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Somehow I just don’t see that kind of stuff happening nowadays; sending your kid off to some unknown destination with his PC to sleep in a gym hall with some strangers from “The Internet”. Either the world was smaller and simpler back then, or my parents were crazy, or both.
Sure, we played games we would have normally played at our respective homes (Mostly League of Legends back then), but there's something different about having everyone in one place.
Now, we go to a semi-annual LAN event called PDXLAN [0]. It's an 800+ seat event in Ridgefield, WA (Just outside Portland, OR...it used to be held in Portland, but we out-grew the venue), sponsored by NVIDIA, Intel, MSI, and over a dozen other PC gaming hardware manufacturers. I've been going since 2016 and it's an absolute blast. There are gaming tournaments, but they really try to appeal to casual gamers as much as hardcore competitors. They've been running a Golf With Your Friends tournament at every event for a couple years now, and it's their most participated tournament.
It was a "PC-community", people really focused on their PC. Its hardware, its OS, how to squeeze as much power as possible out of it. The perfect CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for each game, which hardware to use/buy next etc.
And THEN they played games. But they also hung out with like-minded people, exchanged alot of knowledge, data and content which would have been impossible to get by just going online with some modem.
The more this complexity of HW/SW was reduced, the more this breed of "consuming" gamers grew who only wanted to play games and didn't know/care that much about the hardware running it (other than wanting it to look colorful and pretty some years later).
--> If all you want to do is play games, the huge effort of hosting/joining a LAN-party is even more of a burden than it was for the PC-community...
Yup that's exactly how I remember it. We were playing half-life at home LAN parties (often at my place and sometimes at big LANs) even before the beta of CS came out. We'd spend lots of time on the various maps, like the "small" map (if I remember the name correctly).
We'd also play Warcraft II on LANs but Warcraft II was playable over "KALI": we'd simulate a LAN over the Internet. For Warcraft II the latency was good enough already.
My best LAN though was the one between my home and my neighbour's home, where a coax cable (!) would hang from window to window, on the second story, in the street. And the phone calls: "Mate, did you forget to put the terminator on a cable, my LAN ain't working anymore!" (if you were to forget the BNC terminator, nothing would work anymore).
"RJ45" ethernet cables already existed but we were broke ass teenagers: so we managed to fetch a shitload of coax network cards and cables a company was throwing away. We didn't have the proper tool(s) though so we'd use kitchen scissors to cut and attach the 'T' connectors to the cables (by squeezing them with the handle of the kitchen scissors). It was totally ghetto but it worked fine.
Great memories, thanks for TFA and for posting TFA!