[HN Gopher] Memories from old LAN parties
___________________________________________________________________
Memories from old LAN parties
Author : ecliptik
Score : 413 points
Date : 2023-09-09 23:54 UTC (23 hours ago)
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| cvccvroomvroom wrote:
| CounterStrike beta, a Half-Life mod.
|
| Quake 2 & 3.
| Sirikon wrote:
| Some personal memories:
|
| 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.
| qup wrote:
| 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.
|
| Anyway, we played a lot of Warcraft 3.
| eterm wrote:
| The note about running SC2 over a file share reminds me of my own
| experience:
|
| In my first professional job I realised their overnight job runs
| of a custom mission critical optimisation software was actually a
| VBA program run in MA Access and was also being run over the
| network share. The databases themselves were small, maybe dozens
| of MB but not bigger, but the way Access worked is that it would
| constantly re-read the data over the slow network share.
|
| It was also just generally really flaky and would often run into
| data quality issues. So you'd cue up the routine and half way
| through it would crash it require restarting everything from
| scratch. A lot of cursing was heard* around 9am when people
| started work and found their overnight job had failed.
|
| All the developers in the company were distracted trying to
| develop the "proper" replacement, coded in a "real" language (C#
| iirc) and server based, but the impression I got was it was stuck
| in development hell, with all the features anyone wanted always
| being pushed out to "phase 2", while delivery of "phase 1" was
| nevertheless always slipping futher away any time anyone asked.
| As a result the old tools were just left to us "analysts" to use
| without any maintenance (and most these tools had organically
| grown out of the analyst team's efforts with spreadsheets rather
| than being developed by the devs anyway).
|
| So I had a poke around and taught myself enough VBA to do some
| "optimisations", the biggest of which was to simply copy the data
| locally before executing all the scripts.
|
| I also put in an "integrity checker" which checked for common
| data errors pre-launch.
|
| The runtime went from overnight to ~10 minutes, with a ~30 second
| data check you could run first. I looked like an absolute genius.
|
| It eventually dawned on me how disfunctional everything was and I
| stopped turning up to work, but the impact of those first few
| weeks of work definitely let me coast the next couple of years.
|
| * This detail is an embellishment, the company was oddly strict
| about this kind of thing. They also still required jacket and tie
| in their dress code.
| c0l0 wrote:
| Back in the early- to mid-2000s, I used to frequent a yearly
| recurring LAN party ("Hobslan") for up to some 100 people hosted
| in Germany, about 1300km away from my home. Of course, my midi
| tower PC that was specifically geared towards attending LAN
| parties was riding with me on the train(s) going there, and after
| a refreshing 14 to 18h trip (depending on the year's train
| schedule and my monitor-and-ride-providing German buddy (thanks,
| Han! :)) giving me the last-200-mile lift to the proper place),
| it arrived with me in all its glory: A Pentium 4 "Northwood"
| 2.6GHz (overclocked to 3.5GHz) on an ABIT AB-AI7 motherboard, a
| Geforce 4 4200 Ti AGP-based GPU with 64MB of VRAM, 512MB of dual-
| channel DDR-SDRAM at a frequency I cannot remember, and, of
| course, my trusty 160GB RAID0(!) SATA HDD array to store all the
| things you could leech on the sweet, sweet Fast Ethernet
| (100Mbps) fully-switched LAN that I was going to plug this thing
| into! The little beast had Gentoo Linux installed, and its
| hardware was perfectly balanced to provide that highly sought-
| after stable 125fps (where a certain physics bug in the game
| engine allowed for maximum jumping distance) under all possible
| conditions in Quake ]|[ Arena ;)
|
| The events were a blast, and even the tournaments I did majorly
| suck at (playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo on an original
| SNES, hooked up to a projector that illuminated pretty much all
| of one of the walls of the school gym that the event took place
| in, for example) are forever etched into my memory.
|
| One year, the network was plagued by the infamous W32.Blaster
| worm, and most of the Windows-based machines the local admins had
| provided fell to it in short order. People were starting to get
| desperate - most of their gameservers and DC++ hubs AWOL or even
| FUBAR, and many were going through the motions of redoing the
| Windows XP setup left an right, only to see their machines
| becoming infected again on the first network-enabled boot-up. It
| was mayhem, and a weekend of pure Quake awesomeness was
| threatened to be reduced to a week of reciting FCKGW-... from
| (muscle) memory ad nauseam. Luckily, my Gentoo machine was
| invulnerable to that particular problem, and my little gaming
| beast ended up on a separate network segment for "vetted",
| provden-clean Windows machines only, providing FTP and several
| Quake ][ and Quake ]|[ game servers at the same time for those
| who HAD machines that still worked, or were brought back from the
| dead. I even saved a relevant screenshot from back then as a
| cherished digital artifact: https://coloss.us.to/blaster.jpg
|
| Makes me smile whenever I happen to revisit it :)
| [deleted]
| drzel wrote:
| Great moments in this vid. Captures the scene in Australia in
| 2003. Focussed on Team Fortress.
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ESzTCRsz7vY
|
| Many of the people captured in this video still play today and
| have enduring friendships.
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| Me and some friends host a pretty weird event, the name of which
| loosely translates to "Field Lan". We set up tents, generators
| and an antenna in the middle of a field in Estonia and compete in
| various games for 72 hours straight on an open field in fresh
| air. We sleep in tents. Its a private event once a year, but we
| have 30 - 50 people there every year. Next year is the 10th year
| we do this.
| swah wrote:
| So thats still a local network or just normal internet?
| asadm wrote:
| That sounds amazing!
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| It sure is.
| Rnonymous wrote:
| Sounds great! I do a small lan weekend with friends, around 15
| ppl, about once a year.
|
| But we struggle finding suitable games that are LAN based, and
| end up playing CS:GO. Would love some more LAN games, any tips?
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| Sure thing. So a few notes, you can host CS:GO and Dota 2
| games on lan. You do have to be logged in to steam and have a
| network connection, but the games themselves can be played on
| lan, so the outbound connection doesn't have to be fast. As
| for some other games, I highly recommend a cracked version of
| the original WC3:FT, Starcraft, Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam.
| Some more insane people, start up a 3-day game of
| Civilization or Heroes of Might and Magic 3. If you have
| enough people, I also recommend Enemy Territory (2003
| version) with some mods, its awesome. But you need at least
| 20 people for this. Just for laughs, if we end up with a tie,
| our tiebreaker is Liero behind a single keyboard.
|
| Edit: Oh, forgot about Age of Empires 2, Rise of Nations. But
| if you want a good Lan-only experience you kind of have to
| use cracked versions of old games. I make up for this morally
| by buying a newer version if there is one even available,
| then use a cracked old version for playing.
| Rnonymous wrote:
| !!Liero!! Wow haven't played that in a good 15 years, i
| used to dream of gauss gun trajectories.
| paint wrote:
| Blobby Volley is the only true tiebreaker! (Also good for
| passing time while games were installing from disc)
| tinco wrote:
| The most well known (and I think long lived) LAN in The
| Netherlands is Campzone, where the LAN is on a camping and
| people being their tents and caravans as well as their PC's in
| the middle of the summer. I always wanted to go as a kid, but
| could never make it work with my parents. I bet there's
| multiple people here who are gonna comment how cool it was and
| possibly still is.
|
| edit: Just checked their website and it looks like they tried
| to reboot it after COVID but the tickets got too expensive and
| they couldn't get enough people.
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| It's a pretty fun read on Wikipedia. Honestly I had no idea,
| there were other people doing something similar. Well,
| somewhat similar. We take a 2 hour break and shut down the
| computers in case a thunderstorm is passing overhead :D.
| ehnto wrote:
| I lived in a tiny rural Australian town during this era, still at
| school. We stole a bunch of network cable from our computer lab
| and had 2-5 person LAN sleepovers.
|
| I got way into case modding, and daydreamed of the day I moved to
| the big city and could hit the massive LAN parties with my fellow
| nerds. I even built specific smalk and robust PC for it.
|
| But by the time I made it to the city, broadband was a thing and
| our city is also pretty small, so the one big LAN event had
| already stopped.
|
| Still, I think we captures the spirit of it all in our pokey town
| the best we could.
| nntwozz wrote:
| There's a new book coming called LAN Party, funded and in
| production:
|
| A loving photographic celebration of the energy-drink-fuelled,
| furniture-rearranging, multiplayer gaming trend and its nocturnal
| participants
|
| https://vol.co/product/lan-party/
| colordrops wrote:
| installing Back Orifice on people's computers so you could open
| and close their CD drives remotely...
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| ctippett wrote:
| I remember being terrified of applying my aftermarket Thermaltake
| cooler on my Athlon XP, so I waited until I went to a local LAN
| so I could get someone more experienced than me to install it.
|
| To this day I still get anxious applying CPU coolers, even though
| they're a lot easier to install. Thanks anonymous person from
| Auckland's LAN at Upper Harbour stadium (I can't remember the
| name of the event).
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Yeah those original Athlon era CPUs with exposed dies were
| nerve wracking to install coolers on. I read the manuals and
| was very careful, and managed to get it right the first time,
| and all the other times.
| Yournothed wrote:
| > There were websites which aggregated downloads of keygens for
| various games. These worked more often than you would expect.
|
| What did I expect? The "warez = trojan" thing is mainly corporate
| propaganda. Commercial products are just as likely to contain
| malware.
|
| > Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive
| for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted for copy
| protection, or rip a CD for that purpose. This only became
| popular once hard drives became big enough for people to spend
| many gigabytes imaging their CDs.
|
| Actually, it was Daemon Tools :^)
| SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote:
| > What did I expect? The "warez = trojan" thing is mainly
| corporate propaganda. Commercial products are just as likely to
| contain malware.
|
| Except that with warez you can get malwares from both the
| original program AND the crack itself.
| bloodfire wrote:
| Where was those LAN Party he's talking about? Was it in the US?
| France?
| thefz wrote:
| > Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive
| for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted
|
| Wasn't that Virtual Clone drive? As far as I remember Alcohol was
| for burning ISOs.
| pluc wrote:
| I think Daemon-Tools is still around
| bombcar wrote:
| If I remember correctly you had to rip the ISO with one program
| and load it with another. CloneCD was involved.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Virtual CloneDrive is extremely under-appreciated both then and
| now. Most retro hobbyists use an ancient version of DaemonTools
| instead
| thefz wrote:
| Daemon tools, right! Not VCD
| drsopp wrote:
| LAN? In the Amiga days we occasionally had nullmodem cables
| between two computers, often for playing Stunt Car Racer.
| I_am_uncreative wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Reminds me of the year LANs died, for my circle at least. One
| year we were lugging equipment for PC or Xbox LAN parties, the
| next it was hardly anyone showing up. Halo 2 had come out,
| GameSpy and other services had traction, so folks just got their
| fix online. Even when there was online voice chat it wasn't the
| same.
| [deleted]
| thesnide wrote:
| I remember thinking this TCP/IP will never work out, too complex.
|
| Whereas IPX works just perfectly.
|
| DHCP was a god send that proved me wrong. Well, until someone,
| somewhere forgot to disable its own server...
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Ipx itself worked but in the same era we had bus topology and
| boy was that a pain.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I remember this too. IPX just worked for LAN games. Anything
| else never worked right.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| This."Go to network adapter and delete the shite called
| TCP/IP", nobody raised an eyebrow and just did it
| beardedwizard wrote:
| "I've got you covered like a jimmy hat" q2 3wave ctf lan party
| quotes from OKC lan party which we drove to from Texas.
|
| If you don't know, the recent q2 remaster includes ctf and people
| are playing!
| jl6 wrote:
| I went to LAN party where everyone had lugged their CRTs, except
| one kid who had a 15" TFT LCD screen, which were super rare and
| expensive at the time. It had a huge crack right down the center,
| but was still just about usable. I asked him how that happened.
| He said he was playing online (Counterstrike I think?) and lost a
| match, causing him to punch the screen in frustration.
|
| That screen must have cost >$1000 at the time.
|
| Sure enough, the guy was a tool - the kind of gamer that gloats
| over every win and questions the opponent's sexuality after every
| loss. And he was every bit as toxic right there in the room with
| us.
|
| The experience completely put me off online versus-stranger
| gaming forever, and in retrospect I'm very grateful to him for
| this.
| tjoff wrote:
| Even better, bad ghosting and maybe bad delay made them
| terrible for gaming. Took quite a while before LCDs were viable
| for anything but office-work.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Ah XxX_420_Slayer69_420_XxX from Xbox Live out in the wild
| before moving online.
| k__ wrote:
| Haha, I had a 17" TFT in 2000.
|
| Was at a 600 people LAN and only one other dude had one.
| stavros wrote:
| Did it have a huge crack down the center?
| k__ wrote:
| Haha, no.
|
| It didn't have any issues ever.
|
| In fact, I found another one (same model) 10 years later on
| the streets and used the two for a ther 2 years, until I
| bought two 27" displays when I finally got a real job.
|
| Those things were build for eternity.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Kudos! You saved yourself from a ton of nonsense. I myself had
| a similar reaction when at my last LAN party (age 18) i got
| motion sick and also caught a flue. It stopped me from playing
| video games for 15 years. Lucky me.
| tanepiper wrote:
| * Packing a whole PC and CRT monitor into a suitcase * Setting up
| DC++ and getting all the latest warez (and discovering there's
| always someone with the worlds largest hentai collection) *
| Counter-Strike
| efxhoy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That is really cool.
| jclulow wrote:
| 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?
| nottheengineer wrote:
| Microsoft does something cool for once and it's an accident?
| wielebny wrote:
| 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.
| mjevans wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I was hoping someone here knew how it actually worked.
| mesh wrote:
| So many found memories of Red Alert 2 and Quake 2 playing at lan
| parties in the 90s.
|
| I was lucky enough in the early 2000's where I could use my love
| of video games and lan parties as part of my job. I was
| responsible for the Flash community at Macromedia, and we would
| set up 4 xboxes with split screen for 8 player Halo 2 and 3
| tournaments in conference rooms (which has multiple plasma
| screens already set up).
|
| I quickly realized that we could use this to make friends in the
| broader community, so we bought a bunch of LCD monitors and
| pelican cases, and began to take our setup on the road to Flash
| conferences. During the day we would hang out at the conference,
| learn new programing / visual techniques and generally see super
| cool Flash stuff, and at night we would invite everyone over to
| our hotel room and then play Halo all night. We made so many
| friends and close contacts in the community through this, and it
| really help us meet a lot of people, and build strong, personal
| relationships.
|
| I remember we were on a 6 week bus tour in North America doing
| events for Adobe AIR, and making a detour to NYC for the Halo 3
| launch at at Best Buy. We then played on the bus all night long.
|
| Here is a clip of me walking to the launch, so happy and singing
| about it being my Halo birthday (whatever that means!).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVQKgui28O8
|
| So many good times.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Loved Macromedia Freehand and Dreamweaver which I used to
| publish my the first website I made for someone via FTP!
|
| My first LAN gaming experience was playing Doom 2 with friends
| in a computer class with a kind teacher at a school in Sao
| Paulo, Brazil.
|
| Good times!
| cvccvroomvroom wrote:
| Good times. 768k SDSL from Verio/NTT for $70/month with 8 ms to
| Stanford from way away in Davis.
|
| Linux PC as a router was the cheaper, more flexible thing to
| do.
| prox wrote:
| I miss Macromedia, Adobe is just a corporate grey blob.
| Macromedia had character and good products.
| 0dayz wrote:
| And created tech that blew anything else out of the water
| d3vmax wrote:
| They will do the same to Figma.
| mobilio wrote:
| Still miss Fireworks
| raincole wrote:
| I remember I played a fighting game (a local one without
| English version) at LAN parties. It was very fun. My friends
| were all about the same skill level so fights were even.
|
| Later on, there was a tool enabling "virtual LAN" and you can
| play against players online, over the internet.
|
| And random people beat the shit out of me. Then I just realized
| that I actually knew like 10% of the game machanism even after
| hundreds of LAN matches. That was where I stopped playing.
| d3vmax wrote:
| Macromedia, Halo 2 / CE split screen parties. Peak America!
| Miss the time I had with my friends playing split screen.
| eru wrote:
| When did you sleep?
| mike_hock wrote:
| When what?
| thesnide wrote:
| Flash. Had a love/hate relationship with it.
|
| Mostly because it was already awesome for the time, so the
| quirks were rather surfacing.
|
| Very much like an "Uncanny Valley".
|
| And I really think that it was the "steam revolution" turning
| point of indie gamedev. So I thank everyone that was part of
| it.
| xtracto wrote:
| >There were websites which aggregated downloads of keygens for
| various games. These worked more often than you would expect.
|
| Reminds me of serials.ws . It was pretty good at the time.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| 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.
| thesnide wrote:
| A 90s retroLAN would be great...
|
| Playing 90s games, that are rather cheap nowadays.
| nvy wrote:
| Probably one of the more viable options because just about
| anything worth playing in the last 10+ years doesn't have LAN
| support.
| eru wrote:
| Isn't it mostly the AAA games that lack LAN support? I
| wouldn't call them the only things worth playing, just the
| opposite.
|
| 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.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Just about anything worth playing was made 10+ years ago.
| Tomte wrote:
| 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".
| hypercube33 wrote:
| 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.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| 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.
| mvkel wrote:
| Totally. Getting everything to work was so rewarding. The
| actual playing of the games was icing on the cake
| Tomte wrote:
| Also the first day was mostly making sure the decentralized
| backups of MP3s and funny videos were replicated to all
| machines.
| luzer7 wrote:
| 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.
| vocatus_gate wrote:
| 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.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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.
| thesnide wrote:
| Bonus points to have those used as the backbone as they are
| looking very entreprise grade...
| smabie wrote:
| I think the key component is you being a teenager
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)
| amatecha wrote:
| 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!!
| lanewinfield wrote:
| Ah, the smell of BAWLS Guarana flowing and the music of CD
| Keygens[1] filling the air...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| So much pr0n
| ErneX wrote:
| Memories of sleeping on floors! But oh those were fun weekends.
| gehen88 wrote:
| LAN parties got me into casemodding. I was always more interested
| in looking cool (to this particular crowd) than actually playing
| games [1]. I always picked a seat at the end of a row, close to
| the catering so people would come over to take a look. This
| quickly got out of hand with sponsors (Cooler Master,
| Silverstone, among others) and dragging my builds to casemodding
| contests and trade shows (CEBIT Hannover). I was still in high
| school. Good times.
|
| [1] Serious Sam was my favorite though.
| iamthepieman wrote:
| Used to organize LAN parties at my college as a fundraiser for
| the newly minutes ACM chapter I helped run. Learned more from
| running the LANs than I did from my networking, leadership and
| general computing classes.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Probably the one positive experience I had at uni before dropping
| out!
| k__ wrote:
| Irrespectively of the number of participants, there will only be
| a maximum of 1 terminators available for the BNC network.
|
| It will take years until you can use Ethernet at a LAN party,
| because of the one poor guy who can't afford to upgrade from BNC.
|
| There is always that one pr0n addict who watches it the whole
| weekend.
|
| Everyone says they won't sleep the entire weekend, but at the
| first night all but one person are sound asleep.
|
| At private LAN parties, there is only one person who has basic
| understanding of networking; it's never the person with the best
| PC, albeit the rich dude will talk like he knows more than the
| poor ones.
| Propelloni wrote:
| > Irrespectively of the number of participants, there will only
| be a maximum of 1 terminators available for the BNC network.
|
| Haha, so true! It reminds me of a LAN party we had at a
| friend's house. We had a bag of spare parts but, of course, the
| guy bringing the bag was late. This was around 1992 or so, thus
| before mobile phones and nobody knew anything. Our host (the
| pr0n guy, but instead of watching porn he liked to put short
| porn mpgs into Windows autostart of unattended PCs) in
| desperation soldered a make-shift terminator from parts of his
| dad's model railroad. I know he used a t-junction, but I don't
| know how he did it. Took him half an hour and it worked good
| enough to set up the network (Personal Netware at the time)
| before the guy with the bag of parts showed up. Quite a feat,
| and good thing we weren't so much into drinking at this point
| of time. Later we established the rule that to participate you
| have to bring one terminator and one t-junction, that fixed
| that.
| k__ wrote:
| haha, nice!
|
| Everyone always had one T-junction and one cable, but somehow
| terminators were always missing...
| Propelloni wrote:
| Yeah, at one time we had so many t-junctions that we build
| a 1m tall robot out of them. That was the time where
| whatever bag you opened you would find a t-junction quad
| assembly.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| > The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600.
| The rich kids had a 9800
|
| Oh man. I had the 9800XT with aftermarket Zalman cooling. I
| didn't know what attention was before I went to a lan with that
| build. Got called the coolest things and the worst things
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Unreal Tournament 99, 2004. Counter Strike. Innumerable MMORPGs.
| Emulators with netplay. Friends bringing terabytes of data to
| share.
|
| I miss it.
| swah wrote:
| Never had this experience - would like to have it as a 40 yr old
| but I guess shooting real guns is also fun and more accepted by
| normies..
| asadm wrote:
| Are there any LAN parties happening these days on regular basis?
| How does one become part of that group?
| mwest wrote:
| Insomnia Festival is the largest of these in the UK I believe.
| In fact, i71 is going on right now. :-)
|
| https://www.insomniagamingfestival.com/lan
|
| Still manages to capture some of that "old school" LAN feel if
| you bring your own PC.
| TreeInBuxton wrote:
| There is also Insomnia's smaller sibling LAN, "StratLAN" -
| captures the old school small LAN feeling a lot more!
| enra wrote:
| 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
| dtjohnnymonkey wrote:
| I've never been to a legit LAN party.
|
| I started out (ca 1995) in "network" gaming playing DOOM (the
| shareware copy, I think we could only play 3 levels). My buddies
| would come over after school. We'd hook up my dad's work laptop
| and our home computer with a parallel cable and play 2-player (2
| kids playing and 5-10 other kids watching along).
|
| I think next came Command & Conquer, which we played over IPX/SPX
| also, but I believe by that time I'd set up a coaxial network,
| where it would just randomly stop working every few months. I'd
| replace the BNC terminators and it was good to go again.
|
| Next, a lot of "C&C: Red Alert" over direct modem connection (2
| player).
|
| Finally, I got ethernet on my PC. It was a game changer, since it
| was much more common for PCs to have ethernet than coaxial
| networking. We'd lug our PCs and monitors (think 15" CRT
| monitors, Sony Trinitrons for the lucky ones) to each other's
| houses for Starcraft. Running ethernet wires from various rooms
| to the Ethernet hub (not switch, those were too expensive).
|
| I won't miss carrying those huge things around just to play
| multiplayer.
| ohadpr wrote:
| Token ring coax cabling with a terminator at the end
|
| DOS, Windows
|
| Quake 3 arena, Descent, Warcraft 2, Unreal Tournament
|
| 94-98
| jholman wrote:
| Threewave CTF for Quake 1.
|
| I can still remember Marek Dubcek (I'm probably spelling his
| name wrong) bragging about his performance at Duke3d or Q1, and
| thinking "fuck him, he's too good-looking to be better than me
| at a video game", and learning to use mouselook back when you
| had to handwrite your own config file to use mouselook without
| holding down Shift.
|
| I took the WAD files for Q1 apart, ripped out all the content
| for the monster AI and the campaign levels and stuff, so that I
| could make a zip that fit on 4 1.44 floppies, carry it in my
| pocket, install it on demand on computers on the Cap labs (I
| wasn't larcenous/brave enough to compromise the network share
| like some other people).
|
| (PS: if anyone recognizes me from that much information, get in
| touch)
| amatecha wrote:
| oh heck yeah, I actually had my own web hosting in those days
| and kept a zip file of a complete quake 1 install so I could
| run the game on any machine that had net access :) fun
| times!!
| pluc wrote:
| 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.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| net send
| scubbo wrote:
| > 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)
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| > You ever played Quake with a bunch of dudes on speed?
|
| I don't think I've ever played Quake _without_ a bunch of dudes
| on speed.
| jholman wrote:
| > It was great when LCDs came about.
|
| 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!
| CableNinja wrote:
| I found these Coolermaster straps that enabled you to carry
| your CRT and tower with a handle. SO SO SO useful for lan
| parties.
| pluc wrote:
| These case straps were common too!:
| https://imgur.com/j41ZhIn
| johnbellone wrote:
| Pretty sure I still got that.
| 3y350n1y wrote:
| 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 :')
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The relatively poor man's version: the indestructable
| yellow or blue IKEA bag
|
| 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)
| raffraffraff wrote:
| We didn't have IKEA in Ireland until 2007 (and that was
| Belfast, I didn't have one near me for another 2
| years)... LONG after my LAN days were done.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Ireland: land of the suspiciously (and accidentally)
| swole LAN partiers
| thesnide wrote:
| Ah... the dilemma of which CRT to bring?
|
| - 'portable' old 14" for safety and ease of transport
|
| - 'shiny' new 19" for showoff and ease of gaming
| jon-wood wrote:
| 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.
| mvkel wrote:
| net send! I once accidentally messaged every computer in my
| high school "fck y" with that powerful little tool.
| totallywrong wrote:
| > 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.
| swah wrote:
| Same. I think it was the most impressive thing I did at
| school. I guess someone somewhere still uses it...
| http://winpopup-lan-messenger.com/
| zerbinxx wrote:
| Love the story. Would also love the story of how normally non-
| druggie nerds get amphetamnines in the pre-adderal era.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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
| kalleboo wrote:
| 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!
| eru wrote:
| > 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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?
| clankyclanker wrote:
| 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.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Well, that makes a lot of sense.
| thesnide wrote:
| that's actually what i use to take naps wihtout alarm
| bell.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Fun memories. I remember when we had to borrow internet from a
| city building across a field, using some weird antenna setup.
| When it rained the internet went down.
|
| And of course the random rage quits of keyboards being thrown
| across the entire hall.
| nivenhuh wrote:
| The OP is younger than me. You haven't been to a LAN party until
| you've shocked yourself by unplugging a BNC connector.
| midasuni wrote:
| Pro tip - Use a cloth for insulation while handling them
| thombles wrote:
| Author here - I did have that problem in the distant past while
| battling a dodgy BNC terminator but luckily we were mostly on
| CAT5 by the time I was doing networks with friends. I won't put
| in writing the ill-advised technique I used to avoid getting
| shocked.
| nivenhuh wrote:
| Lol! Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
| minitoar wrote:
| LAN parties were a very big part of my high school experience.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| > The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600.
| The rich kids had a 9800.
|
| This made me chuckle. For my computer I went though a bunch of
| local computer stores, going through all their CPU boxes and got
| lucky on the second day. There it was, an Athlon XP with AQZFA
| stepping. Overclocked twice as fast as the other models, and the
| coolest of CPUs in that generation.
|
| Overclocking of an AQZFA Athlon XP was as easy as using a pencil
| to draw a line in between the two right pins. The mods I've seen
| on LANs to cool this thing were something else. From custom-built
| PLC radiators to water cooling setups, which were the new hot
| stuff at the time.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| That line made me chuckle too. I used a Duron 1.2 with a all in
| wonder 9600 XT, then got an XP 2500+, which I almost
| immediately OC'ed to 3200+.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| The BIOS recognitions were kinda funny when you overclocked
| them. My one told me it's a 3800+ because they probably just
| made it dependent on the base frequencies x multiplier or
| something similar.
| sgt wrote:
| I remember my first LAN party. No Internet, just one continuous
| 10Base(something) coaxial network where I was on the one far end.
| I brought down the entire network more than once when I needed to
| disconnect my BNC connector and terminator, in order to
| troubleshoot some hw/driver issues.
| dade_ wrote:
| 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.
| mndgs wrote:
| Yes, Doom! I am reading this and I think to myself: nobody here
| was kid/teenager in 90s?
|
| It was Doom on 8-10 school computer network PCs for me,
| absolutely fantastic times!
| 31337Logic wrote:
| Found my twin. Thanks. ;-)
| dade_ wrote:
| 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.
|
| Things went downhill fast after that.
| pierat wrote:
| 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.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| very familiar points except the part about stealing hard drives.
| Totally unthinkable scenario.
|
| You just don't ever, EVER, touch another persons computer without
| them inviting you in for help, or some kind of showoff. Atleast
| one of your boys would look after your computer while you were
| afk. Someone would always be there
| thombles wrote:
| Author here. The victim was a mate of mine and we were just as
| shocked. No idea how the perp got away with it let alone had
| the audacity to try. It was so bizarre I had to include it.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| Did you run undelete on the 80 to look for traces of the
| owner? the demand for justice had to have been overwhelming.
| I feel it even now as I write this
| pvorb wrote:
| > 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.
| julianlam wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Then Hamachi came along :)
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| 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. :)
| JuanPosadas wrote:
| 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.
| conradfr wrote:
| 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
| :)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| 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.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Thank you for the reminder of the French halo leak. Amazing
| memory.
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| physicles wrote:
| 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.
| MivLives wrote:
| I did LAN parties through out highschool in the late 00s. It's
| funny looking how different our era of lanning was. This was post
| Steam, and so the piracy was less rampant. By the time I went to
| college, they also had a lan club and I started doing that. It
| was the early 10s, and that's when the lan part of the lan party
| was truely dead. Everyone stopped playing TF2, and CS, and
| everyone moved to League of Legends. There was still SC2, and a
| bit of cs going on but the majority of the lan was just people
| grouping into fives/tens and playing league. Esports became a
| thing a few years later and sorta ate the lan club. I can't say I
| every lugged a CRT but games of UT2k4 and TF2 in a dingy basement
| full of nerds are core high school experience memories for me.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Summer of college, working as a temp at a soulless company where
| all I did, all day long, was call doctors and ask if they still
| took a certain insurance.
|
| Someone brought a cracked version of Quake to work one day and we
| all stayed late playing. Even the boss got into it - LAN parties
| were always amazing but going from call center temp job -> LAN
| party was like going from the lowest low to highest high.
| deevus wrote:
| The first prize I won at a LAN was a 16 MB Corsair USB flash
| drive for winning a Call of Duty 5v5 tournament! That would have
| been around 2003?
|
| During the 90's my older brother and I had a coaxial cable
| running between our two rooms through a hole in the wall. We used
| to play deathmatch DooM and Quake. If he wasn't home, I would
| invite my best friend over and we would play together. Of course,
| I got to play on my brother's PC which was superior.
|
| My best friend and I would frequent Duke3D. I vividly remember a
| wide open city map with a fire truck driving around the
| perimeter. You would think that getting run over by the firetruck
| would kill you, but instead you would just appear on top of it.
| epolanski wrote:
| Still remember huge "bring your own PC" lan events 20 years ago
| in Italy with 1000+ people.
|
| I find it crazy that better connectivity killed socialization in
| gaming rather than helping it.
| jlengrand wrote:
| LANs are still a thing! Knew no one 10 years ago when we moved to
| the Netherlands. Pretty much all friends come from the local LAN
| group.
|
| Now we still organize them but there's kids running around as
| well, and we sometimes also go to each other's weddings
| ughitsaaron wrote:
| My friends and I had only a few LAN parties that I can recall, at
| least ones that took place at any of our homes. There was,
| however, a PC repair shop in town that had a (pretty high-end for
| the time) LAN gaming room. I wanted to learn about computer
| repair, and so offered to work for them once a weekend or so, for
| a few hours, in exchange for learning about computer repair and
| free gaming for my friends and I. After raising an eyebrow, they
| agreed.
|
| In the end, I don't think I really learned all that much. (The
| solution was often to just backup what we could of a person's
| storage and reformat.) But my friends and I had a good time at
| this shop, run by two computer geeks of an older generation, that
| was probably just a few years shy of being wiped out by the Geek
| Squad and Genius Bar.
|
| Apart from that, my school district had a kind of magnet career
| skills center that offered a network administration course. On
| Fridays the instructor would let all of us in class play
| Counterstrike on the classroom's LAN. I think that was put a stop
| to, however, after a district supervisor came into the room just
| as a student gleefully yelled, "Headshot!"
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Lol, there is actually a 'gaming zone' (commercial space set up
| for LAN parties) still operating in Sunnyvale. I had a shuttle PC
| that I used for LAN parties and would re-image the disk when I
| got home.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Good times. Lug your big ass computer and monitor. Setup and
| install everything you need, someone has a pirated copy. Break
| out the energy drinks. Game all day and night (most likely
| counterstike and call of duty) until it's time to head out for
| early morning breakfast, then crash.
| swyx wrote:
| 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.
| tverbeure wrote:
| Before consumer LAN parties were a thing, there was xpilot on the
| university HP 9000 workstations. We'd play from 7pm until 6am. By
| then, our hands were completely cramped from pressing a million
| different buttons to navigate the space cave, shoot bullets and
| activate the ECM system.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPilot
| bionsystem wrote:
| Always check your beer bottle, you never know when someone is
| going to use it as an ash tray.
|
| If you sleep in an aisle or under your desk, you will wake up
| with dicks drawn on your face.
|
| If you ask the guy who draws dicks on peoples' face to not draw
| one on yours, he will make sure to know your sleeping location,
| so that when you sleep, he can come by and draw a dick on your
| face.
|
| There is often a "magic room" where drink and food is abundant
| and free for admins. If you befriend an admin, by the end of the
| weekend you may get invited in the room and get a share because
| there is way too much for them anyway.
|
| If you play a lot at a certain game (let's say Quake 3), and you
| want to hustle some LANs, make sure you know how to setup a
| dedicated servers ; some admins do not use the proper competitive
| settings like sv_fps and whatnot, so you can advise on that and
| avoid playing under sub-par conditions.
|
| Make sure you have a lot of free space on your hard drive so you
| can leech stuff while you are sleeping and somebody else draws
| dicks on your face.
| jon-wood wrote:
| A friend and I would often sleep in his car at LAN parties in
| order to avoid the endickening that would otherwise happen.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| 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
| dirtyid wrote:
| I feel like most of west missed out on internet cafe around the
| street corner, lan gaming whenever you want culture. Fancy bars
| with VIP seating and way too many unhealthy people.
| grokas wrote:
| I stumbled upon the StarCraft CD key thing myself after my sister
| broke my original CD and case. I had a ripped copy and tried a
| pattern until it worked. I was maybe 12 and didn't know what an
| ICQ was.
| pi-rat wrote:
| Any lan party organiser or participant worth his damn knew a
| variation of K4HVD-.. by heart for those reinstall situations :P
| pluc wrote:
| There was always that one guy who knew how to splice RJ45s and
| had the tools.
| fieldbob wrote:
| There was this one guy that didn't sleep very much and had to
| much caffeine pills and jolt cola, he started having severe
| hearth problem and he passed out so they had to call an
| ambulance, he survived. The following in monday in school the
| teachers were condemning caffeine consumption
| st_goliath wrote:
| > Having a PC with a window in the side of the case does in fact
| give you credibility.
|
| That, plus of course the obligatory blue/green cold-cathode tubes
| :-)
| alexgaribay wrote:
| > The cool kids had a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and a Radeon 9600.
| The rich kids had a 9800.
|
| I still remember trying to flash my 9600 bios to a 9800 because
| some were able to that. Unfortunately I didn't have one of the
| lucky models that could do so.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Wait, why would you want to do that? I still have my 9800 :)
| alexgaribay wrote:
| From what I remember, some 9600s had the same hardware as a
| 9800 but had features/processors disabled from the card BIOS.
| Those could be unlocked with the right BIOS.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I think they were trying to modify their 9600 to think it was
| a 9800.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Hah, that explains it, thanks. I remember of people
| flashing the Radeons to get them to work on Mac, but I
| didn't know this detail.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Hah, that explains it, thanks. I remember of people
| flashing the Radeons to get them to work on Mac, but I
| didn't know this one.
| Thaxll wrote:
| I remember every lan party there would be someone that would have
| issues with his PC, that being network or Windows and could not
| play at all.
| danrl wrote:
| this!
| irrational wrote:
| I have fond memories of lugging our desktop machines and CRT
| monitors to someone's college apartment to play Age of Empires
| all afternoon in the mid 90s. Good times.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| If you are found using a wallhack, you _will_ be duct taped to
| your chair for the remainder of the LAN.
|
| Buy the latest most expensive graphics card and return it after
| the LAN, but this trick only works a couple times before the
| computer store will only return your money by check after 3
| months.
|
| Real Lan Parties(TM) bring their own electrical distribution
| boxes to avoid surges in the commercial building's existing
| setup.
|
| Don't leech the giant shared network drive while the kindly soul
| providing it is trying to frag.
|
| The hottest girlfriend there is being ignored the entire time by
| the weird dweeb boyfriend who just wants to talk StarCraft.
|
| There is a pecking order of games, and without question the most
| hardcore players are the gods of Rocket Arena 3, followed closely
| by anyone who is so good at Counter-Strike that it's impossible
| to tell if they're cheating. (they are.)
| a-dub wrote:
| lol.
|
| midimaze.
| halz wrote:
| Ooooh yes.. Fond memories of attending a few events that were
| hosted by Hurricane Electric on folding tables in some conference
| room annex of their data center. And the marvel of finally having
| an Ethernet connection to the Internet instead of dialup! I'm not
| sure I balanced "game time" with "download-all-the-things time"
| well enough.
| roel_v wrote:
| My last LAN party was back when everybody was still lugging
| around CRT's, but despite that being a long time ago, I remember
| the smell when you'd been inside for several days, pop outside to
| wake yourself up in the cold outside or to get some drinks when
| they'd ran out near the end of the event, and then walking back
| in.
|
| I mostly organized events, so a lot of my time was spend on
| configuring networks and just general overhead of running events.
| Always fun: people who configured the wrong IP address so there'd
| be conflicts and you had to get up on stage, get everybody's
| attention, and get everyone to check they IP addresses at the
| same time. DHCP? Lol. After a few events we switched to peg DHCP,
| that worked remarkably well, as long as you had a few tech
| support guys who could help people out setting things up.
|
| And also, people bringing extension cords on a roller, not
| completely unrolling it, plugging in several computers and the
| wires inside the coil melting as soon as the load was high
| enough. Smoke coming out, breakers going off, actual flames once.
|
| And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the
| occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on. I
| found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was
| clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't
| understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids with
| us.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| In the age of slick unibody aluminum slabs inset with a thin
| black mirror, in the age of fanless battery powered devices
| that last 10+ hours on a charge... people have forgotten the
| sound and smell of computing in the bygone age of the LAN
| party.
|
| The heat of too many CRT screens in a room, of pentiums
| whirring away, their clacking harddrives and big PSUs filling
| the room with all sorts of olfactory detritus... the smell of
| nearly burnt dust being passed over and over again through a
| gauntlet of hot electronics... the sound and the physicality of
| powering up a room full of workstations.
|
| And I'm not even talking about the humans using the machines.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Oh man. I forgot my ~2003 voodoo computer with athlon 1100mhz
| and a tiny fan (5cm or so?) which spun at 5 or 6k rpm... It
| was like a jet engine vacuum cleaner to power thay thing on
| :->. Brutal!
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > And then there were the incredulous looks from parents or the
| occasional girlfriend who stopped by to see what was going on.
| I found some pictures from an event in a shoe box when I was
| clearing out my parents' attic a few months ago. I don't
| understand how any of us ever convinced a woman to have kids
| with us.
|
| Same...
|
| My younger brother was still living with my mom... Once a year,
| around Easter vacation, our mom would leave for two weeks. We'd
| all (brothers and friends) load up our cars with 'em PC tower
| and CRTs and set up a LAN at my mom's home. Some of us didn't
| have cars, so those who did would go and fetch the others.
|
| We'd play mostly Half-Life mods (lots of time on the "small"
| map: the little one kinda happening mostly inside a little
| house), Warcraft 2 and then the Counter-Strike beta when it
| came out.
|
| Sometimes some parent would drive his kid and check that we
| weren't doing heroine or something and make sure their kid
| could stay sleep at night. Then tere weren't enough beds of
| course: so it was sofa, floor, FIFO queue for the beds etc.
|
| Twenty meters long ethernet cables from the 2nd floor to ground
| level, hanging in the stairway.
|
| I still have one of the Ethernet hub (yup, hub, not switch)
| from back then: a 10 Mbit/s Farallon hub. Still working fine
| (I'm not using it but I tried it with some 1 Gbps to 100 Mbps
| then some 100 Mbps to 10 Mbit/s and then eventually that old
| hub). Geez did many orcs and firearms shots transit through
| that hub!
|
| Sadly I only have one picture from that era and it's only
| showing three CRTs and three people playing, zombie-faced (due
| to a very real lack of sleep): not the cabling or overall mess.
|
| Then there were the food orders: _" Who goes buy eight kebab
| this time?"_. Pizza boxes everywhere.
|
| And then the panic two weeks later when our parents were on the
| road back to their house: a few hours to clean all the mess we
| left for 15 days.
|
| Not just girlfriends: girls who wanted to hang out with us and
| maybe become girlfriends and we wouldn't even look at them...
| With all of us only understanding years later that, well, maybe
| for some reason they kinda liked us. So they'd drop at the LAN
| hoping to chill with us, but we'd just play the games nearly
| 24/7 and eat junk food, not understanding that we weren't very
| nice to them.
|
| I remember the PC / GPU I'd take being a bit underpowered at
| first, so I'd mod Counter-Strike not to cheat but to have
| simpler models: characters made of very simplistic cubes...
| Game would then render faster.
|
| And the sneakernet going strong: when we wouldn't be playing,
| we'd be hooking HDDs in the same tower and be copying
| directories.
|
| We also had HDD "trays" to make copying simpler (who remember
| these?).
|
| Speaking of reinstalling Windows as in TFA: we had a pirated
| copy of Ghost, before Norton were to acquire it. In german
| (none of us would speak german). And we'd image the entire C:
| drive as soon as Windows was cleanly installed, with all its
| drivers etc. Re-installs were then faster. My roommate (whom
| I'd take to the LAN with me of course) once mistakingly
| "imaged" his broken C: drive to his D: drive where he had all
| his backups. I remember him being highly pissed off.
|
| What an era.
| pluc wrote:
| Ah man Norton Ghost spun up memories of Norton Utilities,
| which had one of the few disk sensor apps (package in a nice
| enough widget to have a place on our desktops). The
| competition we had over HD speeds!
|
| That's a part of LANParties that seems to be forgotten, and
| even here as I read all the replies. Sure, it was about games
| and file-sharing, but it was as much about "hey you see what
| this dude did to skin his Windows?" or "wait was this
| transfer really that fast?" or "did you hear what this guy
| just did?" little legends that developed in the time we had
| together and made us ache to come back better and have the
| cool stuff everyone would be talking about next time.
|
| Before Google had all the answers, before all the hardware
| was centralized into a dozen corporations, before there was
| an index of tools and their purpose... we had each other, and
| that was pretty cool.
| Sakos wrote:
| I mostly just organized events with friends and my brother's
| friends. Biggest LAN party we had was around 20 people at our
| parent's house (back when we still went to high school).
| Networking was such a nightmare. Either it was trying to get
| everything configured right, or finding the right cables or
| getting the right network hub or switch or getting them hooked
| up right. Half of the first day was always wasted getting
| everything setup and up and running.
|
| Overall though, loved the experience of playing together with
| 10-20 people in the same one or two room(s) over an entire
| weekend.
|
| It's a shame that it's mostly died out. I don't even know who
| I'd invite to a LAN party nowadays. I certainly don't own a
| house, much less one as big as my parents'.
| jon-wood wrote:
| We had a long running adage that the games would start at LAN
| parties about 10pm. Didn't matter when you arrived to set
| things up, could be 9pm, could be 9am, technical issues would
| conspire such that they weren't resolved until 10.
| thecosmicfrog wrote:
| peg-dhcp, for the uninitiated:
|
| https://handwiki.org/wiki/Peg_DHCP
| roel_v wrote:
| The HiP '97 mentioned in that link is actually where I first
| learned it and stole it from lol.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I remember at one of our LANs one of the "two hoses into an
| open bucket watercooling his Celeron" guys accidentally kicked
| out one of the hoses and went pumping water all over the floor.
| This was when an 8-port unmanaged 100 Mbit _switch_ had _just_
| turned affordable to two early teens pooling their paper route
| savings together to buy one (finally! not three 10 Mbit hubs
| chained together!!), and of course it was lying on the floor in
| the middle of all the machines... The incident messed up all
| the LEDs and two of the ports but otherwise the switch kept
| working for years at my parents house.
|
| We did have a DHCP server - my old Macintosh Centris 660AV
| running IPNetRouter. It was even routing a 56K dialup
| connection (that went down whenever someone ordered a pizza)
| which was completely useless.
| Veliladon wrote:
| >A LAN isn't legitimate unless at least one person has to
| reinstall Windows along the way.
|
| Never a truer phrase spoken.
| conradfr wrote:
| A lot of drama with graphic card drivers as well (for the
| people too poor to have a 3dfx).
|
| Also managing to have everyone on the same patch for $GAME
| could waste hours.
| JD557 wrote:
| > 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.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| 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
| jholman wrote:
| 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.
| CableNinja wrote:
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| The dirty secret was windows XP was just a skinned Win2k and
| the components were very similar.
|
| I remember resisting XP for awhile and instead editing INF
| files so drivers would install on 2k for me.
| CableNinja wrote:
| Yeah, i suspect thats the only reason it worked. If it had
| been ME and 2k it probably wouldve burst into flames
| exikyut wrote:
| Do you remember what parts acted like what?
| CableNinja wrote:
| Not entirely. I do remember that the login screen and
| control panel became 2k like
| tuananh wrote:
| Kenton (cloudflare) has a LAN-party-optimized house
| https://kentonshouse.com/
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| This list sounds like it's written a little after the time of my
| first LAN parties.
|
| I recall really only having one game we could play (and really
| only one game we wanted to play)... Doom. And the network was
| fully 10BASE2 running IPX, not IP.
|
| Fun fact: I have the BNC connector I used back then sitting on my
| desk in front of me as I type this.
| johndhi wrote:
| My high school friends and I built a website and web forum for us
| to chat about our LAN parties. We also spent one summer turning a
| dirt space beneath one guy's house into an epic lan room - we put
| in floors and carpeting and lighting and tables. So awesome.
|
| Some of the best memories of my childhood.
| grubbs wrote:
| 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.
| ronnier wrote:
| Going to quakecon and meeting John Carmack was a top life
| experience for me
| vocatus_gate wrote:
| He replied to a tweet of mine and I still have it bookmarked
| and screenshotted to this day. My GF didn't understand why I
| was so excited
| chillbill wrote:
| 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!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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
| refracture wrote:
| I miss these, these days people just don't want to bring hardware
| together anymore. I get it but the social aspect was wonderful.
| scelerat wrote:
| I did LAN parties in the early '90s when a bunch of BBS nerds
| would show up at a local pizza joint cradling Mac LCs, IIsi's,
| and Powerbooks, bust out some PhoneNet connectors and play some
| intense Bolo [0] or Spaceward Ho [1] games. Later, Spectre [2],
| Marathon [3]
|
| Maybe someone would demo some app they were working on in MPW or
| Think C, or demo a funny postage stamp-sized quicktime (new video
| format) of an exploding whale or dumb Dan Quayle quotes.
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceward_Ho! [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game) [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)
| amatecha wrote:
| That sounds like an amazing time. I sunk a ton of hours into
| networked Bolo, Spectre and Marathon... probably not quite to
| the scale that you experienced! I often tell people how the
| game mechanics in Marathon are still present in basically all
| multiplayer FPSes today- the "Post-Game Carnage Report" exceeds
| what you even get in many games today, for that matter.
| jenscow wrote:
| wow, sdf.org - another blast from the past
| ashurov wrote:
| The outdoor lan parties that quickly popped up in the Netherlands
| is where I have my best memories of. Also, modding levels of
| Shadow Warrior or Quake and then telling your friends that they
| had to copy this newer version as it had a patch and then
| pranking them for an hour in game by completely destroying them
| with hidden passages and explosions... all the while hearing them
| in disbelief.. and then sharing the secret... also FTP Servers
| with more music, movies and games you could ever put on your own
| hard drives..
| jjice wrote:
| These are my favorite HN threads. Personal expenses that double
| ad historical accounts.
|
| In high school a land center opened up and they would do 24 hour
| lans once a month. Being 15, we all loved it. So many new people
| that all loved the same stuff as us. It was a blast. It
| eventually closed due to lack of profitability but I'm very
| thankful for them taking that shot on that business.
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