LAN Gaming - Good memories

T

t1337duder

Gawd
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Does anyone here miss LAN gaming and have any memories to share? To make it clear I'm obviously not talking about network tunneling. Some of my favorite gaming memories was hopping on the Quake 3 demo during "study time" in my science class with a couple of classmates and playing against slackers who'd already have a LAN match hosted in another class. Occasionally during lunch some of us would meet up in an empty class and play matches of Starcraft. I miss PC gaming's ability to bring everyone together. Now with LAN removed from 99.9% games (thanks to pirates using network tunneling to access multiplayer) - there's much less of a reason for people to leave the comfort of their homes to do this sort of thing. Even if you manage to get people to bring their PC's to the premises, I'll find that most popular games these days give little to no control over which server you can connect to, giving you no option but to connect to some far-distant server just to play with your buddy who's 6ft away from you. I'd like to think there are solutions other than completely limiting players abilities to host matches on their own network, but unfortunately most big developers and publishers disagree this days. Thankfully the situation isn't entirely dire, and we still have thoughtful indie developers implementing LAN solutions. With my plans of living communally in the future, I'd love to get people together to play some Valheim. Other games I have found LAN memories of...

- Diablo 1 + Diablo 2 + Lord of Destruction. Despite the success and popularity of Battle.net at that time (impressive to look back on),
- SWAT 4. Was a lot of fun cooperatively tackling missions with friends. Competitive multiplayer was great too.
- Resident Evil 5. Very tight, action packed coop campaign.
- Halo CE. Also played the demo for this on this school LAN. Demo's with LAN was the coolest thing ever. I remember spending more time on demos back in the day than I've spent with entire games today (e.g BF1942 and BF2 demos).
- Dead Rising 2. Fantastic coop which is perfect for LAN play with a buddy.
- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Unforgettable coop missions that I couldn't help but play with all my friends.


Does anyone have any other specific games or memories to share? I'm not an old person but I do feel highly nostalgic of that era.
 
This one cyber cafe in Flushing Queens me and friends from high school used to always play cs beta against a bunch of Koreans - one row all us, one row all them - when they died they'd killcam fly around and call out our locations in Korean like we didn't know what they were doing. We knew and we'd call em out, everyone starts cursing at each other back and forth and 5 minutes later you'd think it's race war time, both sides.

Guy at the counter never once said shit even when we caused people to leave lol. We played weekly.

That was really my only experience with LAN gaming. Good times 👍
 
I didn't know anyone at all going into college, but the first day everyone on my dorm had their Xboxes and tvs out in the lobby playing Halo CE. I made a ton of friends LANing Halo CE.

A few times while I was eating lunch in the cafeteria I heard random people say my Halo name talking to each other which was pretty weird.

I went to a big tournament and played with people that became some of the first legitimate pro gamers.
 
I called 911 because I couldn't sleep for work on my brothers hooligan friend during a Quake lan. The cops said they would have to arrest us both lol.
 
The biggest one that I attended with my son, who was 13yrs old at the time in 1998, was in San Diego off of El Cajon BLVD. There were about 75 or so gamers with their rigs. Both my son and I were running Windows 95 with Voodoo cards. Played all night and through the early morning hours. I even outlasted my son who was tired by 3am. We played Quake mostly. I think I came in the lower 20's for the Quake Tournament they held. I think I even beat my son, but we both won prices - me for being the oldest one there, and my son for being the youngest one there.

Once a month, there would be about 4 or 5 of us that would get together at a networking business and play for several hours. I also use to play during my lunch hour with 3 others at work for ~1 hour. The only part that was not fun was hauling your rig. I do miss it. It does not compare to on-line gaming where you can see the people you are playing against and their reactions.
 
sharknice said:
I didn't know anyone at all going into college, but the first day everyone on my dorm had their Xboxes and tvs out in the lobby playing Halo CE. I made a ton of friends LANing Halo CE.

A few times while I was eating lunch in the cafeteria I heard random people say my Halo name talking to each other which was pretty weird.
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Many of my college friends don't know my real name, just Toast; lol. We all had laptops, because it was an engineering school with a mandatory technology program; I remember having a Compaq Armada E500, pentium II maybe III? mobile with an ATI Rage graphics and a DVD drive which was handy. Played a lot of Diablo 2 between classes with whoever was near by (no wifi, but lots of network ports). I think you needed to start as multiplayer, but then people could join in and leave as their class schedule allowed.
 
'00-04 every friday was filled with ut, c&c:ra and generals as mainstays with various other games passing through, 8-10 of us gaming and smokin..
 
Attended a couple LAN parties in the very early 2000's with the high school crew at a buddy's house that had room to accommodate such things.

- At the time I wasn't lucky/privileged enough to own a PC worth a darn. So, I took my Dreamcast and we'd play Power Stone, MvC2, & Chu Chu Rocket. Good times.

Then years later, I lugged my "beast" PC (i5-750 /w AMD 5850) to QuakeCon in 2009. (Honestly, not worth it. IMO)

I spent 99% of the time in the back courtyard, drankin' n smokin'.
 
horrorshow said:
Attended a couple LAN parties in the very early 2000's with the high school crew at a buddy's house that had room to accommodate such things.

- At the time I wasn't lucky/privileged enough to own a PC worth a darn. So, I took my Dreamcast and we'd play Power Stone, MvC2, & Chu Chu Rocket. Good times.

Then years later, I lugged my "beast" PC (i5-750 /w AMD 5850) to QuakeCon in 2009. (Honestly, not worth it. IMO)

I spent 99% of the time in the back courtyard, drankin' n smokin'.
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The Dreamcast had Phantasy Star Online and a passable Quake 2. And it's fighting game selection was godly. They still make games for it, through third parties. It's like the NEOGEO, it will never truly die. It also has a KBM. You can still connect it online hilariously enough and it can do VGA or with an adapter HDMI. You can still play the games online. You can buy their broadband modem.

 
SOAREVERSOR said:
The Dreamcast had Phantasy Star Online and a passable Quake 2. And it's fighting game selection was godly. They still make games for it, through third parties. It's like the NEOGEO, it will never truly die. It also has a KBM. You can still connect it online hilariously enough and it can do VGA or with an adapter HDMI. You can still play the games online. You can buy their broadband modem.

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It was Quake 3 Arena not Q2. And you could play online, with keyboard and mouse and VGA monitor, and it actually had crossplay with PC, but the PC server had to be on a specific patch and limited to the maps that were on DC.
 
PSO/PSO v2 using the Dreamcast keyboard was my first online gaming experience of note. Subbed to Sega.net and everything..

I still have my DC collection (including some PAL imports like Shenmue II & Headhunter)

Bought my first unit on 9/9/99 - ie Launch Day. Sonic Adventure, Hydro Thunder, and Soul Calibur (y)
 
horrorshow said:
I spent 99% of the time in the back courtyard, drankin' n smokin'.
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We used to throw LAN parties on Fridays and keep them rolling until Sundays. Ripping CDs, sharing and watching movies, marathoning entire anime shows, and there was always booze and, shall we say, party amenities? Also we weren't legally allowed to purchase alcohol, but if you buy enough of it, well, we found a place that wasn't really into checking IDs.

We had to ban one guy from taking mushrooms because he inevitably wound up playing a single Japanese techno song on repeat for hours at a time. We hid his speakers so he just listened to it on his headset, which he kept on his lap with the volume turned up as high as it would go...

Oh yeah also we sometimes played Counter-Strike.
 
Axman said:
We had to ban one guy from taking mushrooms
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I took blotter at the LAN's without fail and apparently had a seizure playing Chu Chu Rocket.... (so I'm told, I just woke up on the floor)

Too many mice I suppose.. lol

UF1R.gif
 
Nothing like a LAN with friends!

Counter Strike, BF 1942 with Desert Combat Mod, Call of Duty 1&2, and Day of Defeat were some of our regulars.

Lots of amazing memories, moving around those full tower cases and large CRTs did suck though!
 
Damn, I miss LAN parties. The town I grew up in was growing so fast back then (late 80s, all through the 90s) that every year there was new school opening up. In elementary, I became friends with some other kids then they went to the new elementary school. We were back together for a year in junior high then the new junior high opened up. We were back together freshman year then the new high school opened. Point being, as I got into building computers in high school, all my gaming buddies went to the new high school. Oddly enough, none of my friends at my high school were into computers/gaming. The LAN parties that we held about once a month were the only time I got to see my old friends. And like others have said in this thread, we all eventually had full towers and 21" CRTs, lol. I never did go to one of those massive LAN party/conventions like QuakeCon.

  • Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
  • Half Life TDM
  • original Counter-Strike betas
  • original Day of Defeat
  • Quake 2 TDM
  • Quake 3 TDM/CTF/Instagib
  • Urban Terror (Quake 3 mod)
  • Starcraft or Warcraft 2
 
Best gaming times, bar none.

Unreal Tournament (was THE LAN game, from house LANs to several dozen people local warehouse events)
Baldur's Gate (4 player coop with towers and CRTs crammed in a 12 m2 (130 sqft) two bed bedroom)
Heroes of Might and Magic 2&3
Aliens vs Predator 1999
C&C Red Alert (null modem 1v1)
Starcraft
Age of Empires 2
Need 4 Speed Hot Pursuit
Call of Duty 1&2
...

Ah, another life.

Oh, and Win95 networking woes, that is one thing I don't miss. Each LAN began with a couple of hours network troubleshooting.
 
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Counter-Strike and StarCraft with a few friends. Trying random custom maps and stuff. Good memories. Seems like it was 10 million years ago now. I remember watching Battle Royale (2000) and some nutty Korean horror film I forgot the name of while at one friends house lol. I think this was in 2002.

And not long before this I got to enjoy the 30+ person cyber cafe experience as a young teenager at a time when cyber cafes were springing up all over the usa in the early 2000s. I still remember people bitching and yelling when losing or winning matches in CS. It was sort of like a completely analog twitch stream/chat experience, now that I think about it. Pretty fun, though I think I would still prefer to play games from the comfort of my own place than in a cyber cafe. I got my first custom PC built at a CompUSA not long after this time. And after that first one I built all my future PCs myself.
 
Long, long time ago (too long) we used to LAN the *beep* out of this great Quake 2 mod called: Action Quake 2. This was time before Counter-Strike betas we used to play after that. Anyway, AQ2 was and still probably is a rock solid, smooth and fast, action movie inspired thing. We spent too many endless nights playing it. Can't remember specifics, but it was accessible for many, because the hardware min. requirements were quite low. DM and TDM were the most popular modes.
 
Back in the early 2000’s when the original Call of Duty was out, I belonged to a clan called [Epic]. The clan leader organized a LanParty in Springfield Illinois, just a few hour drive from where I lived. I had only been with this clan for about a month or two when the Lan took place. Special thing about this Lan was that it was held in what was a restaurant adjoined to the Best Western. The restaurant went out of buisness but it was all still in tack. Some of us including me had my own booth for my setup. Hell I probably could have slept in my booth instead of getting a room there.
it was mostly an adults only Lan as we always had a keg tapped. Good times!
There was a pc magazine that had a booth there and had their top 2 pc builds of theirs at the time. Can’t remember the name of the mag but I know they went all online at some point after.
They had a few tourneys there too. Call of Duty and Counter Strike.
Was exciting to see several of my new clan mates there after talking on TS with them for so long and finally putting a face to the voices.
But it wasn’t just for [Epic] clan. Anyone could come and many did.
One of our clan members from California came out. His personal job was working at a video editing studio out there. He put together a mighty fine video of all of the high points of the Lan and sent a copy to anyone who wanted one. I sometime rewatch it occasionally for old times sake.
There will never be a Lan Party that fun for me ever again.
 
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