Remembering the LAN Parties of Yesteryear

The inter­net is full of pho­tos from the 90’s and ear­ly 2000’s when com­pet­i­tive mul­ti­play­er gam­ing was a niche hob­by enjoyed between friends in base­ments and liv­ing rooms.

Let’s take a nos­tal­gic tum­ble back to an era when gam­ing wasn’t the mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar mon­ster that’s infil­trat­ed everyone’s life, and using the inter­net meant chain­ing your com­put­er to an eth­er­net cable, pray­ing no one picked up the phone, and patient­ly wait­ing eight min­utes for a sin­gle low-res jpeg of Kate Winslet to load. Good luck try­ing to game with those speeds. So what hap­pens you inevitably want­ed to get a few rounds of Counter-Strike in with your boys? Enter the LAN par­ty.

If the con­cept of a Local Area Net­work par­ty is as for­eign to you as a rotary phone, you prob­a­bly crawled out of the womb some­time after the turn of the cen­tu­ry. For those lucky, nerdy indi­vid­u­als who thrived in the late ‘90s and the Y2K era, LAN par­ties were when mul­ti­play­er gam­ing meant actu­al­ly being in the same room as your adver­saries, and the only thing hot­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion was the unven­ti­lat­ed room full of over­clock­ing com­put­ers that you were going to be sit­ting in for hours.

It went like this: you and your geek squad, dripped out in car­go shorts and the lat­est graph­ic tees, would haul your key­boards, mice, hulk­ing com­put­er tow­ers, behe­moth CRT mon­i­tors, and rat’s nest of wires into your friend’s mom’s mini­van. Des­ti­na­tion? Anoth­er friend’s mom’s base­ment. Stock up on ener­gy drinks, junk food, and essen­tials (Bawls and piz­za, clas­sic com­bo), and pre­pare for an all-night gam­ing marathon on a sin­gle net­work.

As long as your tech held up and the cut­ting-edge graph­ics of Quake II didn’t make your PC spon­ta­neous­ly com­bust, you were in for an epic time, an all-night par­ty that was open to all.

The phe­nom­e­non seemed to be a great social lev­el­er–as long as you had the hard­ware to run the games of the time, the only thing that mat­tered was how well you could car­ry your team. Every­body from mil­i­tary guys to high school­ers to even the San Anto­nio Spurs was plugged in. One gamer rem­i­nisced about this “strange alter­nate uni­verse where the cap­tain of the foot­ball team hung out with the sci­ence fair nerds.” Pure mag­ic.

Sur­vive the night with­out pass­ing out and wak­ing up with artis­tic gen­i­talia sketched on your face in per­ma­nent mark­er, being cooked from the heat of PSU exhaust from 20 com­put­ers cir­cu­lat­ing in the room, or set­ting fire to the whole place because those 20 com­put­ers are all hooked up to the same pow­er strips plugged into one sock­et, you were com­ing away with some seri­ous­ly good mem­o­ries that will last you for­ev­er. A nos­tal­gic gamer recount­ed, “My first LAN was in a church gym play­ing Bat­tle­field Viet­nam on 128MB RAM and a Celeron 1.1GHz. I drank 7 bot­tles of Bawls. I weighed 140lbs at the time.” Icon­ic.

But it wasn’t just base­ments. LAN par­ties could spring up any­where: col­lege rec rooms, cyber cafes, church base­ments, aban­doned big-box stores—hell, even peo­ple at mil­i­tary bases and sci­en­tif­ic research facil­i­ties got in on the action.

The LAN par­ties of old fea­tured shoot­ers and strat­e­gy games like Doom, Hex­en, Quake, Unre­al Tour­na­ment, Counter-Strike, and Star­craft. I jumped in just in time for Halo, Age of Mythol­o­gy, and War­craft 3, right before con­soles took over (if you haven’t played any of these, stop read­ing, get some friends togeth­er, and get on it. Now).

I remem­ber the thrill of sneak­ing the Halo: Com­bat Evolved demo onto our mid­dle school Mac com­put­ers (it was the only ser­vice­able thing we could get off the inter­net for free) and squeez­ing every drop of fun out of the sin­gle Blood Gulch map dur­ing com­put­er sci­ence class­es. Nerd nir­vana.

LAN par­ties are most­ly an after­thought now, replaced by stream­ing e‑celebrities, esports, and the blessing/curse of high-speed broad­band and con­sole gam­ing. They were proof of com­mu­ni­ty before we all got stuck online, a time when you were 1337 and the ene­mies were n00bs to be fragged, and maybe you fit in a few fun­ny videos from New­grounds or Ebaumsworld in between rounds. It was also indica­tive of what the broad­er mood in the late 90s and ear­ly 2000s was like.

Thank­ful­ly, there are some who try to keep this slice of his­to­ry pre­served (or still pay host­ing fees to keep their old clan web­site from 2001 run­ning). Writer/game devel­op­er Mer­ritt K. com­piled pho­tos and sto­ries from that era into a book, LAN Par­ty: Inside the Mul­ti­play­er Rev­o­lu­tion, and it’s an incred­i­ble effort.

The inter­net still has a bunch of pho­tos from that time, most­ly ama­teur shots on ear­ly dig­i­tal cam­eras. They may be sin­gle-dig­it megapix­els with abysmal res­o­lu­tions, but the grainy, time­stamped jank real­ly takes you back to that time, when desk­top com­put­er gam­ing dom­i­nat­ed the mar­ket, and the gam­ing com­mu­ni­ty heav­i­ly inter­sect­ed with open-source pro­gram­mers and hack­ing cul­ture. If you built your own PC, knew how to tor­rent files, host­ed an FTP serv­er, and dual-boot­ed Lin­ux, you weren’t a wizard—you were just a reg­u­lar guy with a com­put­er.

These pho­tos also give a glimpse into sub­ur­ban youth life: mid­dle-class décor, JNCO jeans, dis­con­tin­ued drink brands, joy­stick con­trollers, wrap­around head­phones, and posters galore. My favorite is the con­stant pres­ence of bot­tles of Bawls Guarana every­where. Before Game Fuel, there was Bawls (yes, they’re aware, they even spon­sored a video game with the tagline “Grab Your Bawls.”)

Through­out my hours spent doing dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gy, I stum­bled upon some fan­tas­tic sto­ries from that time that are too good not to share:

“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.”

– pluc, Y Com­bi­na­tor

“I worked at Chick-Fil‑A for a year or so in high school. One of the ones in a free stand­ing build­ing in the mid­dle of a park­ing lot of a much larg­er shop­ping cen­ter- bor­der­ing the inter­state. A group of 6–7 of us, INCLUDING the Gen­er­al Man­ag­er, were big gamers. At the time, Call of Duty releas­es were all the rage. The night of the Mod­ern War­fare 2 release, we all closed up at 10pm, invit­ed a few of our friends, and brought in our mon­i­tors (most­ly 40inch TVs) and Xbox­es. We set them all up on the Chick-Fil‑A tables and booths and made sev­er­al batch­es of Chick-fil‑A nuggets and fries. We played 6v6 from about 11:00pm — 4:00am. I remem­ber think­ing how ridicu­lous it must have looked from the inter­state to see a Chick-Fil‑A lit up with 12 screens inside through those translu­cent shades at 2:00 in the morn­ing on a week­day.”

– beacham, Y Com­bi­na­tor

“We rotat­ed between three hous­es for our ear­ly LAN par­ties. In my room I ran a net­work con­sist­ing of a ded­i­cat­ed web host and sev­er­al oth­er sys­tems. All built from hand-me-down parts and oth­er pieces I could scav­enge on my $0 income. Met my best and clos­est friend at these events. Began work­ing for Koolance and used my posi­tion to attend and spon­sor large LAN events. The mod­ding com­mu­ni­ty was a fas­ci­nat­ing group. We had the artists build­ing beau­ti­ful sys­tems for our mod­ding con­tests and over­clock­er build­ing bench rigs with liq­uid nitro­gen and cop­per pots com­pet­ing to get the best OC on the hard­ware avail­able. We’d find places to pur­chase pur­chase pelti­er cool­ers to sand­wich between our waterblocks and rip com­pres­sors out of refrig­er­a­tors to meet the TDP require­ments of the over­clocks. Then we’d see if we could get through a game of DOTA with­out crash­ing.”

– not­cof­feetable, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“We had a friend that worked at the horse race tracks and after they closed down for the night on a week­end or two we had 30 peo­ple there, two par­ty’s of 15 in one large room using their near [IMAX] scale tv’s.”

– Spoutin­wyze, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“Unique as in, it was dur­ing the bot­tom of the inter­net surge, where access was quite large but still a lux­u­ry, with slow/low-band­width (mixed with dial-up and the very few lucky ones, broad­band inter­net) and made cre­at­ing low-laten­cy mul­ti­play­er game ses­sions a pre­mi­um event, hence LAN par­ties. Also, shar­ing data, knowl­edge, com­par­ing PC builds, etc, was the craze. I clear­ly remem­ber a guy flex­ing his Full-Tow­er, Pen­tium II 450Mhz, with like 4 5.25 ODD dri­ves and a diverse HDD set­up, brag­ging and show­ing him burn­ing a CD-ROM and play­ing Unre­al Tour­na­ment at the same time with­out buffer under­uns, that was quite a flex back in the days.”

– bigd33ns, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“I think you just unlocked a fond mem­o­ry of mine that’s fad­ed into the back­ground some­what. The IT depart­ment in my high school hijacked a room that was­n’t being used and set­up a bunch of old PCs for play­ing Counter Strike and Star­craft, LAN par­ty style. Some­one even made a map of the high school for Counter Strike and called it “no_guns_in_school”. Obvi­ous­ly that did­n’t last long (this was around 2005).”

– Cur­tisHx, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

We used to LAN par­ty in bar­racks on a Sun­day dur­ing the mid 90’s. A whole bunch of “slight­ly” hun­gover air­men gath­er­ing in the bar­racks lounge to play Doom (nat­u­ral­ly) or what­ev­er we could get run­ning.

– Andrew­Mack, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“A web cam was set up so that mem­bers of the Ars forum could watch over us. A good time was had by all, even the police — who brought cars and a heli­copter towards the end of the evening, and came to see why peo­ple were car­ry­ing lots of elec­tron­ics out of a house late at night.”

– ProphetM, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“Owned a com­put­er repair busi­ness in 1998 to 2000. Just a 1500 sq-ft office in a strip mall. At night after we’d closed up we’d have friends and friends of friends bring over their desk­top com­put­ers and hook into our lit­tle local net­work and game until as late as 3 AM. The most mem­o­rable event occurred when there was a loud bang­ing on our door. It was one guy’s wife and we thought he was in trou­ble with his old lady. Nope… she was there fran­ti­cal­ly explain­ing one of their employ­ees had been picked up by the police for pos­ses­sion of mar­i­jua­na and they need­ed to go bail him out so he did­n’t have to call his dad. We had so much fun on those nights. We most­ly played Delta Force, Quake 3, and Red Alert.”

– RodneyWS1977, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“I trav­eled to San Jose Cal­i­for­nia from my home in South­ern Ontario Cana­da, for a descent3 con­test put on by the pub­lish­er. I lugged my gam­ing tow­er and mon­i­tor and periph­er­als onto the air­plane for that. Imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing that, I flew to texas, where a shirt­less guy in a VW minibus, picked me up at the air­port and brought me to his trail­er home where we had anoth­er Mini gam­ing par­ty with a few oth­er descent guys. Anoth­er time, I invit­ed a bunch of my online descent bud­dies to my house in Cana­da, which was actu­al­ly my par­ents house. We had around 15 peo­ple from all around North Amer­i­ca, that I had nev­er met in real life. I remem­ber run­ning exten­sion cords to both of my neigh­bors hous­es on either side, to ensure we would have enough pow­er. Some of those peo­ple found my par­ents liquor cab­i­net overnight, that was a good time. I drove 6 hours to Ottawa once, for anoth­er lan par­ty in some­one’s base­ment. At that one every­one was smok­ing mar­i­jua­na con­stant­ly, which was some­thing entire­ly new to me. I inhaled so much sec­ond­hand smoke that I was def­i­nite­ly buzzed.”

Gree­nEn­vy, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“Oh yeah good times, LAN par­ties in the ’90s, lug­ging CRTs around, end­less­ly dink­ing with coax cable net­works, and ter­mi­na­tors (don’t jig­gle those cables too much!), play­ing Doom, Quake, Heretic, Hex­en. Did I men­tion those damn coax cables, bump the desk or card­board box you’re on, and the entire net­work goes down. If things got too slow, some folks could always wan­der off and com­plete an entire game of chess, while the net­work gurus, pos­si­bly tip­sy and/or stoned, worked their slow mag­ic, long nights. And Sepul­tura, real loud for the neigh­bors of course. The strangest game was play­ing Descent until the wee hours, then attempt­ing to dri­ve home, total­ly sober, but you’re real­ly are stuck in a 2D world with sub­stan­tial­ly few­er degrees of free­dom. At Uni, we used to break into one of the com­put­er labs at night, but climb­ing on top of the file cab­i­net and going through the ceil­ing tiles, very con­ve­nient, until we got caught since the top of the cab­i­net was very dusty and our shoe prints left as evi­dence. But there were always oth­er labs, build­ings.”

– password123, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“I remem­ber going to Recon 2000 (iron­i­cal­ly back in 2001?) at the Con­ven­tion cen­ter in Chan­til­ly, VA. Over 1000 peo­ple there who all lugged their fork­lift heavy mon­i­tors, built rigs with Voodoo2 or TNT2 cards to play Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat, Unre­al Tour­na­ment (orig­i­nal ver­sion!), Quake 2 with your favorite mods, Orig­i­nal Star­craft, etc. We also, eh.…“traded” soft­ware on net­work shares giv­en that not many peo­ple had great band­width at home. Peo­ple also for­get what awe­some oppor­tu­ni­ties these things were for recruiters or peo­ple look­ing for work. Every per­son was a NERD capa­ble of build­ing their own rigs which meant the aver­age com­put­er knowl­edge and IQ was high. Pow­er could be dan­ger­ous at these events. There was a whole set of tables that got a pow­er surge from the con­ven­tion cen­ter elec­tri­cal sys­tem. Not all of the com­put­ers were on surge pro­tec­tors. Tak­ing a sur­vey of melt­ed pow­er strips and black­ened PCs was hor­rif­ic.”

– danathar, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

“Man, hear­ing that brought back so many mem­o­ries from my Navy days on the USS Coro­n­a­do. On our last major deploy­ment to Japan (we were parked next to the Kit­ty Hawk for 9 months) we end­ed up being bad, bad boys and run­ning switch­es and CAT5 through the var­i­ous shops on the ship. We end­ed up using our lit­tle LAN for play­ing any­thing from mul­ti­play­er Halo on the OG Xbox to Rise of Nations, Doom, Unre­al Tour­na­ment, and just about any­thing else we could get our hands on to play in the mid­dle of the night.”

– Blac­k­Ic­eXP, Ars Tech­ni­ca Forums

It’s a nod to the ear­ly adopter nerds and out­siders whose escape from sub­ur­ban monot­o­ny turned gam­ing from a niche hob­by into the colos­sal indus­try it is today, for bet­ter or worse. Before Dis­cord servers, peo­ple were shit­post­ing IRL with their friends, and they weren’t per­pet­u­al­ly online like we are now. Before the advent of social media, it just wasn’t pos­si­ble.

Despite all of our tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments as a species, annu­al LAN par­ties have not died out and con­tin­ue to be held to this day. One Swedish event, Dreamhack, attract­ed a record 22,000 atten­dees just four years ago. But whether it’s that the scene has out­paced the tech that made these gath­er­ings nec­es­sary or that mod­ern games demand dif­fer­ent setups, some say the old mag­ic is hard to recap­ture.

One blog­ger nailed it: “You could try to imi­tate one of these things today. But it just wouldn’t be the same. Every­one has lap­tops now, every­one has wire­less routers, and we are no longer true and proud, for there is no longer Red Bull run­ning through our veins.”

Excuse me, I sud­den­ly have the urge to crack a bot­tle of Bawls and hop on a round of Counter-Strike 1.6. I have an old high to chase.