alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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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.
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.
> 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.