The Ultimate Countdown: How Real-Life Console Clashes Outshine Online LAN Bouts

Key Takeaways

• LAN parties fostered new friendships and bonding over shared gaming experiences, creating long-lasting connections.
• LAN parties provided a platform for discovering and sharing new media that wasn’t easily accessible elsewhere.
• Face-to-face multiplayer gaming at LAN parties created a unique and irreplicable experience that online gaming can’t match.

Modern gaming technology and fast internet connections are wonderful, but so too were in-person LAN parties. I spent my youth lugging CRTs and PC towers to friends’ houses or whatever space we could borrow for a weekend, and I miss it with all my heart. Here’s why it was awesome.

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Getting Ready for the Event

An IRL (In Real Life) LAN party is a get-together that happens wherever people can find a space covered with electricity and somewhere to put their computers. In the days before fast internet (or any internet at all), gaming was a solitary thing for most people. At the time, there was nothing like the anticipation of a LAN party coming up.

Checking that you have all your discs, external hard drives, peripherals, cables, game updates was all part of the build-up. The necessary preparation contributed to the excitement and anticipation of an event that required real effort to set up and attend.

This was the geek’s equivalent of prepping for a hike or a hunting trip with your friends that you’ve been looking forward to for weeks. A mini vacation where you got to leave school or work behind for a few days and forget about everything happening in the real world. Except there’s zero chance of sunburn!

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Making New Friends

LAN parties were the absolute best place to make friends who were into the same things I was, just by virtue of the dedication required to attend a LAN party. Complete strangers could be best buddies by the end of a weekend, after sharing victory, defeat, and extremely unhealthy amounts of pizza without sleep.

More friendships were forged on the battlefields of Diablo II, Warcraft, StarCraft, Quake, Doom, and numerous other absolute classic LAN games than you could fathom. You might have your TikTok and Instagram followers, but would any of them take a thunderbolt spell for you? No, real friends who you’d stay in touch with for the rest of your life were waiting for you at the next LAN party.

Discovering New Media

One of the best parts of going to a LAN party was the downtime between games, where people would share and show the video clips they’d been collecting, before the modern idea of the “meme” had been coined. You’d get to learn about movies, TV shows, books, and comics you’d never heard of.

This was a cultural exchange as much as an excuse to play video games. It’s not an exaggeration to say many people were introduced to lifelong fandoms at LAN parties, and you never knew what wacky thing you’d be exposed to next.

Face-to-Face Multiplayer

The best part of a LAN party was always the main event: multiplayer games. There’s a big difference between playing against someone on the other side of the world and someone on the other side of the room. Not least of which is that your trash-talking better not step over the line!

This is the feeling that online multiplayer will never replicate, even in an age of Discord or Xbox Live chat. Nothing beats eight or twelve people in one room slaying demons and blowing up aliens for 20 hours straight.

Learning About PCs and Networking

The last thing on my list isn’t so much something that I miss, but something that I’m grateful for. Where else would I get the chance to learn network engineering before I even left high-school? Where else could I get an intense, high-pressure crash course in troubleshooting PCs? LAN parties required technical know-how, and everyone was learning and teaching at the same time.

It’s also where we got together and talked shop, saw each other’s builds, and generally sharpened our technical chops. I can attribute a large part of my career as an adult to things I learned at LAN parties, and so, finally, my parents are proven wrong. It wasn’t a waste of time after all!

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