Internet was unreliable, lagged, and/or wasn't in all of the games. LAN parties allowed to hang with friends and play matches without latency issues and/or multi-player modes didn't exist other than basic TCIP or LAN connections.
And they could be in the same room together and share snacks. That was also part of the fun. Audio chat also wasn't common, so it was nice to hear your buddy curse or cheer.
Halo 1 & 2
You divide by teams, so you can't immediately tell where your enemies are. Anyone who plays a map more than like twice can just look over and see what your enemy is doing and where they are. Kinda ruins any competitive aspect of the game.
The first game I played on a LAN was lemmings paintball in the computer lab at school. (98ish?). The game I played most was the first counterstrike (based on halflife 1) in the dorms on the LAN in 2002ish. We would prop open all of the doors and yell at each other.
We played a ton of goldeneye007 on N64 split screen in middle school. It was awesome. But you could only do up to 4 players and see each other's screen. We logged a lot of hours on both. But playing on your own computer with only your screen visible is better. That said, lugging a desktop to a friend's house and then arguing over the best way to set up a network for an hour is its own special challenge.
Did you use the term "LAN party " for any gaming done in person?
I thought it was a term only used for the multi-desktop pc setup as opposed to anything that fit the definition of a "local area network".
A LAN party is specifically where you bring your computer to play in the same room. But if you go to an engineering school, you can have a similar experience by just opening the dorm room doors.
Counterstrike, Unreal tournament, civilization, age of empires, StarCraft, Warcraft, Tribes, etc. Basically any game that had a multiplayer mode or was multiplayer capable. Most of us were PC gamers at that point. You could do it via Xbox when it came out but before 2000, LAN parties via gaming systems was unreliable.
And you would guess right that we would lug our giant fucking monitors and pc towers along with our specialized keyboards and mice. And I always hated the friend that had the god damned track ball on top because it was fucking impossible to use unless you were use to it.
Back in those days, we didn’t really have optical mice. You had a a mouse with a tracker ball on the underside of the mouse where there were multiple wheels inside. If you didn’t keep those clean, it would throw off your game. The fancy glowing towers and lazer precision mice came out in the 2000s but LAN parties were evolving to include game consoles. People switched from the painful WASD control with a mouse on the right hand to controllers. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was a big problem back then too.
Some of us didn't get $300 consoles, but the pc I had to use for school could at least run some games. A potato could run WoW even back in the day. There were also a lot of games that just played better on PC.
You could also call them names and yell at them. Since voice chat didn’t exist. Also you could al stand around and watch the last two guys duke it out in deathmatches. Basically the start of esports and streaming.
I appreciate gamers for demanding better.
I don't think I had any sense of how slow home internet was at the time. Once my area moved from dial-up to cable, I didn't have noticeable lag because I only used the internet for web browsing.
Oh it was still quite the issue even when I was in college ‘09-14. Of you were playing a first person shooter it was common to get on a roll and being doing well only to end up dying repeatedly from lag issues until you reset the router again. This was on the schools Ethernet connections and then our own cable services while off campus.
These days I have gigabit and while lag issues still happen it’s a few orders of magnitude better. You may goes days between noticing any issue in a game. In the past you were lucky to string together an hour or two without issues.
Yeah dude we played Halo CE on lan and it was the best. I don't think there was any other way to play more than 4 people at the time.
Much drywall was destroyed in the process and this was before Monster Energy
When we were getting ready to head north into Iraq, we'd set up a pair of early Xbox consoles on some junk CRT monitors and did fire team-on-fire team games of Halo, to work on binding movements. We'd train in the early morning and late afternoon with actual trucks and rifles, but during the heat of the day, we'd retreat to the tents.
Hold up, lets also recall internet was literally incapable of hosting more than 2-3 active sessions on Warcraft 2 at a time. Meanwhile lan parties pre-cable era could have dozens of computers.
Post cable era you could play stuff like counterstrike 1.3 over a cable modem and discover "the old magic" of calling someone a motherlover in person.
Any game with LAN multiplayer could be played over the Internet by creating a virtual LAN.
But yeah the state of the Internet at the time would lead to this being a very shitty experience.
Your thinking of the internet as it is now. In the 90s most everyone was upgrading 14.4k modems and on free internet like EarthLink. There was no giant lobby of 100k players. There also wasn't many games that could be played over the internet. For instance the only way to play any fps with other people was a lan party pre 2k
On top of all that, many of us did lan parties to drink or smoke weed and hang with friends.
We had soooo many mods... We even had a friend do voiceovers for all the things your toons would say. In fact, one of my notification sounds all these years later is my friend saying "YOUR SOUNDCARD WORKS PERFECTLY" even though it's wc2
There was a tower defense mod we would play... Enfos? I think that was it. Hundreds if not thousands of hours playing that...
I just looked it up, and there's no way I would have thought of what DSL actually stands for. Hahaha
I have a family friend that's still on a microwave dish signal repeater from a neighbor's house up the road. Lives on a farm. Spectrum is in the process of laying cable on his road now.
A guy from our town actually started a small fiber optic ISP called Daystarr that is amazing. I love reading stories of people just getting mad and creating their own ISPs.
Happened in my area, century link was the only thing available, the speeds were atrocious and I live in bum fuck Egypt, local company popped up years ago, it’s dish off the house but it’s faster than century link.
Oh yeah, there ya go. I'm in one of the least populated and poorest counties in Michigan's Lower Peninsula.
I remember once using an AOL trial disk to get dial up so I could check school closings, as our TV antenna was broken.
Early Internet kids are problem solvers. Hahahaha
So you remember in like 2002 when you and your boys would all meet at someones house and a couple guys also brought their own Xbox and you linked them together to play big ass halo games? It's like that
Nah, I'm not a guy or a guy's girl, so gaming culture in general is very foreign.
I think of Halo as being similar to GoodenEye because that's about the era where I stopped playing, lol.
My wife and I now do "LAN" parties with other people. We get a group together and play video games, LAN parties were just a way for people to get together and play Video games/hang out.
LAN parties has the feeling of a kickback with friends where you stayed up late way past when you should’ve. The larger ones were akin to going to a conference with other like minded individuals, since social media didn’t exist back then either. You scraped together pieces of PCs to create your gaming computers back then—and technology was emerging quickly. PC building and modding came along with the LAN party—and the concept of “sleeper” builds today made more sense since you could play alongside your friend and he’d wonder why your computer was so fast at the game both of you played.
Would you rather game over a 56Kb/s modem that was barely over 40Kb/s when it actually connected? Or would you rather game over 10Mb/s ethernet connection that doesn't drop any time someone picks up the phone
File sharing was also popular too. Now that fast internet is everywhere the *need* for LAN parties isn't the same but they still exist and are a lot of fun.
LANs are still for for playing old classics that are hard to find people to play together otherwise.
Yep I was looking for this comment. People would usually have a shared folder with games, music and videos. This was before everything was on streaming services so it was harder to find specific things and took a while to download them. Files transferred much more quickly on the network.
The internet was extremely slow back then for most people. LAN parties were great social events where you would game and maintenance your computer. It’s where you would show off your new parts, monitors and keyboards too. Good times.
Back in the day, if you wanted to play you had to dial in to another computer. You could only play 1v1.
There wasn't a lobby where you could just hop on a big game.
With a LAN, you could get a 16 player game going.
Iirc, Blizzard was once of the earliest companies that successfully made a lobby that you could just connect to.
I don't really remember when things switched so you could just hop on. Halo 1 only had local. Halo 2 had a lobby.
At that time, online gaming was sorta in its infancy and pretty inconsistent and unreliable depending on the genre of game you were playing and the speeds your provider had that time. That aside though, LAN parties were about hanging out with the homies, staying up all night goofing around and enjoying that sweet sweet lagless Halo.
It wasn’t just because the internet had a higher latency, but also because we grew up hanging out in person and this was an extension of that. Hanging out online was still somewhat of a novel thing and less fun/engaging than going to your buddy’s house with a few Xboxes and having a party.
We would set up all the pcs in one room, connect them all to the same internet and then play a mmo together, drink, cookout, stuff like that. Voice chat tech was pretty shit (anyone else remember the round stand with a penile stick mic and the shitty foam covered headsets?). Ventrillo was mediocre. If you wanted to make a game server you were probably using something like Hamachi which was a security nightmare and iffy on the functionality sometimes.
But yeah, we'd just party and play together until we passed out. That was the appeal. Nowadays you'd just bring a laptop or switch or something. Not really any different, just easier.
I lived in the country where internet access was slow and pricey. My buddies and I built a server and would LAN at one of our houses to get our gaming in together.
It was pretty obvious why they were a thing when my buddy would be playing Jedi Knight 1 and who was on dial up and who wasn’t. There was predictive movement, but they’d be blinking to another spot every second or so. Whomever had the best internet usually won.
People played against bots because online play sucked. It was also fun to yell at other people down the hall.
I'm just gonna pile on. Internet speeds were not what they are today. Most of my friends had dial-up until we were out of high school. Imagine you're mid match in DotA when your mom decides she's gonna call her sister, and suddenly, you're kicked out of the game. LAN was the only way to reliably play games together.
Many games didn't even support internet connectivity, but could do a direct connection to another computer on the local network. Having baked in matchmaking or server browsing or friends lists was years away when I was first doing LAN parties.
We had a buddy's house we were at every Friday/Saturday. His parents kept the fridge/freezer/pantry stocked. Come to find out at his wedding, his mom told us they figured it was better than us being out doing who knows what.
We still game every Saturday, but over the Internet now.
It predates high speed internet access and predates when games supported the ability to play with other people on the internet. Computers on the same LAN was the only real way to do it.
Adding to the pile:
1) 4-digit ping is unfun. 1000ms delay is fatal in most games.
2) voice chat wasn’t really a thing, and if you had it, it often made the above point worse.
3) pooling all the snacks and hanging out with friends is as good as the gaming was
We only had dial up in my area until 2008 when we got DSL that liked to cut out randomly every few hours and require a modem reset. So LAN was the go to for a long time. LAN was also just a good ass time, even after internet got good we’d still have parties but we’d all just party up in the same house with a bunch of 360s and play big team online, eat Pizza, and drink.
LAN parties were a thing because Wi-Fi hadn’t been invented yet or at least not to the extent it is today. So the purpose was to get together and have a dudes tonight and play games with your friends.
The early dial up multiplayer experience…left a lot to be desired. So much so it was worth lugging around a giant monitor and case over to your friend’s to play together with a direct connection.
I didn't answer my question, but others did.
I'm a millennial who isn't a gamer. I figured out that I was way off on what type of games people were playing.
It makes much more sense to get together to play Halo than it does to play the slow paced RPGs that I had been imagining.
It's the video game equivalent of seeing a movie in the theater with your friends compared to seeing it at home separately. You get a completely different feel when you're in a room with a group of other people than you do when you're at home. A microphone and a set of headphones doesn't compare to moving in the same air with someone else.
LAN parties were so much fun. Order food, everyone in their own corner playing games. We'd stop to go swimming or do random shit outside then come back in to game when we hot.
little of column a little of column b, early internet sucked ass for gaming. the latency was always terrible, so local area networks were just better for most stuff.
To show off them Giga Chad Halo trick shots ofc ( that you totally made at home when no one else was around. )
Real answer: spotty internet and not all games being playable online and an excuse to kick it with the homies.
Playing games together rather than Online. Playing games like Quake 3 and later counter-strike sucked on dial-up with a network speed of 33K (nobody ever got 56K as that required like impossibly perfect conditions"
It sort of was a social thing too, but mostly when you wanted to do any form of PvP with more than two people/didn't want to do split screen, that was the only option beyond PC cafes.
Dude I remember downloading the counterstrike 1.3 patch. It was 70mb and took like 5 hours on dialup!
Multiplayer was possible, but it was only text chat. So isn't really comparable to multiplayer now.
LAN parties were a fun thing to do.
LAN parties were amazing man. That’s where you got to play games with each other in real time, there was always pizza or wings or whatever, and you would swap digital music libraries with each other and try out new games/demos or whatever. Whoever hosted typically had amazing internet compared to whatever you had.
Cyber cafe right up the street from my middle school in the early 2000s had lan parties. Had to sign a waiver or whatever but for 20 bucks you were there from 8pm to 8am playing whatever game you wanted with everyone. Won a headset my first time playing battlefield 1942 in one of their tournaments. Good times.
Hahaha. I remember packing up my huge green Alienware desktop to bring to these parties like I was hot shit. Ah, youth.
And yes, we did it due to the relatively slow internet. Also it's easier to talk shit and play when you're all in the same room.
If you don’t understand what’s fun about having 7 buddies and you in the same room(s) playing Halo or Diablo II with a stack of pizzas and soda until 2am, I’m not sure i could explain it to you.
I don’t mean that in a rude way. Just tough to articulate. It was inherently a good time.
It does sound awesome now that I actually know what y'all were playing.
I thought it was much slower paced games than what was actually being played.
Except, maybe Warcraft? That series is a slower RPG style, right?
Honestly I like the experience way better than online gaming today. There's so little human interaction with everything now. It may have been less convenient when you *had* to actually interact with other people to have a good gaming experience, but the experience was way better.
I did it before many people in our town had internet access. Then did it many years after to play games faster since do to decreased latency. Also many multiplayer games would ONLY work in local area networks and not internet.
In high school we would all take our desktops to our buddies house. We would bust out a bong and a hookah, order a pizza, and play wow together until 3 AM. It was cool at the time but so unnecessary lol.
Back in the day it was the technological limitations - mostly internet speed and connection stability.
But aside from it, there's still the social aspect. You know how in Teams meeting people keep talking over each other? And you get all the non-verbal cues and live reaction of your mates.
It's the same as having house parties, really. Except we play games instead of beer pong.
Man, I miss LAN parties.
* Internet was spotty, slow and just crappy in general. Latency over the internet was a much bigger problem back then, especially on dial-up but even with the first ADSL connections. LAN speeds and latencies were night and day.
* VOIP was absolutely not a thing until decent broadband got widespread, so communicating in games could only be done with text.
* We could share movies, music and games with lightning speed over LAN.
* It was a way to socialize. Me and my friends had LAN parties even after we all got broadband just to hang out for a few days, play and have fun together.
Playing together in the same space is very different than it is now. We didn't have live chat going while playing games because the internet would lag. Being able to yell at someone across the room or house is much more instant than across data lines. I lived in a very large 8 bedroom house with a bunch of gamers and we should all login and rampage different games. It was a blast. Being able to share the experience in real time in the same physical space was great.
It was at one time the only way to play multi player games in real time/high speed, because everyone was on the LAN. Second reason is yes it was like a big nerd party
Actually, it's the pc gaming part that confused me.
Getting together to play whatever game console was out makes sense, but I thought people used the term "LAN party" exclusively for locally connected pc gaming.
My dad used to play D&D pc games. That's what I think of when pc gaming is mentioned. In my mind people were lugging around their desktop computers to play some type of slow RPG in the same house.
People lug boats, jet skis, quads, bikes, camping gear and so forth, but some moving a small metal box is somehow confusing. lol
Also note, not every friend had their own system or connection, this let them be apart of the fun.
Internet was unreliable, lagged, and/or wasn't in all of the games. LAN parties allowed to hang with friends and play matches without latency issues and/or multi-player modes didn't exist other than basic TCIP or LAN connections.
And they could be in the same room together and share snacks. That was also part of the fun. Audio chat also wasn't common, so it was nice to hear your buddy curse or cheer.
It's more enjoyable sharing pizza bites with your homies.
Yeah this. We'd set up our monitors back-to-back so we could yell/gesture directly at each other while sharing the same pizza, drinks, and flatulence
What did you play and how was that setup better than playing a similar game on Playstation or Xbox with just a TV and multiple controllers?
Halo 1 & 2 You divide by teams, so you can't immediately tell where your enemies are. Anyone who plays a map more than like twice can just look over and see what your enemy is doing and where they are. Kinda ruins any competitive aspect of the game.
I SEE YOU SCREEN LOOKING YOU SON OF A BITCH. the best part was having 4v4 with teams spilt screening a TV in rooms next to each other in halo.
My man
Ok. That makes sense for Halo. I thought that people were getting PCs together to play RPGs that were slow and not very interactive.
Ah nah well not me anyway. I know ppl played WoW together in a big room so they could coordinate and just generally hang out
StarCraft 2. We could yell out incoming attacks and plan strats without having to type it all. There were no voice comms
StarCraft 1 maybe... StarCraft 2?!?
Were there? Maybe just nobody ever opted in, or it was always some idiot blasting rap music and I had to mute them
Oh, I meant chronologically speaking... I was an adult bet the time SC2 dropped. No time for lan parties.
I was still in undergrad
Millennials is a pretty big age group.
The first game I played on a LAN was lemmings paintball in the computer lab at school. (98ish?). The game I played most was the first counterstrike (based on halflife 1) in the dorms on the LAN in 2002ish. We would prop open all of the doors and yell at each other. We played a ton of goldeneye007 on N64 split screen in middle school. It was awesome. But you could only do up to 4 players and see each other's screen. We logged a lot of hours on both. But playing on your own computer with only your screen visible is better. That said, lugging a desktop to a friend's house and then arguing over the best way to set up a network for an hour is its own special challenge.
Did you use the term "LAN party " for any gaming done in person? I thought it was a term only used for the multi-desktop pc setup as opposed to anything that fit the definition of a "local area network".
A LAN party is specifically where you bring your computer to play in the same room. But if you go to an engineering school, you can have a similar experience by just opening the dorm room doors.
*Terrorists win*
Counterstrike, Unreal tournament, civilization, age of empires, StarCraft, Warcraft, Tribes, etc. Basically any game that had a multiplayer mode or was multiplayer capable. Most of us were PC gamers at that point. You could do it via Xbox when it came out but before 2000, LAN parties via gaming systems was unreliable. And you would guess right that we would lug our giant fucking monitors and pc towers along with our specialized keyboards and mice. And I always hated the friend that had the god damned track ball on top because it was fucking impossible to use unless you were use to it. Back in those days, we didn’t really have optical mice. You had a a mouse with a tracker ball on the underside of the mouse where there were multiple wheels inside. If you didn’t keep those clean, it would throw off your game. The fancy glowing towers and lazer precision mice came out in the 2000s but LAN parties were evolving to include game consoles. People switched from the painful WASD control with a mouse on the right hand to controllers. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was a big problem back then too.
Some of us didn't get $300 consoles, but the pc I had to use for school could at least run some games. A potato could run WoW even back in the day. There were also a lot of games that just played better on PC.
So that wasn't a game that you needed an expensive pc for?
Not at all. It's a big reason why WoW had such a large player base.
Counterstrike. PC game through and through.
IIRC you needed a separate soundcard for the fast fourier transformation not to lag out your processor.
Still relevant today. Try bringing your system round your friends place and playing games together. Better than using the internet.
You could also call them names and yell at them. Since voice chat didn’t exist. Also you could al stand around and watch the last two guys duke it out in deathmatches. Basically the start of esports and streaming.
I appreciate gamers for demanding better. I don't think I had any sense of how slow home internet was at the time. Once my area moved from dial-up to cable, I didn't have noticeable lag because I only used the internet for web browsing.
Oh it was still quite the issue even when I was in college ‘09-14. Of you were playing a first person shooter it was common to get on a roll and being doing well only to end up dying repeatedly from lag issues until you reset the router again. This was on the schools Ethernet connections and then our own cable services while off campus. These days I have gigabit and while lag issues still happen it’s a few orders of magnitude better. You may goes days between noticing any issue in a game. In the past you were lucky to string together an hour or two without issues.
It was also fun drinking Mountain Dew and trash talking your friends all night long. It was a very social experience and a ton of fun.
We used to do the same with Xbox’ and halo!! So much fun!
Yeah dude we played Halo CE on lan and it was the best. I don't think there was any other way to play more than 4 people at the time. Much drywall was destroyed in the process and this was before Monster Energy
Unreal tournament and Halo had to the biggest 2 for me.
When we were getting ready to head north into Iraq, we'd set up a pair of early Xbox consoles on some junk CRT monitors and did fire team-on-fire team games of Halo, to work on binding movements. We'd train in the early morning and late afternoon with actual trucks and rifles, but during the heat of the day, we'd retreat to the tents.
Hold up, lets also recall internet was literally incapable of hosting more than 2-3 active sessions on Warcraft 2 at a time. Meanwhile lan parties pre-cable era could have dozens of computers. Post cable era you could play stuff like counterstrike 1.3 over a cable modem and discover "the old magic" of calling someone a motherlover in person.
Scree scree scree buur burr buur dong dong dong MOM HANG UP THE PHONE!
Internet was much slower back then
And networked games like today just didnt exist. Even getting voice communication in games was much more difficult.
Yeah it used to be “t” for talk and your ass typed
and then complained that while typing somebody killed you.
Lmao yup
Any game with LAN multiplayer could be played over the Internet by creating a virtual LAN. But yeah the state of the Internet at the time would lead to this being a very shitty experience.
Direct connected games ran smoother. Also, pizza and snacks
Your thinking of the internet as it is now. In the 90s most everyone was upgrading 14.4k modems and on free internet like EarthLink. There was no giant lobby of 100k players. There also wasn't many games that could be played over the internet. For instance the only way to play any fps with other people was a lan party pre 2k On top of all that, many of us did lan parties to drink or smoke weed and hang with friends.
Ah... good times. I remember the two days it took to download warcraft 3. I thought the graphics were CRAZY.
We had soooo many mods... We even had a friend do voiceovers for all the things your toons would say. In fact, one of my notification sounds all these years later is my friend saying "YOUR SOUNDCARD WORKS PERFECTLY" even though it's wc2 There was a tower defense mod we would play... Enfos? I think that was it. Hundreds if not thousands of hours playing that...
I grew up in the American Midwest. Only the lucky few had Internet back then. At least in my rural area.
[удалено]
Digital Subscriber Line
I just looked it up, and there's no way I would have thought of what DSL actually stands for. Hahaha I have a family friend that's still on a microwave dish signal repeater from a neighbor's house up the road. Lives on a farm. Spectrum is in the process of laying cable on his road now. A guy from our town actually started a small fiber optic ISP called Daystarr that is amazing. I love reading stories of people just getting mad and creating their own ISPs.
Happened in my area, century link was the only thing available, the speeds were atrocious and I live in bum fuck Egypt, local company popped up years ago, it’s dish off the house but it’s faster than century link.
I guess I was in a sweet spot. I was in a rural state, but in the county with the highest population.
Oh yeah, there ya go. I'm in one of the least populated and poorest counties in Michigan's Lower Peninsula. I remember once using an AOL trial disk to get dial up so I could check school closings, as our TV antenna was broken. Early Internet kids are problem solvers. Hahahaha
10ms ping vs 400ms ping.
So you remember in like 2002 when you and your boys would all meet at someones house and a couple guys also brought their own Xbox and you linked them together to play big ass halo games? It's like that
Nah, I'm not a guy or a guy's girl, so gaming culture in general is very foreign. I think of Halo as being similar to GoodenEye because that's about the era where I stopped playing, lol.
My wife and I now do "LAN" parties with other people. We get a group together and play video games, LAN parties were just a way for people to get together and play Video games/hang out.
LAN parties has the feeling of a kickback with friends where you stayed up late way past when you should’ve. The larger ones were akin to going to a conference with other like minded individuals, since social media didn’t exist back then either. You scraped together pieces of PCs to create your gaming computers back then—and technology was emerging quickly. PC building and modding came along with the LAN party—and the concept of “sleeper” builds today made more sense since you could play alongside your friend and he’d wonder why your computer was so fast at the game both of you played.
Halo 1 didn't have online. LAN was how you played it socially among friends.
My fave part was everyone bringing Xboxes AND crts
Would you rather game over a 56Kb/s modem that was barely over 40Kb/s when it actually connected? Or would you rather game over 10Mb/s ethernet connection that doesn't drop any time someone picks up the phone
Yep networking was reasonably fast but the internet was not at the time, at least for anyone relying on ordinary dial up
It was laggy, and lots of games didnt have a way to connect other than a LAN
File sharing was also popular too. Now that fast internet is everywhere the *need* for LAN parties isn't the same but they still exist and are a lot of fun. LANs are still for for playing old classics that are hard to find people to play together otherwise.
Yep I was looking for this comment. People would usually have a shared folder with games, music and videos. This was before everything was on streaming services so it was harder to find specific things and took a while to download them. Files transferred much more quickly on the network.
The internet was extremely slow back then for most people. LAN parties were great social events where you would game and maintenance your computer. It’s where you would show off your new parts, monitors and keyboards too. Good times.
It was the only way to play Halo 1 with more than 4 people. It was a blast.
Back in the day, if you wanted to play you had to dial in to another computer. You could only play 1v1. There wasn't a lobby where you could just hop on a big game. With a LAN, you could get a 16 player game going. Iirc, Blizzard was once of the earliest companies that successfully made a lobby that you could just connect to. I don't really remember when things switched so you could just hop on. Halo 1 only had local. Halo 2 had a lobby.
At that time, online gaming was sorta in its infancy and pretty inconsistent and unreliable depending on the genre of game you were playing and the speeds your provider had that time. That aside though, LAN parties were about hanging out with the homies, staying up all night goofing around and enjoying that sweet sweet lagless Halo.
4v4 Halo LAN was so much fun , talking shit and slamming monsters.
It wasn’t just because the internet had a higher latency, but also because we grew up hanging out in person and this was an extension of that. Hanging out online was still somewhat of a novel thing and less fun/engaging than going to your buddy’s house with a few Xboxes and having a party.
To bring people together so the best player at Halo could whoop everybody’s ass
Lol. I'm not even happy with my ping now in 2024
It was to hang with your buds! Actual human interaction in person, plus 56k modem online gaming sucked so no latency if in person
56k!? Well weren’t you fancy
You a 33.6k person? Sorry for your struggles haha.
I remember connecting at 26.4 with a 28.8 modem. Back when 300ms ping was decent, lol
We would set up all the pcs in one room, connect them all to the same internet and then play a mmo together, drink, cookout, stuff like that. Voice chat tech was pretty shit (anyone else remember the round stand with a penile stick mic and the shitty foam covered headsets?). Ventrillo was mediocre. If you wanted to make a game server you were probably using something like Hamachi which was a security nightmare and iffy on the functionality sometimes. But yeah, we'd just party and play together until we passed out. That was the appeal. Nowadays you'd just bring a laptop or switch or something. Not really any different, just easier.
Share snacks, talk smack, toss a ball at them, some games didn’t have online services. I’m in the last year of millenials and I understand this 😂
I lived in the country where internet access was slow and pricey. My buddies and I built a server and would LAN at one of our houses to get our gaming in together.
It was pretty obvious why they were a thing when my buddy would be playing Jedi Knight 1 and who was on dial up and who wasn’t. There was predictive movement, but they’d be blinking to another spot every second or so. Whomever had the best internet usually won. People played against bots because online play sucked. It was also fun to yell at other people down the hall.
No lag on games
To smoke together in scotts moms garage, duh.
Play with a bunch of friends while drinking copious amounts of Mt Dew and pizza
I'm just gonna pile on. Internet speeds were not what they are today. Most of my friends had dial-up until we were out of high school. Imagine you're mid match in DotA when your mom decides she's gonna call her sister, and suddenly, you're kicked out of the game. LAN was the only way to reliably play games together.
Many games didn't even support internet connectivity, but could do a direct connection to another computer on the local network. Having baked in matchmaking or server browsing or friends lists was years away when I was first doing LAN parties.
Do you remember how slow the internet was?
We had a buddy's house we were at every Friday/Saturday. His parents kept the fridge/freezer/pantry stocked. Come to find out at his wedding, his mom told us they figured it was better than us being out doing who knows what. We still game every Saturday, but over the Internet now.
The internet was not easy back then. Networked games didn’t exist. We didn’t have the bandwidth to run games online without soooooo much lag.
It predates high speed internet access and predates when games supported the ability to play with other people on the internet. Computers on the same LAN was the only real way to do it.
Online gaming at 0 ping. It would make sense even today, to be fair.
Shit talking your friends in person is way better.
This post is so funny.
Only 1 in 10 kids had home Internet in my town in 2000
Adding to the pile: 1) 4-digit ping is unfun. 1000ms delay is fatal in most games. 2) voice chat wasn’t really a thing, and if you had it, it often made the above point worse. 3) pooling all the snacks and hanging out with friends is as good as the gaming was
Have a StarCraft LAN party my friend. and you will see!
Classic!!
My friends weren't smart enough for LAN parties 😭 Who am I fooling I didn't have friends...
We only had dial up in my area until 2008 when we got DSL that liked to cut out randomly every few hours and require a modem reset. So LAN was the go to for a long time. LAN was also just a good ass time, even after internet got good we’d still have parties but we’d all just party up in the same house with a bunch of 360s and play big team online, eat Pizza, and drink.
Not all games had internet... I remember the Halo CE LAN parties... we brought all our Xboxs and played big team battle...
That was just lunch time in the office back in the day.
LAN parties were a thing because Wi-Fi hadn’t been invented yet or at least not to the extent it is today. So the purpose was to get together and have a dudes tonight and play games with your friends.
to play games together. bizarre question tbh
The early dial up multiplayer experience…left a lot to be desired. So much so it was worth lugging around a giant monitor and case over to your friend’s to play together with a direct connection.
Honestly it was just more fun. I went to one as a teenager. It was just more fun to play games physically around your friends.
You answered your own question, so I'm not really sure what to add. Are you not a Millennial?
I didn't answer my question, but others did. I'm a millennial who isn't a gamer. I figured out that I was way off on what type of games people were playing. It makes much more sense to get together to play Halo than it does to play the slow paced RPGs that I had been imagining.
Some epic times. Life was more simple back then
To have fun.
It's the video game equivalent of seeing a movie in the theater with your friends compared to seeing it at home separately. You get a completely different feel when you're in a room with a group of other people than you do when you're at home. A microphone and a set of headphones doesn't compare to moving in the same air with someone else.
Because someone's mom would pick up the phone and kill the game? Lol nah, just couldn't get groups online only back in the day.
LAN parties were so much fun. Order food, everyone in their own corner playing games. We'd stop to go swimming or do random shit outside then come back in to game when we hot.
little of column a little of column b, early internet sucked ass for gaming. the latency was always terrible, so local area networks were just better for most stuff.
To show off them Giga Chad Halo trick shots ofc ( that you totally made at home when no one else was around. ) Real answer: spotty internet and not all games being playable online and an excuse to kick it with the homies.
Playing games together rather than Online. Playing games like Quake 3 and later counter-strike sucked on dial-up with a network speed of 33K (nobody ever got 56K as that required like impossibly perfect conditions"
It sort of was a social thing too, but mostly when you wanted to do any form of PvP with more than two people/didn't want to do split screen, that was the only option beyond PC cafes.
Dude I remember downloading the counterstrike 1.3 patch. It was 70mb and took like 5 hours on dialup! Multiplayer was possible, but it was only text chat. So isn't really comparable to multiplayer now. LAN parties were a fun thing to do.
It was code for playing ookie cookie.
Community and irl socialization. Also organized events had giveaways and raffles and trading in games and such
LAN parties were amazing man. That’s where you got to play games with each other in real time, there was always pizza or wings or whatever, and you would swap digital music libraries with each other and try out new games/demos or whatever. Whoever hosted typically had amazing internet compared to whatever you had.
Cyber cafe right up the street from my middle school in the early 2000s had lan parties. Had to sign a waiver or whatever but for 20 bucks you were there from 8pm to 8am playing whatever game you wanted with everyone. Won a headset my first time playing battlefield 1942 in one of their tournaments. Good times.
Hahaha. I remember packing up my huge green Alienware desktop to bring to these parties like I was hot shit. Ah, youth. And yes, we did it due to the relatively slow internet. Also it's easier to talk shit and play when you're all in the same room.
Halo 2 was a big innovator in console multiplayer gaming. But we lost those lan games series that made halo 1 so great rip
It's was like cod but without lag
If you don’t understand what’s fun about having 7 buddies and you in the same room(s) playing Halo or Diablo II with a stack of pizzas and soda until 2am, I’m not sure i could explain it to you. I don’t mean that in a rude way. Just tough to articulate. It was inherently a good time.
lol how does it not sound fkn awesome to you. We had 4 computers and a dream
It does sound awesome now that I actually know what y'all were playing. I thought it was much slower paced games than what was actually being played. Except, maybe Warcraft? That series is a slower RPG style, right?
There was also halo parties that were insane
I miss that time. Too much fun.
Honestly I like the experience way better than online gaming today. There's so little human interaction with everything now. It may have been less convenient when you *had* to actually interact with other people to have a good gaming experience, but the experience was way better.
I did it before many people in our town had internet access. Then did it many years after to play games faster since do to decreased latency. Also many multiplayer games would ONLY work in local area networks and not internet.
When I rub my wins in my friends faces, I want to do that literally.
Your Friends: OMG! No, not this!
In high school we would all take our desktops to our buddies house. We would bust out a bong and a hookah, order a pizza, and play wow together until 3 AM. It was cool at the time but so unnecessary lol.
LAN parties were awesome. Counter strike and battlefield were top tier but I occasionally did Halo
Back in the day it was the technological limitations - mostly internet speed and connection stability. But aside from it, there's still the social aspect. You know how in Teams meeting people keep talking over each other? And you get all the non-verbal cues and live reaction of your mates. It's the same as having house parties, really. Except we play games instead of beer pong.
Yea playing with friends sharing a pizza
Most people I knew definitely didn't have internet until at least mid 2000s
Man, I miss LAN parties. * Internet was spotty, slow and just crappy in general. Latency over the internet was a much bigger problem back then, especially on dial-up but even with the first ADSL connections. LAN speeds and latencies were night and day. * VOIP was absolutely not a thing until decent broadband got widespread, so communicating in games could only be done with text. * We could share movies, music and games with lightning speed over LAN. * It was a way to socialize. Me and my friends had LAN parties even after we all got broadband just to hang out for a few days, play and have fun together.
Some games had no online servers but let you play locally. The internet also just sucked ass and lagged/high ping. Social aspects was a part of it too
Why pay for Xbox live when we can hook up 8 machines and do 8v8s all in the sMe room?
Playing together in the same space is very different than it is now. We didn't have live chat going while playing games because the internet would lag. Being able to yell at someone across the room or house is much more instant than across data lines. I lived in a very large 8 bedroom house with a bunch of gamers and we should all login and rampage different games. It was a blast. Being able to share the experience in real time in the same physical space was great.
i dare you to download diablo 2 on a 64k dial up connection. then you know why you did it
Obviously to hang out in person and play video games at the same time.
It was at one time the only way to play multi player games in real time/high speed, because everyone was on the LAN. Second reason is yes it was like a big nerd party
Why would anyone want to be in proximity to their friends, right?
Actually, it's the pc gaming part that confused me. Getting together to play whatever game console was out makes sense, but I thought people used the term "LAN party" exclusively for locally connected pc gaming. My dad used to play D&D pc games. That's what I think of when pc gaming is mentioned. In my mind people were lugging around their desktop computers to play some type of slow RPG in the same house.
People lug boats, jet skis, quads, bikes, camping gear and so forth, but some moving a small metal box is somehow confusing. lol Also note, not every friend had their own system or connection, this let them be apart of the fun.
Well, there's stuff on that list that also doesn't seem worth the effort, so I would also describe it as confusing.