[HN Gopher] The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
___________________________________________________________________
The Rise and Fall of the LAN Party
Author : gaws
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-04-24 19:56 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aftermath.site)
(TXT) w3m dump (aftermath.site)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| More anecdotes and discussion of the book LAN Party from it's
| early stages
|
| _Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN
| party (2022)_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680678
|
| And more recently a review last year:
|
| _Berlin Review: LAN Party_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36898833
|
| CNN last month:
|
| _A nostalgic look back at when the Internet still felt joyful_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805005
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Waaazzup?
| mixermachine wrote:
| I was on some great LAN parties. Nice memories.
|
| Four years ago I attended a LAN party where I was the youngest
| one (26 back then). All others already had kids but swore to keep
| the old spirit alive. Never have I seen such a well organised
| party with actually working games :D. They used the "eti-
| launcher"
| sshine wrote:
| I remember showing up at my first LAN party, ~20 years younger
| than my online friends. They just couldn't believe I was actually
| 13. They were really nice. One woman had a son my age that I went
| to a music festival with when I was 20. Another got me my first
| job as a programmer.
|
| Somehow I just don't see that kind of stuff happening nowadays;
| sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to
| sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from "The Internet".
| Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents
| were crazy, or both.
| j45 wrote:
| The interesting thing that you point out to me is the indirect
| mentoring / support from someone ahead of you in tech you
| received simply based on mutual interests.
|
| Sadly there's a lot of segments where juniors want to learn
| much on their own, often re-learning lessons of the past that
| could have been put towards more meaningful progress for them
| in hindsight.
| huytersd wrote:
| This seems specific to your family. My family would never allow
| that unless they knew the parents of atleast a few people at
| the place I was sleeping over.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| In North Branch MN there was an old movie theater with the
| seats taken out and tables setup - The BattleShack. parents
| would dump kids there and they'd be there for days or weeks
| just gaming and hanging out at the Denny's in town. My buddy
| had a workshop addon to their house where the same thing
| would occur. Summers around us were just a solid LAN Party.
| holoduke wrote:
| I loved lan parties. Putting all my heavy gear in my cheap old
| little car. Big ass 19 inch crt and a big tower full of useless
| buttons and knobs. Spend the entire day and evening setting
| everything up. Of course everything broke to the point windows
| had to be reinstalled. Driver issues, network issues, hardware
| issues. But then finally at 1am we started playing serious sam,
| unreal tournament, dune 2000, 1nsane, moha, quake 2 or 3, team
| fortress 1 and many more. Good old times.
| m463 wrote:
| I remember when there was a lan party aboard the USS Hornet
| aircraft carrier in the SF Bay Area.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Hornet_(CV-12)
|
| I think that would be the pinnacle.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| Recently, my friends and I recreated our old LAN parties. Went up
| to a cabin in the woods, brought some cheap network switches, and
| had everyone install OpenRA (https://www.openra.net/, open red
| alert), and had a blast, even with everyone on laptops (mac/win).
| You can still do this in 2024 and it's worth it!
| iwontberude wrote:
| Shout out to my old homies from LC3 LAN (Loraine County Community
| College in Ohio)
| pathartl wrote:
| I'm part of a group that still holds 3-4 LAN parties a year with
| ~16-24 seats. We play mostly older stuff and it's still as fun as
| it was back then.
|
| Gaming has changed dramatically, but it's not like that old stuff
| disappeared. Sure, some games don't hold up well in the
| slightest, but the good ones have. Some favorites are AoE2,
| Unreal Tournament 2004, Re-Volt, C&C, Natural Selection, Call of
| Duty, and oh god so much more.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Any love for Crysis (the first one, not the subsequent
| abominations)?
| pathartl wrote:
| Not at the moment. We use recycled 4-6th gen i5 all-in-ones
| so everything runs off the iGPU. It basically limits us to
| games that were released up until 2006. We _do_ play Far Cry,
| though.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| My last LAN party (20 years ago):
|
| * A few gallons of Code Red = $40
|
| * Having a drive full of the latest cracked games = awesome
|
| * Owning your friends face to face = better than awesome
|
| * Given every game in existence, still playing a 4 hour Risk game
| because computer dice are bullshit = priceless
| mikae1 wrote:
| I held Quake LAN-party this weekend and it was so damn fun.
|
| We played Deathmatch Dimension[1] which is a very recent map pack
| that's better than anything I played back in the day.
|
| We use the Quakespasm Spiked source port.
|
| [1] https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/dmd.html
| unethical_ban wrote:
| There is a LAN this weekend that may be interested in this...
| Thanks!
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| When my brother was getting married ~6 years ago, we ended his
| Bachelor Party with a LAN party.
|
| Sure, we played games we would have normally played at our
| respective homes (Mostly League of Legends back then), but
| there's something different about having everyone in one place.
|
| Now, we go to a semi-annual LAN event called PDXLAN [0]. It's an
| 800+ seat event in Ridgefield, WA (Just outside Portland, OR...it
| used to be held in Portland, but we out-grew the venue),
| sponsored by NVIDIA, Intel, MSI, and over a dozen other PC gaming
| hardware manufacturers. I've been going since 2016 and it's an
| absolute blast. There are gaming tournaments, but they really try
| to appeal to casual gamers as much as hardcore competitors.
| They've been running a Golf With Your Friends tournament at every
| event for a couple years now, and it's their most participated
| tournament.
|
| [0] https://www.pdxlan.net/
| enlightens wrote:
| I started attending a monthly Halo 3 LAN party last year. It's
| all flatscreens and current-gen consoles running MCC, and we all
| have to juggle the schedule around our adult responsibilities
| now, but it's still such a blast to get together with ~30 people
| and yell at each other from throughout the house.
| gibbonsrcool wrote:
| Speak for yourselves... I'm flying to Seattle to LAN next month!
| :P
| unethical_ban wrote:
| LANAllNight in Dallas is happening this weekend, it happens twice
| a year now. 200ish people, good old-school vibe. Minimum red
| tape.
|
| Quakecon is this July or August in Dallas. Several thousand
| people. A sight to see, but a lot more bullshit these days, lots
| of security, metal detectors, etc.
|
| In fact, I'm wearing a Quakecon shirt right now!
|
| LANs even today are so much fun, just to escape reality for 2-3
| days and play games, even single-player sometimes while you wait
| for friends to wake up. I can't stay up til 7am like I used to,
| no amount of BAWLS will help it.
|
| Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake Live/Quake Champions, Risk of Rain
| 2, Left 4 Dead 2. Golf With Friends is a fun casual game to
| unwind with after dinner (pizza) and before hitting the hard
| stuff.
|
| I predict Helldivers will be popular this year.
| Joe_Cool wrote:
| Does Helldivers 2 have a LAN mode? The first one didn't.
|
| Or does this LAN have Internet? Where I am at LAN parties are
| completely offline, so genuinely curious.
| dc3k wrote:
| I can't speak for other events, but QuakeCon and Dreamhack
| have had internet access (and quite good access all things
| considered) for a decade or more now.
| yayitswei wrote:
| I found out about this LAN-party-optimized house
| (https://kentonshouse.com/) from a previous discussion on HN, and
| thought it was the coolest thing ever.
| 55873445216111 wrote:
| I went to so many LAN parties at friends houses during high-
| school in the mid 2000s. Without this experience, I doubt I would
| have pursued electrical engineering and moved to silicon valley.
| thesnide wrote:
| Another thing that DRM (and always online) killed...
|
| Being online just hasn't the same feeling when you could hear
| screaming within earshot when your plan executed to perfection...
|
| I miss the raw simplicity of IPX. Not the NE2000 IRQ hell, though
| Lammy wrote:
| > Lee's Summit, MO (USA), 2002
|
| I wonder if that person ever got to meet Lowtax lol
| ocardoso wrote:
| It's amazing than reading the comments here makes me realize that
| even in "1st world countries" we all play the same ol' games (one
| flavor of UT, Other game that became a must for that specific LAN
| Party like Delta Force, and some other strategy game).
|
| I used to be "the young guy" in my local group back in the late
| 2000's and I often wondered what games we would play if everyone
| had access to a top class PC back in the day.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-24 23:00 UTC)