alt Hacker NewsI love this technically, but part of the magic was all setting up trestle tables, sitting in someone’s garage / outbuilding, and it all being a bit raw.
I vividly remember cutting a hole in the side of a Shuttle XPC case to fit the fan of a GPU someone had bought over for me at one. That was all part of the experience for me.
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I'm torn on this issue as well. I have fond memories of the janky setups, but also it is nice to actually have time to play games at the party. At some LANs, I've spent hours and hours just trying to get everyone in the game and playing. Plus with a setup like his you don't have to worry about finding older games that will run on the lowest common denominator hardware that people bring.
As you said though, there was a certain magic those days...
He touches on this on the website and I agree with his statement
> I do feel a lot of nostalgia for the days of trying to pack four people, four computers, and four monitors into one car on the way to a friends' LAN party, setting up machines on haphazardly arranged card tables with questionable seating arrangements, daisy-chaining power strips and network hubs. I'm a little less nostalgic for the experience of trying to copy game files over the network to get everyone on the same version, or pitying the one friend who inevitably has to reinstall Windows and doesn't manage to get in-game until after midnight. [...] Even the most enthusiastic of us didn't really want to do all that more than, like, 3-4 times a year, and a lot of people—even those who like games—really don't care to do it at all. I'm not even sure if I could do it anymore, as a 40-something with two kids!