LAN parties still happen today, but they’re not like they used to be.
The purpose of a LAN party was to get a bunch of friends together, have them bring over their PCs, connect them all together to a single router and play multi-player games. Why? Because it was a “no-lag” environment, and because it was just fun to do.
In the 1990s, everyone was still on dial-up, however there were several game titles available that were LAN-capable. One computer box would act as the game host, and everyone connected to that host to play. This was a far better experience than anything you could have online at the time because there were was no network “choke” whatsoever. Even at 10 Mbps speed, the gaming experience was amazing.
LAN parties grew in popularity and eventually gave birth to the commercial version of it, known as the internet café (which for all intents and purposes is the modern version of the arcades of the 1980s).
As noted above, LAN parties do still exist today but are much fewer in number due to modern gaming consoles with internet connectivity built right in. Not too many kids these days see the need for a LAN party when you can connect with all your friends right from the console without having to bring your computer equipment anywhere.
The thing lost however with the LAN party decline was the social part of gaming. Gamer geeks used to go to each other’s houses, set up shop and go for it. Since online gaming replaced that, the in-person social part has been all but lost completely.
For those that still do LAN parties today old-school style, the big bulky PCs have been replaced with laptops and the networking environment is now completely wireless. All of this is a significant improvement. The only big problem is that many modern game titles simply have no LAN options, so you’re forced to play the old stuff. The old stuff isn’t bad or anything like that, but it is crappy the newer stuff largely ignores even offering a LAN connection option.
I sincerely wonder when someone is going to get up the nerve to set up a “retro LAN gaming area” in an internet café if it hasn’t happened already. This would be relatively easy to set up. Six PCs, all early-Pentium-era CPUs, all running Windows 98 SE, all with CRT monitors mated to them, old-style keyboards and mice, etc. And the game loaded? Unreal Tournament, of course. It would not surprise me at all if the kids constantly begged to play those machines because of how cool UT is – assuming you could even get them out of the house.
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