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

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

God do I miss those days sometimes.

4 comments

Im going to sound like the ultimate hipster, but the best thing about LAN parties back in the day was that video games were still very much a "geek" thing, so it attracted a certain type of person, which was fun to be around. I learned so much from people LAN parties - basic networking, IRC, torrenting, modding Half Life, little bit of music production. Video games were made for people like that, and you could tell.

Nowdays, most video games are made for the lowest common denominator of people and targeted at consoles, so the mod scene is a fraction of what it used to be, you don't meet interesting people anymore in the gaming world. So no wonder Lan parties aren't a thing anymore.

I dunno, it always felt a bit mixed to me. Of course, us who were deeply into computing and LAN parties went to the parties to play video game, nerd out and everything else, but also "popular kids" were attending with their own spots, mostly to play CS1.6 and Battlefield 1942, but in the end our parties ended up quite a mix-match of people from different walks of life, from poor families and rich families, from nerdy kids to "future sports athlete cool people", everyone just wanted to game their favorite games with others, as most of us only had modems so online-play wasn't really a thing for us.

This was early 2000s sometime, and in a really small place, less than 1000 total population, maybe that's why, but attending larger events like Dreamhack back then also seemed to attract a wide-range of different folks.

Our biggest LAN was at our School’s gym (we had 2 or 3 smaller ones before that inside the normal building, and of course a few even smaller private ones) in 2004, I think we had ~80 people playing over 2 days, the more normal ones going home to sleep (or just being there for a single day), the full nerds having sleeping bags. It was more nerds, but we had all kinds of people (and even an oversized casemodding sponsor that probably didn’t make any money with their stand).

Fun times. But I don’t think I’d still survive a LAN like that, nowadays. Too little sleep, too much on-screen gaming, too much action, too many energy drinks. Later this year a few of the people from back then will rent a holiday house in Denmark for our modern, yet more relaxed version: A week of boardgaming ;)

> You spent hours debugging basic networking issues.

And that was FUN, as long as you were enjoying the tinkering and not stressing about missing a game.

> Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives.

I think this is an under-remembered aspect, or at least, under-told. LAN parties were filesharing parties too, sometimes that more than gaming. (Which caused no end of strife with the gaming folks, until we learned to segment the network to keep the filesharing congestion from lagging the gaming packets.)

The heyday of mp3 also coincided with the explosion of coffee-shop wifi, in the days before client isolation. Grab a latte, browse Network Neighborhood...

In college we had Mojo for downloading tracks out of other people's iTunes, for a precious little amount of time (maybe just a year or year and a half before they released an update that killed the actual filesharing). It was always fun finding hidden gems in people's libraries - learned about some of my favorite artists that way.

At a three person LAN party in 1998, I didn’t have an Ethernet card. The owner of the house had two phone lines. I connected my modem to one of his phone lines and dialed across the room to his dial-up server on his Win95 machine. We played Quake that way :-D A little laggy, but acceptable.

> There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine.

Our first LAN parties (early 2000s sometime) were organized without DHCP servers, just manually helping people setting up manually assigned IPs, explaining to them to not touch their network settings until they came home and wishing for the best, first day basically spent just setting up networking stuff and routing. 2-3 days post-LAN was spent helping people restore their modem/broadband connections once they were home again and we had ruined their network settings...

Was feasible until we hit ~100 people or so, then of course DHCP became a necessity.

There's an RFC for Peg DHCP! :D https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2322

While it's an April 1st RFC, I've seen this implemented at a Hackspace in Amsterdam, works very well!

First 100 then dhcp? I've been to 400 and 1000 people lanparties with ips on a clothspin (or whatever it's called in English). Works fine until someone misreads.