New Book Remembers LAN Parties and the 1990s 'Multiplayer Revolution'

erek

erek

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"Growing up as a teenager in this era, you could feel a sense of hope (that perhaps now feels like naivete) about the possibilities of technology, K explained. The book is full of photos featuring people smiling and posing with their desktop monitors, pride and fanfare apparent. At that point in time, many new tech products were designed with ostentatious playfulness in mind — cellphones were often blinged out or swiveled up, cameras came in hot pink shells and tech companies even collaborated with luxury fashion houses.

“It felt like, ‘Wow, the future is coming,’” K said. “It was this exciting time where you felt like you were just charting your own way. I don’t want to romanticize it too much, because obviously it wasn’t perfect, but it was a very, very different experience.”

It was also a new era for photography. Digital cameras — with which most of the photos in “LAN Party” were taken — had just become widely available to the public. As a result, the visuals are grainy, unedited and generally low quality by today’s standards. Documenting everyday life through images was still an anomaly, after all, K said. As such, people in the book’s photos weren’t yet conscious of their best angles, nor does it seem they were necessarily trying to look ‘good’ for the camera."

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Source: https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/style/lan-party-online-gamers-photos/index.html
 
1990s revolution in the title but we see Windows XP and digital camera widely available to the public feel more early 2000s no ? Or I am misrembering what 98 vs XP looked like and the timeline of digital camera becoming popular and good enough ?

yeah...
Montana in 2002. ... Oklahoma in 2003, etc... Missouri in 2001 ....
 
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I was part of a Sacramento-based LAN Party organization called LANtrocity for quite a while around the turn of the century and for a handful of years afterward. It was a ton of fun, and a great time to be a teen / young adult. We did a lot of events that had ~100 people, and some larger events in San Francisco also.

We even made a cheesy video that went viral at the time:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGHGtJiDlxw
 
Yes, I remember Kali and Kahn. Kahn was a bit cheaper, Kali more polish and far more popular. Since each also supported live chat and channels, it made it easier to get a random game going especially with random internet strangers. Ultimately, they both used IPX emulation which was the whole point. Games were not really designed for the internet yet, so we paid for these softwares to essentially turn IPX packets meant for LAN environments into TCP/IP or UDP packets the internet used.

Quakeworld and Unreal Tournament made all of that obsolete. But if you wanted to play something older like multiplayer Doom, Descent, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, etc. over an internet connection this was the way to do it.
 
Absalom said:
Yes, I remember Kali and Kahn. Kahn was a bit cheaper, Kali more polish and far more popular. Since each also supported live chat and channels, it made it easier to get a random game going especially with random internet strangers. Ultimately, they both used IPX emulation which was the whole point. Games were not really designed for the internet yet, so we paid for these softwares to essentially turn IPX packets meant for LAN environments into TCP/IP or UDP packets the internet used.

Quakeworld and Unreal Tournament made all of that obsolete. But if you wanted to play something older like multiplayer Doom, Descent, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, etc. over an internet connection this was the way to do it.
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Quakeworld...was that the first major "Drop In Multiplayer" where matchmaking wasn't required........I just remember showing up in my first sesson of quakeworld and some dude had a wicked Spawn model, but none of the gun models worked so everyone had the default weapon :D Then a few weeks later I think they patched it and you had weapon switch. Damn, I think also looking up/down was fixed at the same time, the models wouldn't track your mouse-look early on or something. Holy crap major old man moment.
 
For whatever reason I remember the technical upsides to Quakeworld. It had client-side prediction (a configurable one at that), which was a multiplayer gaming concept well ahead of its time. So when I pressed W on the keyboard I actually moved forward. With the IPX emulation, when I press W I had to wait 250ms+ for my player to move forward. Once you had a taste of that, there was no going back.

How easily we forget the dark times that came before client-side prediction networking.

Quakeworld's only missed opportunity was integrated matchmaking. You still had to know the server's IP address and had to pass that along via command line or console. So id software teamed up with GameSpy which solved the matchmaking end as a complete solution. Unreal Tournament would ultimately provide a unified solution, but GameSpy served its purpose for a while. I look back on GameSpy era as a symbol of gaming development laziness. Kind of like what EA did with Battlefield 3 matchmaking.

When I look back on Kali, I don't value the IPX emulation so much as the matchmaking capability. It's a feature we took for granted at the time.
 
This is absolutely timely for me as , in preparation for a remodeling of a nearby room, I ended up unpacking a box of my old university books and it included a copy of...

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that someone had gifted me. It wasn't new info at the time - heck, I was HERE back then and grew up gaming on PCs in the 90s, but t he book was a nice look back. Man, remembrance of better times in some ways - when it still felt like the "old" Internet.
 
Never was into lans but there was a local Commodore Owner Workshop (COW) at the local rec center in the 80s. There was legit stuff talked about in the front but in the back, that's where all the "shady" copyfest stuff was going on, I remember packing up my c64, monitor and two floppy drives to that every month just about, the later the Amiga 500 with a spare floppy which weighed less. I almost forgot that we would lug CRT monitors to these things, of course we would use a furniture dolly to move stuff but still. These days with super thin lcds would be so much easier
 
LANning was a great time and I really miss those days. Mind you, lugging around my CRT monitor, desktop, and all of my peripherals was a bit of a pain, but had some great times with friends those few years in the really early 2000s when not everyone had broadband yet so getting together was a much better gaming experience. Really added to the social aspect either way. Biggest one I attended was at a friends place at the beginning of Christmas break. Open concept basement, 13 of us packed in there. Great times!
 
HockeyJon said:
LANning was a great time and I really miss those days. Mind you, lugging around my CRT monitor, desktop, and all of my peripherals was a bit of a pain, but had some great times with friends those few years in the really early 2000s when not everyone had broadband yet so getting together was a much better gaming experience. Really added to the social aspect either way. Biggest one I attended was at a friends place at the beginning of Christmas break. Open concept basement, 13 of us packed in there. Great times!
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Lanwar and Million Man Lan were awesome.
 
GotNoRice said:
I was part of a Sacramento-based LAN Party organization called LANtrocity for quite a while around the turn of the century and for a handful of years afterward. It was a ton of fun, and a great time to be a teen / young adult. We did a lot of events that had ~100 people, and some larger events in San Francisco also.

We even made a cheesy video that went viral at the time:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGHGtJiDlxw
Click to expand...


Aw heck, it's an honor to finally know someone who made that video. I remember seeing that video decades ago, and getting a good chuckle out of it.

I only wish that they would have done that for real to some of the cheaters in the Team Fortress Classic community. It would have done me a lot of soul warming to see a bunch of guys lifting up the massively rotund "MassacrE" and dumping him out on his fat posterior.
There were many times he claimed he wasn't cheating in TFC, and that he "only" cheated in Counterstrike, since everyone cheated there. He ended up getting arrested in real life for poaching baby ducks on a pond outside of hunting season. No joking.

He even had the gall to come back to the Team Fortress Classic community and beg for money to pay for his lawyer fees and the fine. Surprisingly, a couple of tender hearted folks did chip in a few bucks.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/youtube-video-duck-shooters-fined-banned-1.797163
 
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