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.
