IRC (good old times).

I resparked this, when I hosted this for my best friends wedding as a best man's gift for him. Was the same fun as when we were young. We kept going and started again visting https://www.northcon.de/ which is once per year in Germany. Many recommend to visit https://www.caggtus.de/ but we yet have to make this one happen.

One thing got harder though: aligning everyone's schedule. Life is happening, and this is fine. Wonder how long we can make it to NorthCon :)

I was lucky enough to have one 3months ago :)

LAN parties?! Pfff, what we would’ve given for a LAN. When I were a lad we made do with a badly soldered RS232 cable and a copy of DOOM. The shareware WAD at that.

It barely worked but we were ‘appy!

…after Cleese et al.

Don't forget bawls water and imported caffeine packs.

Not forgotten… we just all got too busy :(

nice

We really need a tool to flag and remove AI slop like this.