'As critics tout dark visions of computers driving people apart, these hard-core gamers prove that communities--even virtual ones--need physical interaction in order to flourish. As the slogan of the Bay Area Network Gaming Group proclaims, “A scream should be heard, not typed.”
“The best game experience is not on the Net, and I think people are starting to realize that,” said Cliff Bleszinski, a lead game producer with Epic MegaGames. “You can’t look over at the person you just beat. You can’t go out to get a beer afterward. You rarely get to actually talk to the people you’re playing against. You may as well be playing against the machine.” '
The best part of this article. LAN parties seem almost extinct with the convenience of online gaming today. That's both a good and bad thing. I remember lugging a CRT TV and Xbox or a laptop to small parties. Usually with a case of mountain dew in tow. I miss the joy and adventure of playing in person. But I also enjoy connecting with people who have moved away in the comfort of my home. It makes me sad that the current and future generation won't get to experience this.
I host LAN parties about twice a year (now that I have space for it). I've been hosting LANs since 2012 and even back then LAN parties were already dying. The hardest part of hosting a LAN these days is convincing your guests to get off their couch. I think in person connection is worth the effort of dragging your PC across town, but it's a hard sell. Online gaming has matured to a point where, from a technical perspective, you don't gain much from playing on LAN at all. In fact many modern games require Internet play, even for private matches!
Cool! I went to a LAN party in a retired nuclear bunker in 2000. I remember someone had one of the first TFT screens. It was muddy, had zero visibility unless you were directly head on, and what felt like around 3fps. They were trying to play Counter-Strike. (Everyone else had a CRT and laughed at it.)
When I moved to Tempe in 1999, there was an Internet Café downtown. It was operating in an old Bank of America building, with its vault room more or less intact. This was not the only bank building to be converted into a café.
The vault was set up as a quite impressive gamer-cave. There were purple LED rope lights lining the walls, and of course, beefy Wintel PCs to run all the games you could ever hope for in those heady days. It was supposedly rather difficult to run wiring into the vault; of course it wasn't designed for all of that, and the walls were not exactly conducive to drilling or sawing into it.
But they made it work for a few years. Those days of Internet Cafés were kind of amazing. Nowadays, we're lucky if the Free Starbucks WiFi is working properly.
Coincidentally, my high-school aged son is actually hosting a LAN party at our house today, they're going to be playing Counterstrike and Minecraft. LAN parties are very much not dead if we decide they shouldn't be.
What a great read. Thank you for sharing. I didn't go to my first lan party for a couple of years after this was written but it's a nostalgia trip nonetheless.
The linked lanparty.com is also a great exploration. (The first archive is from a few months after the article)
'As critics tout dark visions of computers driving people apart, these hard-core gamers prove that communities--even virtual ones--need physical interaction in order to flourish. As the slogan of the Bay Area Network Gaming Group proclaims, “A scream should be heard, not typed.”
“The best game experience is not on the Net, and I think people are starting to realize that,” said Cliff Bleszinski, a lead game producer with Epic MegaGames. “You can’t look over at the person you just beat. You can’t go out to get a beer afterward. You rarely get to actually talk to the people you’re playing against. You may as well be playing against the machine.” '
The best part of this article. LAN parties seem almost extinct with the convenience of online gaming today. That's both a good and bad thing. I remember lugging a CRT TV and Xbox or a laptop to small parties. Usually with a case of mountain dew in tow. I miss the joy and adventure of playing in person. But I also enjoy connecting with people who have moved away in the comfort of my home. It makes me sad that the current and future generation won't get to experience this.
I host LAN parties about twice a year (now that I have space for it). I've been hosting LANs since 2012 and even back then LAN parties were already dying. The hardest part of hosting a LAN these days is convincing your guests to get off their couch. I think in person connection is worth the effort of dragging your PC across town, but it's a hard sell. Online gaming has matured to a point where, from a technical perspective, you don't gain much from playing on LAN at all. In fact many modern games require Internet play, even for private matches!
Anyway I wrote up some more of my thoughts about modern LAN parties here: https://justinbecker.dev/blog/2026/08/05/how-to-host-a-lanpa...
Cool! I went to a LAN party in a retired nuclear bunker in 2000. I remember someone had one of the first TFT screens. It was muddy, had zero visibility unless you were directly head on, and what felt like around 3fps. They were trying to play Counter-Strike. (Everyone else had a CRT and laughed at it.)
When I moved to Tempe in 1999, there was an Internet Café downtown. It was operating in an old Bank of America building, with its vault room more or less intact. This was not the only bank building to be converted into a café.
The vault was set up as a quite impressive gamer-cave. There were purple LED rope lights lining the walls, and of course, beefy Wintel PCs to run all the games you could ever hope for in those heady days. It was supposedly rather difficult to run wiring into the vault; of course it wasn't designed for all of that, and the walls were not exactly conducive to drilling or sawing into it.
But they made it work for a few years. Those days of Internet Cafés were kind of amazing. Nowadays, we're lucky if the Free Starbucks WiFi is working properly.
Coincidentally, my high-school aged son is actually hosting a LAN party at our house today, they're going to be playing Counterstrike and Minecraft. LAN parties are very much not dead if we decide they shouldn't be.
What a great read. Thank you for sharing. I didn't go to my first lan party for a couple of years after this was written but it's a nostalgia trip nonetheless.
The linked lanparty.com is also a great exploration. (The first archive is from a few months after the article)
https://web.archive.org/web/19981212015213/www.lanparty.com/
I'm pretty sure my friends and I used this resource when setting up: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202184536/http://www.lanpar...