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We still have frequent lan parties at our university
Man that brings back memories! We used to play OpenArena on our lab.
I really hope campus computer labs will never go away!
I am considering getting some kind of thin client sized office PCs that can run the following games fine:
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Half-Life
Half-Life: Opposing Force
Unreal Tournament 2004
OpenTTD
Age Of Empires 2 HD.
And more similar games, then I could rig up a quick LAN party and invite my friends and then can join without lugging their computers to my apartment
That’s a great idea!
Early Blizzard games actually leaned into this. I remember the original Diablo allowed you to install a “spawn” version of the game. Basically, a copy of the game which was locked into playing in a LAN game. My group spent so many hours in that game, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear and others. We’d all drag our systems to one person’s home, setup and spend a long weekend just playing. Taking a massive CRT monitor to someone’s home was always a PITA, but goddam it was worth it.
I had a friend with multiple PCs, so all we’d need to do is show up. He worked at a computer store or something (I think Circuit City), so he had discounts or something. We’d bring the pizza and whatnot and he’d provide the computers.
That was less cool when I got older, so we instead brought consoles to each other’s houses. I remember having Halo LAN parties where we’d connect two systems in different rooms and do red vs blue battles. Between the rooms, we’d have a table with pizza where we’d talk between matches and sometimes redo the teams. It was super fun despite having a pretty big skill gap.
At one of my jobs, we’d play OG Starcraft on our office LAN as well. We’d all be in the same room, but not about to see each other’s computers, so it worked out pretty well.
That just doesn’t exist anymore, except maybe on the Switch, and I’m not sure if anyone actually does anything like that these days (I’m not old with kids).
Quake 3 accidentally supported it by accepting any CD key compost of 2s and 3s.
https://lanwar.com is still going strong
They’re on mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@lanwar / @lanwar@mastodon.social and there’s an event this summer!
Hah, in the title photo with all the PCs, the far-right black case is what I’m still using at home. Ripped out a lot of the 2.5" drive bays to fit my GPU.
