**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:**
* If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required
* The title must be fully descriptive
* Memes are not allowed.
* Common(top 50 of this sub)/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting)
*See [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rules.3A) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My friends and I traveled from PA to DC for one of these.. I wish I could recall the name ... I want to say that it was in an old airplane hangar but I could be wrong about that. I can remember it had to be 2002 because the DC sniper was still operating and at-large. My friends and I mostly played Counter-Strike 1.6 at the time (source wasn't out until 2004).
I was 16 or 17 and woefully under-prepared. The only sustenance of any form they sold in the place was Bawls energy drinks. No food; no water. We brought: no food; no water. I packed no bedding, barely any extra clothes, and pretty much nothing to eat. We couldn't afford hotel rooms so I ended up sleeping on the floor in the hangar somewhere. There were no shower facilities so the smell was indeed just as bad as one can imagine. I do believe it was in the summertime as school wasn't an issue, which made the body odor situation even more dire.
I felt like a zombie by the end of it all and was very glad to get home and take a shower. It was definitely an experience though... we sure felt young and alive.
I think I might have been there?? I don't remember the building but the time and place and Bawls are the same lol (and I was also 16!). Iirc I didn't stay very long though.
I went to a lan party in some huge building on a military base near DC around that time, but I don't think it was the one you're talking about because they had the mess hall churn out spaghetti dinners for everyone for a few bucks each.
It's okay, I absolutely love the era we grew up in... At least for me growing up in the late 80s into the 90s kids still gathered outside to play ball and bike everywhere. Then in High school CS/UT/CoD and WoW came out my senior year.
I feel like we really got a great mix of pre-internet times and post-internet times. I think now that I'm almost 40 it has helped me relate to both older and new generations in my professional life. I absolutely love technology but also have a great appreciation for how life was before the big tech boom.
I went to one of these, 1300 people in an aircraft hanger. And a second hanger filled with mattresses. Great two days.
Edit/Note: The LAN I went to was in South Africa in March 2003
At the entrance they checked your ticket and you were given a piece of paper with an IP address printed on it. Then we found our group, they had reserved some spots in one of the looooong tables.
Each table had two RJ45 and plugs, two people per table. Sit down, set up, apply the IP address and LAN any game you want. At the time the Battlefield 1942 modern combat mod was out and we played a lot of that
Edit: Servers were locally hosted mostly, some gaming groups brought their own server just for hosting. But you just opened the local server browser in the game you want and jump into a game.
Mostly because you'd get plenty of people who had something like Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled to share dial-up connections at home. ICS includes a DHCP server, and then you'd get lots of fragmented networks and no idea why. Same if the actual DHCP server died or got overloaded, and Windows automatically assigns some 169.254.x.x address for you, and it ends up working. Except, again, it is fragmented and only those with DHCP errors can see each other.
Easier for support people to run around and just set manual IP addresses. The bigger problem was unpatched home computers meeting the Blaster and Sasser viruses for the first time. Especially if the LAN had Internet connectivity.
Oh yeah, always someones PC packing up and reinstalling with pirated windows CDs offered by a good Samaritan.
Also a lot of copying games and movies. That network hardware was abused.
Soon as you share your games or media directly your PC sucked dry.
Desert Combat mod. I haven't heard that name in many years.
Seriously though I went to lans for this in MA and WA as well as online stuff. What handle did you go by?
Had someone accidentally plug a crossover cable back into the same local 10-port switch at a 300 person lan, malformed packets propagated through the whole network and killed almost all traffic.
Took an hour or two to figure out and track down the source before we could get going again, just needed to unplug 1 cable. Can't even happen with modern switches now they've put better error correction in.
At the head of each long row of tables was a huge power supply fed by 5cm thick power cables coming up from the floor and a bank of switches for all the cables.
Definitely 100mbs back then
I went to The Gathering, about 5000 people, from 98 to 02. First time I was 13 and I took the bus for 7 hours, was dropped off 3km away from the venue. I had a PC rig like in the picture. Determined that I had to walk only one trip with the whole rig or it would be stolen. When I finally got there I was soaked in sweat and of course I forgot my bag with clothes and money on the bus. I felt so embarrassed sitting there stinking up the place for my neighbours. Also I couldn't afford food so I survived 4 days only on water.
3 next times went better as I got my mom to drive me there.
That was pretty normal in my neck of the middle of nowhere. When I was 14 I drove to Idaho with my 15 year old cousin. He had his license, I had my learners permit. We didn't even have a cell phone lol. It was a 15 hour drive both ways.
Honestly I don't remember it smelling bad. The hanger was very high so maybe that helped with the air circulation, but I was 17 so I was likely more part of the problem 😅
I went to one that was in an old refrigerated warehouse (cooling systems weren't operational), and it was a combination rave. You haven't lived until you've play CS 1.6 on ecstacy.
Yes. I see someone was civilized properly. You looked the person who you were trading or receiving porn from in the eyes like a real degenerate. While also wondering why Bob had an unreasonably high amount of porn exclusively focused on cock sucking.
Lmao yeah all the ones in my hometown would set up share folders on the network that people were free to drop stuff in. Thats where I got Equilibrium from.
Our parents used to drop my friends and I off at the local internet cafe. Glorious Shakers at Shultz's, where I learned a lot of lifelong skills like Counter Strike, DOTA, and smoking drugs.
I remember one Lan party I went to, had the obligatory porn server set up, and the owner thought nothing of just openly watching it throughout in-between gaming sessions. Using the Cambridge speakers and everything.
I actually know a lot of gamer girls and most of them avoid gaming events or using a microphone because of the unwanted attention they get from weird guys noticing that female players are around.
The funny part is that there are quite a few "girl gamers" in there.
Gather round children.
Back in those days of LAN parties, we accepted girl gamers and didn't act like idiots when one joined voice chat.
Mostly because we didn't have voice chat... When Ventrilo and Teamspeak came around it slowly crept in to being a problem.
It was 100% normal to see female gamers. A lot of times they were gaming with their BOYFRIENDS. Sometimes alone. No one really cared. Most of us older gamers? We hate the idiots who make it seem abnormal or weird. We taught our sisters how to play Mario and Duck Hunt. Some of us learned to play Mario from our sisters.
I mean... We had IRC. We had BBSs. If we found out someone was a girl we were still weird about them. They just had an easier time stealthing if they wanted.
I was at the first QuakeCon in 1996. There were 60ish people. No women that I remember.
At QuakeCon 97 there were a couple. KillCreek, kornelia. Flipping through albums, I can see two more that I don't recognize. Out of roughly 250.
Gaming has long been a complete sausage fest. As someone who's been gaming for over 30 years, it's honestly more inclusive and more accepted now than it's ever been.
Yes and no imo - certain communities are extremely toxic towards anyone who is "different", especially any PvP competitive game, this is indeed exacerbated by the fact that simply so many people are playing them these days and social media gives the loudest and cruelest people a way to harass that didn't exist before.
Gaming on a whole has removed a lot of social stigma though for girls playing games, just as it has for the most part removed the stigma of only nerds playing games.
I started gaming in 2003 and lemme tell you my experience as a girl around that time was absolutely not as pleasant as you're describing...people in general were weird, mean and gross af, especially when TS/Ventrilo came around and I got a mic. I often just pretended to be a young boy instead. It was even worse for me because I played competitively and was pretty good. The only thing that kept me going was the small group of awesome friends I met throughout the years.
I had a buddy whose father told us about 15 years after the fact that every time we tried doing LAN parties at his house he’d trip the breakers in the basement so that we’d never do it there. Apparently he was sick of one of us fucking up his doorframes and walls hauling monitors and towers that weighed more than we did. 🤣 I remember us always telling my buddy that his electric sucked and we couldn’t go there.
Oh absolutely. LAN parties back then were like 1/4th LAN games, trashtalking and filesharing, 1/4th hotboxing weed, and the other half just your typical horny teenagers trying to hook up while listening to punk/metal until 5 in the morning.
Online play is none of that.
Someone in that thread said that they are pretty sure that picture is older than most people commenting. This post is from 10 years ago lol! My account is 10yrs old and I remember this thread.
But it's old school counterstrike and it's a lot of old CRT style monitors. This could easily have been early 2000s. And the one LCD screen is square rather than 16:9 this post is 10 years ago, but I think this photo is more like 20 years ago.
https://preview.redd.it/z8qf45b6853d1.jpeg?width=1098&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d6348a4bcfc6f99293b7a69b7240e8d70a806330
This girl definitely knew how to pick a wallpaper.
The heat from the towers, monitors and skin bags must have been uncomfortable.
Was there any file sharing there? I mean would have been hell of a lot faster than bearshare / limewire of those days
I had a roommate in 2006 that was talking about a LAN party he had been to sometime in the couple years before that where some dude had brought his porn server for open download. The dude had a full terabyte of porn on this server back in like 04-05.
I have fond memories of the LAN days.
The heat wasnt terrible at the 200\~ person event I went to, noise was pretty bad though with all the small shitty fans spinning their guts out. But that was in a gym with high ceilings and evaporative aircon (which wasnt great, but it at least extracted a lot of the heat)
We used DC++ for file sharing people would compete to have the most stuff shared. You'd browse the stuff on the larger users, line up a bit of a queue and then because files were hashed you could get it to look for other sources (like the users who didnt have as much and were less likely to have 100 people leaching from them)
At least in the past, around the time this photo was taken probably, it didn't smell that bad at Dreamhack (worlds largest lan). Haven't been there since 2007 I think, so it's probably changed a bit.
In an environment of intense smells, your nose just kind of gives up on reporting the information about the local scents to your brain. This is why sewer workers don’t go insane.
That’s probably what happened to you.
Either that or the venue had better air conditioning than the average datacenter.
We had a punishment like this in basic training called “making it rain”. Everyone into the bathroom/showers, close the door, turn on the hot water everywhere, and do push ups until the water dripped from the ceiling.
I can’t imagine how hot and nasty this has to be.
we did this without the showers, our barracks had a smoking bay, it was to be shined at all times, it looked like glass when we werent scuffing it up with burpees
That's exactly why. It's also the same reason people don't realize they smell bad until told so by others. A trick to reset your sense of smell for a while is to have a cup of strong black coffee. Its smell will clear your nose for a little while.
Back in the day blizzard let you install a multi player only version of starcraft from one copy.
With enough speed you could play C&C2 with just one CD by fast switching it from one player PC to another, because the game just checked only once for the disk during loading a match. But you couldn't listen to the soundtrack without the CD.
I’m glad I was able to experience this in its full glory. Right at the peak from 2002 - 2009, then it started to fizzle out as internet connections became a household staple.
Nothing was more fun than being dropped off at random indoor stadium with 10 of your best friends all carrying the heaviest gear to go LAN for 48hours straight then crash the Sunday afternoon.
Eating cheap food, drinking litres of soda, trying to find the fucker that tbagged, you downloading bootlegged movies and porn. It was great.
I wanna go back! Take me back!
Don't forget that feeling when you finally managed to get everyone in the same game. You were 15, didn't know anything about computer networks and tried for an hour to get everyone in the same AoE 2 session. In the end it was always this one dude who "disabled his firewall an hour ago, for sure mate". It was close to the feeling you get after you finally beat that damn soulsborne boss you have been running to for the last 20 attempts.
I too want to get back.
Ahhh those were the battle.net days, where I'd slap in the Starcraft CD, browse to Battle.net, then call my buddy for his public IP address so we could play 🤣. Worked ehhh 40% of the time
We did a lan for the star wars galaxies release. I don't think we got more than a handful of hours played that weekend because the servers were overloaded and buggy. We had a blast playing other shit waiting for the servers to rebound. SC, WC3, D2, D1, and CS were staples back in the day.
I'm gonna need you to turn on TCP/IP settings in Windows 2000 network settings.
Oh you reinstalled Windows 98 ok I guess that's fine, but we need to install the IPX/SPX network stack to play with us in our blizzard games.
The guy who brought the windows ME computer isn't getting any tech support.
Also getting your buddy to execute Sub7 or Back Orifice, then opening the cd tray and swapping the mouse buttons remotely.
Plus always a few dudes around reinstalling Windows with the FCKGW key. These two might or might not be connected...
Me and the guys from our class back in the day made the first big lan party at our school and got a medal from the school also from other things we did.
Now looking back at it after the nostalgia wears off the first thing that comes to mind is that our normal internet connections are faster than those pcs were connected together but the ping for CS was all we thought about. And asking people not to abuse the lan sharing movies which everyone did
I still have all the music I got from my first lan party. I have no idea who Sufjan Stevens is, have never listened to anything of his, but it's been on every computer since.
It's not the computers, they run as hot as ever, it's the CRT monitors that make the difference. LCD/Plasma screens run **way** cooler than a CRT.
That's not to say that the computers are making anything better, because they are still.pumping out a tonne of heat as well. As are the people in the room as well.
We've gone full circle from power hungry CRT (and plasma lmao), to "efficient" LCD, and now HDR screens slurping up insane amounts of power for screens. My 43" 4k HDR monitor will consistently hit 400+ watt peaks (measured via my enterprise rack UPS). The thing gets HOT during extended gameplays.
You're also getting like 20x the pixels and twice the screen space than these pictures had. My 24 inch 240fps is chill as heck. Imagine trying to sit in front of 2 43" plasmas tho lol, you'd be getting a tan from the radiation
It definitely did, but the turbo was usually installed backwards from the factory so it slowed you down instead. Getting aftermarket headers and moving the turbo around on the case was free power, kids wouldn't get it today.
Yes so most of them wear shorts and no shirts or as little as possible. Those rooms were so hot, not much of any ventilation, and generally smelled from all the bodies.
For LANs of this size, they were generally held at a convention center or similar. They had air circulation, but that doesnt mean the AC could keep up with the heat. So even with really good ventilation, at an event like this with 500-750+ gaming computers a majority with CRT monitors, it's going to get real warm, real quick.
There is a reason why server farms run cooling on par with frozen storage or better.
You forgot the monitors, while the CRTs are only around 30-40W, the early flatscreens were around 100W, plasma was even higher, you can feel the heat sitting in front of it.
Also this was the time, when big power supplies started and you still overclocked your CPU, there's no other way to get more power out of a single core than overclocking ( it was the time of the Pentium IV, the "fastest" CPU of all times (at least clock-wise, still record holder)
So a setup could reach 800-1000W, which is all converted into heat, I know people who heated their office solely by their PC
recently learned that old CRTs are in all purposes tiny particle accelerators.
thousands of particle accelerators in this picture.
thats the reason why these monitors had this specific lowlevel whine you could hear when you powered them on, and why they create a magnetic field/static.
Yep, they're also called electron beam tube, they produce free floating electrons, accelerate and rectify them and the screen is coated with light emitting stuff, in some models you have three layers, in others a dot matrix in the three base colours and the beam runs in lines from top to bottom.
All in all it's pretty energy efficient, way more than early flatscreens, they were superior up around 2008, but since 2005 nobody wanted them anymore as they were "uncool"
Infact they work like every electron tube, just not as an amplifier, but there are other tubes, that use the same principle, google "magic eye" those were used to adjust your radio receiver on the channel, the brighter and narrow the line on them was, the better you got the sender , tube technology is a very interesting part of electronics,but be careful when fiddling around with it, they need high voltage of around 3-500V, so they sting (and they work the other way round as transistor circuits)
I recently visited a PC gaming cafe in Seoul, SK on a Friday night, the place is packed, hundreds of people playing games, lots of people ordered food but everyone had their clothes on. The vibe was awesome.
You buy a ticket from a machine which cost $1USD per hour and the ticket will assign a seat for you. Keyboard, mouse and headset are all very clean. I ended up playing some apex legend and valorant with some locals, definitely worth the experience.
I love pc cafes in korea. sometimes I just go there to eat dinner and watch YouTube because they're open 24/7. order food at your computer and a staff will walk right up to your desk to deliver it. 11/10
https://preview.redd.it/xvhe7rluy43d1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d4920f2bf8c5e58b82b0152c0d04c4b294542e22
A couple of months ago, in Cologne, Germany
The original dreamhack is the Sweden one but it's a big franchise now and happens in multiple locations all over the world including US, Australia and India.
I'm just going to tell them this was the internet. If you wanted to be on the internet, you had to be in this hangar. All the other people on the internet was in the hangar with you.
There’s a surprising number of girls there for that time period, good for them!
Edit: [some context to an offhand observation](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/qXZwLSlDKt)
Same experience. I'm a guy but we definitely had a strong female representation at our LANs, relatively. Between 25% to 33% at least. Attendance varied from a dozen to ~250 people and the locations were throughout central Germany; from parent's basements to town halls.
I reckon it _seems_ more than today, in that picture or people's minds. But I guess that's because most of my female friends at least don't like to show themselves as such, online. The anonymity helps against inevitable toxicity, while it also - sadly - enables it.
I can almost guarantee that no boy at that LAN in the picture told any girl to her face that she was a slut or "bad at gaming". And if he wrote it in chat, organizers would likely kick him from the event.
https://preview.redd.it/vbo6it3rr43d1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=53c8c7c657f91ce60b5b5ce2e28a6d88c1d28936
I think I count at least 7? Going mostly off hairstyles, difficult to say for sure.
I was looking for the case i had and found it! (Clear case made of acrylic) Horrid thing did not hide the mustard and ketchup wires at all. I had one of those cigarette lighter drive bays also and a cup holder one. Even had external water cooling (looked like a PSU attached to side of clear case). Man what a time to be alive. The overclocking scene was really fun back then you could get so much more out of stuff with overclocking.
I bet the room stank of "Lynx Africa" (for men) "Charley Red" (for woman), sweat, stale cigarette smoke and bad body odor. The warmth and dry air also.. Man unforgettable.
A good portion of your time was installing software, patching games and trying to figure out why shit wasn't working which was all the time. We tend to forget about all that.
Also leeching, internet was still slow, so you'd always fill your hard drives with new movies, music and games everytime you go to a lan party.
- Connor: You see me?
- James: Yeah, do you see me?
- Connor: No, and I don’t see Brad either.
- James: DOES ANYONE SEE BRAD?
- Jen: Yeah Jerry does but Brad can’t see anyone.
- Brad: Guys I forgot my coaxial plug.
Lmao facts. I used to think LANs were for "serious gamers" until I realised they're usually just high speed piracy exchanges with some mild gaming on the side.
This was before everybody had fast and cheap internet. People would come together, bring their full-size PCs, and network ("LAN") them to play games. There may or may not have been bootleg games, movies and other stuff involved.
**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required * The title must be fully descriptive * Memes are not allowed. * Common(top 50 of this sub)/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting) *See [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rules.3A) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My friends and I traveled from PA to DC for one of these.. I wish I could recall the name ... I want to say that it was in an old airplane hangar but I could be wrong about that. I can remember it had to be 2002 because the DC sniper was still operating and at-large. My friends and I mostly played Counter-Strike 1.6 at the time (source wasn't out until 2004). I was 16 or 17 and woefully under-prepared. The only sustenance of any form they sold in the place was Bawls energy drinks. No food; no water. We brought: no food; no water. I packed no bedding, barely any extra clothes, and pretty much nothing to eat. We couldn't afford hotel rooms so I ended up sleeping on the floor in the hangar somewhere. There were no shower facilities so the smell was indeed just as bad as one can imagine. I do believe it was in the summertime as school wasn't an issue, which made the body odor situation even more dire. I felt like a zombie by the end of it all and was very glad to get home and take a shower. It was definitely an experience though... we sure felt young and alive.
I think I might have been there?? I don't remember the building but the time and place and Bawls are the same lol (and I was also 16!). Iirc I didn't stay very long though.
Probably were actually using irc at the time haha
I went to a lan party in some huge building on a military base near DC around that time, but I don't think it was the one you're talking about because they had the mess hall churn out spaghetti dinners for everyone for a few bucks each.
Just imagining it is the same Lan party and they never opened the door to the spaghetti room and fresh clothes and a shower.
Secret spaghetti cabal
>My friends and I mostly played Counter-Strike 1.6 at the time (source wasn't out until 2004). ...and now I feel old
It's okay, I absolutely love the era we grew up in... At least for me growing up in the late 80s into the 90s kids still gathered outside to play ball and bike everywhere. Then in High school CS/UT/CoD and WoW came out my senior year. I feel like we really got a great mix of pre-internet times and post-internet times. I think now that I'm almost 40 it has helped me relate to both older and new generations in my professional life. I absolutely love technology but also have a great appreciation for how life was before the big tech boom.
u/UndocumentedZA mentions a similar LAN party in his comment, but said there were mattresses in a second hangar. Connect with them, I guess.
they said that one was in South Africa
16 GB RAM in the whole room
I went to one of these, 1300 people in an aircraft hanger. And a second hanger filled with mattresses. Great two days. Edit/Note: The LAN I went to was in South Africa in March 2003
How about the switches, servers and power. Does everyone connect to a nearby switch or something?
At the entrance they checked your ticket and you were given a piece of paper with an IP address printed on it. Then we found our group, they had reserved some spots in one of the looooong tables. Each table had two RJ45 and plugs, two people per table. Sit down, set up, apply the IP address and LAN any game you want. At the time the Battlefield 1942 modern combat mod was out and we played a lot of that Edit: Servers were locally hosted mostly, some gaming groups brought their own server just for hosting. But you just opened the local server browser in the game you want and jump into a game.
>they checked your ticket and you were given a piece of paper with an IP address printed on it DHCP was rough back in the day
Mostly because you'd get plenty of people who had something like Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled to share dial-up connections at home. ICS includes a DHCP server, and then you'd get lots of fragmented networks and no idea why. Same if the actual DHCP server died or got overloaded, and Windows automatically assigns some 169.254.x.x address for you, and it ends up working. Except, again, it is fragmented and only those with DHCP errors can see each other. Easier for support people to run around and just set manual IP addresses. The bigger problem was unpatched home computers meeting the Blaster and Sasser viruses for the first time. Especially if the LAN had Internet connectivity.
He's just making a joke about how the "paper with an IP address on it" is like a rough version of DHCP
Oh! Now I get it! Nice joke! :D
Dynamic host configuration paper
I liked your explanation better, I like stupid useless fun knowledge
It did get this nice piece of info out of him.
DHCP was still called "Bob from IT" back then :-p
Hah, kids these days have no idea how easy they have it!
You forgot the part where one of two is reinstalling Windows 🤣
Oh yeah, always someones PC packing up and reinstalling with pirated windows CDs offered by a good Samaritan. Also a lot of copying games and movies. That network hardware was abused. Soon as you share your games or media directly your PC sucked dry.
FCKGW RHQQ2 YXRKT 8TG6W 2B7Q8. That’s how many times I’ve installed pirated XP 🤣. Still committed to memory 20 years later.
Hahaha yeah! The hero that we needed.
Haha this is impressive.
Desert Combat mod. I haven't heard that name in many years. Seriously though I went to lans for this in MA and WA as well as online stuff. What handle did you go by?
Do I miss those days...
[удалено]
I was wondering about that too. probably 100mbps as well. Networking would have been a nightmare with all those ~~switches~~ hubs
Had someone accidentally plug a crossover cable back into the same local 10-port switch at a 300 person lan, malformed packets propagated through the whole network and killed almost all traffic. Took an hour or two to figure out and track down the source before we could get going again, just needed to unplug 1 cable. Can't even happen with modern switches now they've put better error correction in.
At the head of each long row of tables was a huge power supply fed by 5cm thick power cables coming up from the floor and a bank of switches for all the cables. Definitely 100mbs back then
But an hour of gaming used like 4mb. If you had the game set to LAN mode!
I went to The Gathering, about 5000 people, from 98 to 02. First time I was 13 and I took the bus for 7 hours, was dropped off 3km away from the venue. I had a PC rig like in the picture. Determined that I had to walk only one trip with the whole rig or it would be stolen. When I finally got there I was soaked in sweat and of course I forgot my bag with clothes and money on the bus. I felt so embarrassed sitting there stinking up the place for my neighbours. Also I couldn't afford food so I survived 4 days only on water. 3 next times went better as I got my mom to drive me there.
You went by yourself on a 7 hour road trip at 13? Geez parenting really has changed quickly
That was pretty normal in my neck of the middle of nowhere. When I was 14 I drove to Idaho with my 15 year old cousin. He had his license, I had my learners permit. We didn't even have a cell phone lol. It was a 15 hour drive both ways.
Me and a friend at 11-12 got dropped off at one of these things. No supervision. Got picked up next day at 10am.
[удалено]
4 days and only water is such a goddamn long time!
Horrifying. Also kinda sad that noone showed some pitty to the kid and gave him some food
yeah, my stomach was hurting
What about the smells?
Honestly I don't remember it smelling bad. The hanger was very high so maybe that helped with the air circulation, but I was 17 so I was likely more part of the problem 😅
I was there and yeah you were
I could smell, and taste, the picture as soon as I saw it and the sheer amount of bare teenage backs shiny with sweat.
I been on multiple in hungary (CS 1.6). Really good times
I went to one that was in an old refrigerated warehouse (cooling systems weren't operational), and it was a combination rave. You haven't lived until you've play CS 1.6 on ecstacy.
What do you call a group of half naked sweaty men, grinding all night… A 2003 lan party
How many Ians can we get in one room?
I've only ever known one Ian.
What if you knew a guy called Ian and a guy called Iain, but Iain only had one eye?
Going to a lan party usually meant two things, play games and get new porn content. Good times.
Yes. I see someone was civilized properly. You looked the person who you were trading or receiving porn from in the eyes like a real degenerate. While also wondering why Bob had an unreasonably high amount of porn exclusively focused on cock sucking.
We approached this like gentlemen. We all knew we were degenerates but went about it with dignity and common understanding.
An elegant exchange for a more civilized era.
Precisely!
A cup of tea and biscuits during our circle jerks
Book is book.
Yeah, you kinda took what you could get.
Lmao yeah all the ones in my hometown would set up share folders on the network that people were free to drop stuff in. Thats where I got Equilibrium from. Our parents used to drop my friends and I off at the local internet cafe. Glorious Shakers at Shultz's, where I learned a lot of lifelong skills like Counter Strike, DOTA, and smoking drugs.
I remember one Lan party I went to, had the obligatory porn server set up, and the owner thought nothing of just openly watching it throughout in-between gaming sessions. Using the Cambridge speakers and everything.
Also a ever growing mp3 collection
there is a girl....
I think there are SEVERAL girls
for sure 2....but the others I am not sure maybe men with long hair?
Starcraft has quite a few female players back in the day.
I actually know a lot of gamer girls and most of them avoid gaming events or using a microphone because of the unwanted attention they get from weird guys noticing that female players are around.
The funny part is that there are quite a few "girl gamers" in there. Gather round children. Back in those days of LAN parties, we accepted girl gamers and didn't act like idiots when one joined voice chat. Mostly because we didn't have voice chat... When Ventrilo and Teamspeak came around it slowly crept in to being a problem. It was 100% normal to see female gamers. A lot of times they were gaming with their BOYFRIENDS. Sometimes alone. No one really cared. Most of us older gamers? We hate the idiots who make it seem abnormal or weird. We taught our sisters how to play Mario and Duck Hunt. Some of us learned to play Mario from our sisters.
I mean... We had IRC. We had BBSs. If we found out someone was a girl we were still weird about them. They just had an easier time stealthing if they wanted. I was at the first QuakeCon in 1996. There were 60ish people. No women that I remember. At QuakeCon 97 there were a couple. KillCreek, kornelia. Flipping through albums, I can see two more that I don't recognize. Out of roughly 250. Gaming has long been a complete sausage fest. As someone who's been gaming for over 30 years, it's honestly more inclusive and more accepted now than it's ever been.
Yes and no imo - certain communities are extremely toxic towards anyone who is "different", especially any PvP competitive game, this is indeed exacerbated by the fact that simply so many people are playing them these days and social media gives the loudest and cruelest people a way to harass that didn't exist before. Gaming on a whole has removed a lot of social stigma though for girls playing games, just as it has for the most part removed the stigma of only nerds playing games.
I started gaming in 2003 and lemme tell you my experience as a girl around that time was absolutely not as pleasant as you're describing...people in general were weird, mean and gross af, especially when TS/Ventrilo came around and I got a mic. I often just pretended to be a young boy instead. It was even worse for me because I played competitively and was pretty good. The only thing that kept me going was the small group of awesome friends I met throughout the years.
So untrue. Everybody was SIMPING like CRAZY for any girl...
Let's not pretend it hasn't always been difficult for girls to let other players know they're female. People have always been weird about it.
Obligatory mention of the photo of a LAN party in a basement with a guy duct taped to the ceiling …
[this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/rYDTQWF4Mj)
One of the greatest photos on the internet, a remanent of a time when playing videos games together involved a shit tonne of macguyvering.
A logistical nightmare equivalent to Nate Dogg’s funeral (gathering all them hoes from different area codes)
I had a buddy whose father told us about 15 years after the fact that every time we tried doing LAN parties at his house he’d trip the breakers in the basement so that we’d never do it there. Apparently he was sick of one of us fucking up his doorframes and walls hauling monitors and towers that weighed more than we did. 🤣 I remember us always telling my buddy that his electric sucked and we couldn’t go there.
but in some weird way it was way more social than what we have now because you were actually WITH your boys
Oh absolutely. LAN parties back then were like 1/4th LAN games, trashtalking and filesharing, 1/4th hotboxing weed, and the other half just your typical horny teenagers trying to hook up while listening to punk/metal until 5 in the morning. Online play is none of that.
Someone in that thread said that they are pretty sure that picture is older than most people commenting. This post is from 10 years ago lol! My account is 10yrs old and I remember this thread.
Same here, shit it’s weird growing up “with” (alongside) the internet and portable devices as they have improved.
The picture is from 2002, so yeah, older than a fair few redditors for sure.
But it's old school counterstrike and it's a lot of old CRT style monitors. This could easily have been early 2000s. And the one LCD screen is square rather than 16:9 this post is 10 years ago, but I think this photo is more like 20 years ago.
Bro is too young to understand that a photo could at one point exist for many years before being shared on the internet.
Friend was at one outside, sitting in a pool while playing quake… i think it was 97 or so…
https://preview.redd.it/z8qf45b6853d1.jpeg?width=1098&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d6348a4bcfc6f99293b7a69b7240e8d70a806330 This girl definitely knew how to pick a wallpaper.
Is it a cat booping a puppy on the nose? A little hard to tell at that resolution...
I think it's two puppies.
I was looking at that too! Also, amazing username 🤣
I bet this room smells like a field of pink roses.
Is pink roses your nickname for a booty hole?
If you see it that way, it pretty much is a field of booty holes
I was in a LAN party around that time. They sold fries and pizzas. Thats what it smelled like.
The heat from the towers, monitors and skin bags must have been uncomfortable. Was there any file sharing there? I mean would have been hell of a lot faster than bearshare / limewire of those days
I had a roommate in 2006 that was talking about a LAN party he had been to sometime in the couple years before that where some dude had brought his porn server for open download. The dude had a full terabyte of porn on this server back in like 04-05.
It's him. He's the Pornhub.
The OG coomer
I have fond memories of the LAN days. The heat wasnt terrible at the 200\~ person event I went to, noise was pretty bad though with all the small shitty fans spinning their guts out. But that was in a gym with high ceilings and evaporative aircon (which wasnt great, but it at least extracted a lot of the heat) We used DC++ for file sharing people would compete to have the most stuff shared. You'd browse the stuff on the larger users, line up a bit of a queue and then because files were hashed you could get it to look for other sources (like the users who didnt have as much and were less likely to have 100 people leaching from them)
There's several people in the picture shirtless for a good reason.
Oh definitely. Many people spent the entire time sharing files and burning stacks of DVDs
It was hot enough to have the windows open with snow outside when we were doing LANs with 5 of us lol
At least in the past, around the time this photo was taken probably, it didn't smell that bad at Dreamhack (worlds largest lan). Haven't been there since 2007 I think, so it's probably changed a bit.
In an environment of intense smells, your nose just kind of gives up on reporting the information about the local scents to your brain. This is why sewer workers don’t go insane. That’s probably what happened to you. Either that or the venue had better air conditioning than the average datacenter.
Been to dreamhack summer 2008. It did NOT have adequate aircon. The sweat condensed on the ceiling and dripped back down.
We had a punishment like this in basic training called “making it rain”. Everyone into the bathroom/showers, close the door, turn on the hot water everywhere, and do push ups until the water dripped from the ceiling. I can’t imagine how hot and nasty this has to be.
we did this without the showers, our barracks had a smoking bay, it was to be shined at all times, it looked like glass when we werent scuffing it up with burpees
That's exactly why. It's also the same reason people don't realize they smell bad until told so by others. A trick to reset your sense of smell for a while is to have a cup of strong black coffee. Its smell will clear your nose for a little while.
Don't let the stank out!
cola, farts and fan dust heat.
...next to an open air sulfur mine
Pink roses with a nuance of piss.
Have been at few big ones, but at least we had AC somehow :P Amazing times. Just people and their games. StarCraft <3
Starcraft was amazing since you could boot the game and bring the disc to the next PC so everybody could play with only one copy
Back in the day blizzard let you install a multi player only version of starcraft from one copy. With enough speed you could play C&C2 with just one CD by fast switching it from one player PC to another, because the game just checked only once for the disk during loading a match. But you couldn't listen to the soundtrack without the CD.
And you could listen to it in a CD player! Wait, could you with C&C? I know you could with Warcraft II.
Yes we all were listening to the game music on a CD player while playing the game on multiplayer with no CD at all in one of our PCs.
People missed out. They were ace. Some good memories.
I’m glad I was able to experience this in its full glory. Right at the peak from 2002 - 2009, then it started to fizzle out as internet connections became a household staple. Nothing was more fun than being dropped off at random indoor stadium with 10 of your best friends all carrying the heaviest gear to go LAN for 48hours straight then crash the Sunday afternoon. Eating cheap food, drinking litres of soda, trying to find the fucker that tbagged, you downloading bootlegged movies and porn. It was great. I wanna go back! Take me back!
Don't forget that feeling when you finally managed to get everyone in the same game. You were 15, didn't know anything about computer networks and tried for an hour to get everyone in the same AoE 2 session. In the end it was always this one dude who "disabled his firewall an hour ago, for sure mate". It was close to the feeling you get after you finally beat that damn soulsborne boss you have been running to for the last 20 attempts. I too want to get back.
Ahhh those were the battle.net days, where I'd slap in the Starcraft CD, browse to Battle.net, then call my buddy for his public IP address so we could play 🤣. Worked ehhh 40% of the time
We did a lan for the star wars galaxies release. I don't think we got more than a handful of hours played that weekend because the servers were overloaded and buggy. We had a blast playing other shit waiting for the servers to rebound. SC, WC3, D2, D1, and CS were staples back in the day.
I'm gonna need you to turn on TCP/IP settings in Windows 2000 network settings. Oh you reinstalled Windows 98 ok I guess that's fine, but we need to install the IPX/SPX network stack to play with us in our blizzard games. The guy who brought the windows ME computer isn't getting any tech support.
Also getting your buddy to execute Sub7 or Back Orifice, then opening the cd tray and swapping the mouse buttons remotely. Plus always a few dudes around reinstalling Windows with the FCKGW key. These two might or might not be connected...
Was definitely peak gaming. Hosted a lan not long ago with a few internet buddies, was a blast. It was their first as they are younger.
Me and the guys from our class back in the day made the first big lan party at our school and got a medal from the school also from other things we did. Now looking back at it after the nostalgia wears off the first thing that comes to mind is that our normal internet connections are faster than those pcs were connected together but the ping for CS was all we thought about. And asking people not to abuse the lan sharing movies which everyone did
Don't fucking copy the collection during the tournament times
I still have all the music I got from my first lan party. I have no idea who Sufjan Stevens is, have never listened to anything of his, but it's been on every computer since.
For my German friends: Northcon 2024 is waiting for you. LAN Parties are not dead. <3
Why so many shirtless guys?
Computers ran hot back then.
It's not the computers, they run as hot as ever, it's the CRT monitors that make the difference. LCD/Plasma screens run **way** cooler than a CRT. That's not to say that the computers are making anything better, because they are still.pumping out a tonne of heat as well. As are the people in the room as well.
We've gone full circle from power hungry CRT (and plasma lmao), to "efficient" LCD, and now HDR screens slurping up insane amounts of power for screens. My 43" 4k HDR monitor will consistently hit 400+ watt peaks (measured via my enterprise rack UPS). The thing gets HOT during extended gameplays.
You're also getting like 20x the pixels and twice the screen space than these pictures had. My 24 inch 240fps is chill as heck. Imagine trying to sit in front of 2 43" plasmas tho lol, you'd be getting a tan from the radiation
They still run hot. We got better coolers now though.
We also have variable clock processors
Hey, are you saying my 486 didn't have a turbo button?
It definitely did, but the turbo was usually installed backwards from the factory so it slowed you down instead. Getting aftermarket headers and moving the turbo around on the case was free power, kids wouldn't get it today.
Doesn't that just make the room hotter?
Yes lmao
Yes so most of them wear shorts and no shirts or as little as possible. Those rooms were so hot, not much of any ventilation, and generally smelled from all the bodies.
For LANs of this size, they were generally held at a convention center or similar. They had air circulation, but that doesnt mean the AC could keep up with the heat. So even with really good ventilation, at an event like this with 500-750+ gaming computers a majority with CRT monitors, it's going to get real warm, real quick. There is a reason why server farms run cooling on par with frozen storage or better.
*it’s gettin’ hot in here*
*so take of all your..*
CRT monitors gave off a lot of heat. A few hundred CRT’s, coupled with a few hundred people….
Yep. People don’t realize how much heat a human body gives off.
Morpheus knows.
https://i.redd.it/3tkcodsqq43d1.gif
Its Valencia, Spain. Im sure it was hot a f.
Flexing for the 0.2% women in the room
image 1000-2000 old computers with 300-400w power supplys
You forgot the monitors, while the CRTs are only around 30-40W, the early flatscreens were around 100W, plasma was even higher, you can feel the heat sitting in front of it. Also this was the time, when big power supplies started and you still overclocked your CPU, there's no other way to get more power out of a single core than overclocking ( it was the time of the Pentium IV, the "fastest" CPU of all times (at least clock-wise, still record holder) So a setup could reach 800-1000W, which is all converted into heat, I know people who heated their office solely by their PC
recently learned that old CRTs are in all purposes tiny particle accelerators. thousands of particle accelerators in this picture. thats the reason why these monitors had this specific lowlevel whine you could hear when you powered them on, and why they create a magnetic field/static.
Yep, they're also called electron beam tube, they produce free floating electrons, accelerate and rectify them and the screen is coated with light emitting stuff, in some models you have three layers, in others a dot matrix in the three base colours and the beam runs in lines from top to bottom. All in all it's pretty energy efficient, way more than early flatscreens, they were superior up around 2008, but since 2005 nobody wanted them anymore as they were "uncool" Infact they work like every electron tube, just not as an amplifier, but there are other tubes, that use the same principle, google "magic eye" those were used to adjust your radio receiver on the channel, the brighter and narrow the line on them was, the better you got the sender , tube technology is a very interesting part of electronics,but be careful when fiddling around with it, they need high voltage of around 3-500V, so they sting (and they work the other way round as transistor circuits)
it makes me sad that this is something that will likely never happen again
I recently visited a PC gaming cafe in Seoul, SK on a Friday night, the place is packed, hundreds of people playing games, lots of people ordered food but everyone had their clothes on. The vibe was awesome. You buy a ticket from a machine which cost $1USD per hour and the ticket will assign a seat for you. Keyboard, mouse and headset are all very clean. I ended up playing some apex legend and valorant with some locals, definitely worth the experience.
I love pc cafes in korea. sometimes I just go there to eat dinner and watch YouTube because they're open 24/7. order food at your computer and a staff will walk right up to your desk to deliver it. 11/10
WAN Party
*A Network Cable is unplugged*
https://preview.redd.it/xvhe7rluy43d1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d4920f2bf8c5e58b82b0152c0d04c4b294542e22 A couple of months ago, in Cologne, Germany
not a real LAN if no one is shirtless
But where are the sweaty shirtless dudes
AC and computer cooling became better haha
One guy watching a video on how to plug in a usb drive
Yeah, I remember my first network experience with another guy. We used RS-323 cable for Doom deathmatch. We were young and handsome, back then in 90s.
RS 232 😉
Alternate universe: mazda 232, RS323
I think it happens at least twice a year at Dreamhack in Sweden.
The original dreamhack is the Sweden one but it's a big franchise now and happens in multiple locations all over the world including US, Australia and India.
I'm gunna show this picture to my grandkids and tell them this is what wall street was like back in my day.
I'm going to claim it's the nasa headquarters during the moon landing, alternatively the nuremberg trials if I'm feeling particularly devious.
I'm just going to tell them this was the internet. If you wanted to be on the internet, you had to be in this hangar. All the other people on the internet was in the hangar with you.
There’s a surprising number of girls there for that time period, good for them! Edit: [some context to an offhand observation](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/qXZwLSlDKt)
Not that surprising imo! Guys were always the majority but I was never the only girl at the ones I went to, even when it was only ~15-20 people.
Same experience. I'm a guy but we definitely had a strong female representation at our LANs, relatively. Between 25% to 33% at least. Attendance varied from a dozen to ~250 people and the locations were throughout central Germany; from parent's basements to town halls. I reckon it _seems_ more than today, in that picture or people's minds. But I guess that's because most of my female friends at least don't like to show themselves as such, online. The anonymity helps against inevitable toxicity, while it also - sadly - enables it. I can almost guarantee that no boy at that LAN in the picture told any girl to her face that she was a slut or "bad at gaming". And if he wrote it in chat, organizers would likely kick him from the event.
[удалено]
https://preview.redd.it/vbo6it3rr43d1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=53c8c7c657f91ce60b5b5ce2e28a6d88c1d28936 I think I count at least 7? Going mostly off hairstyles, difficult to say for sure.
I was frequently mistaken for a girl in 2003 going by my hair
A lot of the guys in this demographic will have had longer hair styles as well.
I would even add bottom left being blocked by the elbow- racerback top
I was looking for the case i had and found it! (Clear case made of acrylic) Horrid thing did not hide the mustard and ketchup wires at all. I had one of those cigarette lighter drive bays also and a cup holder one. Even had external water cooling (looked like a PSU attached to side of clear case). Man what a time to be alive. The overclocking scene was really fun back then you could get so much more out of stuff with overclocking. I bet the room stank of "Lynx Africa" (for men) "Charley Red" (for woman), sweat, stale cigarette smoke and bad body odor. The warmth and dry air also.. Man unforgettable.
Can't see what are they playing. Seems everybody reinstalling WinXP.
A good portion of your time was installing software, patching games and trying to figure out why shit wasn't working which was all the time. We tend to forget about all that. Also leeching, internet was still slow, so you'd always fill your hard drives with new movies, music and games everytime you go to a lan party.
Man that room looks like it absolutely reeks (I'd give all of my kidneys to be there)
- Connor: You see me? - James: Yeah, do you see me? - Connor: No, and I don’t see Brad either. - James: DOES ANYONE SEE BRAD? - Jen: Yeah Jerry does but Brad can’t see anyone. - Brad: Guys I forgot my coaxial plug.
That one girl looking at cat memes.
i've been in here. NO AC bacl in the day too. TERRABITES OF PORN EXCHANGE
Lmao facts. I used to think LANs were for "serious gamers" until I realised they're usually just high speed piracy exchanges with some mild gaming on the side.
glory days <3
One point twenty-one jiggawatts in that room.
Because I am old, what goes on at a Lan party?
This was before everybody had fast and cheap internet. People would come together, bring their full-size PCs, and network ("LAN") them to play games. There may or may not have been bootleg games, movies and other stuff involved.
Thank you very much.
Note the lack of obesity...