LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :)
I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3
It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experience possible for participants :3
[1]: https://tg.no (no English site exists unfortunately)
Historic bit: in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a bit of a trend - and quite some tension - of demoscene parties getting taken over by LAN parties. I believe the Gathering used to be a demoscene party, but completely transformed into a gaming LAN party.
There were also those that tried to be both (I believe Assembly is doing both to this day) or those that kept the gaming out (Mekka/Symposium, which no longer exists, but there's been a followup party called Breakpoint, and later another followup called Revision that still exists).
It's an uncomfortable truth that even TG is failing to pull in participants lately, but LANs don't have the critical role in nerd culture they had in the 2000s. I'm happy it still exists and the board seem to be making some decent attempts at revitalising it for a modern crowd
I attend “The Party” in Aars, Denmark for a few years around 2000. It was at the crossroads of broadband, but got to taste the demoscene vs gamer experience. It was magnificent.
There were a real festival atmosphere, and afterwards you’d declare never to attend again - that was, until the tickets were released and you somehow couldn’t help yourself.
As kids me and my friends used to muse over the fact that growing old, eventually moving into a care home would be awesome. Pension, you say? Well, what's that if not an unending LAN party!
It turns out reality is different - the older I get, the less interested I have in computer games. It feels like I've seen it all at this point, and I'd rather see grass twice than a virtual anything.
When me, and my generation, are old enough where people start getting shipped into care homes, I suspect there won't be any interest at all, save perhaps a nostalgia trip every now and again.
I feel both sides of this. I'm almost 40 and for me it comes in waves. I dumped like 100 hours into ARC Raiders over the past few months and had a great time with it, and before that I've loved obsessing over single player adventures like Spider-Man and RDR2, as well as indie darlings like the Hollow Knight games.
But there are always gaps in there where I don't feel as drawn into it. Right now I try to get in a few rounds of Deep Rock Galactic every week with my twelve year old, and that hits the right things as far as having some progression for us to chase together while still being time-boxed to clear rounds and not having a huge survival/base-building component to it like Minecraft or Valheim or Don't Starve Together.
Basically... I expect this pattern will remain for the remainder of my adult life. I'm not going to retire and suddenly be like "ah yes now I will revisit six decades of forgotten gems sitting in my backlog" but I'm also not going to completely walk away from it. Rather certain things will grab me and I'll obsess over them for a bit, and then I'll take a break to work on a coding project or build something with my hands, or putter around the garden, or whatever else it is.
Our high school computer science team did a StarCraft LAN party on a flight coming back from a coding competition. We felt like the coolest kids in the world when we did that.
My core memory of LAN parties was the one I organized at my university and there was so much power draw it threw the breaker for the entire student lounge building.
Had to run a massive extension cord across to the next building to spread it out a little so we wouldn’t keep tripping it.
The article opens by saying LAN's chief advantage was "nearly eliminating latency" and closes by saying revival is as easy as sharing your Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi and a wired switch are not the same thing. The one thing that made LAN parties technically distinctive is the one thing the revival pitch quietly removes.
There's a huge difference between the latency you get from connecting to each other via the Internet, and the latency you get going via a local network, even if that network is a wireless one.
There's an even bigger difference between that, and going online via the Internet back in the days when LAN parties were really popular, because the most common method of connecting to the internet was via modem.
The distinction they're drawing isn't WLAN vs LAN but WAN vs LAN. Remember that in the peak days of the LAN party it was an alternative to gaming on dial-up or DSL - even if you had a good connection it was unlikely the whole game had one. A reasonable Wi-Fi connection today is miles beyond the WAN connections of Y2K.
I think lan parties are set for resurgence since we're almost at the point where a small handheld can run almost any game. What killed lan parties wasn't the internets. It's having to schlep a CRT to my friend's house.
But LAN parties were probably more common during the CRT era.
I wonder how much of an impact harder to crack games has had, as well as many titles removing LAN play as a form of DRM. PC LANs were basically driven by piracy.
This is still very much alive in the fighting game scene. At least in the US, every major city has at least one local running a bracket and casual sets regularly. This has many of them, not all: https://sk-tekken.com/tracker
My own efforts in this area amount to creating the game, Space Nerds in Space[1], which is a LAN game in which everyone gathers in a room with their computers, and each computer acts as one of the stations on the bridge of a starship: navigation, weapons, science, comms, engineering, damage control, etc. Multi-bridge is supported as well, so if you can overcome the insurmountable task of gathering enough people together, you can indulge in that luxury. This is in the same genre as such games as Artemis: spaceship bridge simulator and Empty Epsilon, but with the additional hurdle that it's linux only. Good luck mustering enough spacenerds. If there are missing features, well, it's open source, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.
Studios have "forgotten" even more than players. My friends and I regularly have Age of Empires 2 LAN parties, and you can't even connect to each other without an internet connection and steam or Xbox account.
It feels a bit dystopian considering that 25 years ago the very same game let me pop the CD out and put it in another computer to set up a LAN.
LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :)
I am moderately obsessed with LAN parties, so I built a file sharing tool for LAN parties specifically, if you want to check it out https://justinbecker.dev/blog/2026/05/16/why-i-built-lanbuck...
No modern LAN party discussion is complete without reference to kentonv's houses:
https://kentonshouse.com/
https://lanparty.house/
There’s still a few large ones. LANfest and quakecon are two that come to mind. Also LAN all night.
>I have on multiple occasions gone player to player, typing the IP into their address bar for them.
Sounds like you play with some serious noobs, friend.
I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3
It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experience possible for participants :3
[1]: https://tg.no (no English site exists unfortunately)
Historic bit: in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a bit of a trend - and quite some tension - of demoscene parties getting taken over by LAN parties. I believe the Gathering used to be a demoscene party, but completely transformed into a gaming LAN party.
There were also those that tried to be both (I believe Assembly is doing both to this day) or those that kept the gaming out (Mekka/Symposium, which no longer exists, but there's been a followup party called Breakpoint, and later another followup called Revision that still exists).
It's an uncomfortable truth that even TG is failing to pull in participants lately, but LANs don't have the critical role in nerd culture they had in the 2000s. I'm happy it still exists and the board seem to be making some decent attempts at revitalising it for a modern crowd
I attend “The Party” in Aars, Denmark for a few years around 2000. It was at the crossroads of broadband, but got to taste the demoscene vs gamer experience. It was magnificent. There were a real festival atmosphere, and afterwards you’d declare never to attend again - that was, until the tickets were released and you somehow couldn’t help yourself.
Good times.
As kids me and my friends used to muse over the fact that growing old, eventually moving into a care home would be awesome. Pension, you say? Well, what's that if not an unending LAN party!
It turns out reality is different - the older I get, the less interested I have in computer games. It feels like I've seen it all at this point, and I'd rather see grass twice than a virtual anything.
When me, and my generation, are old enough where people start getting shipped into care homes, I suspect there won't be any interest at all, save perhaps a nostalgia trip every now and again.
I feel both sides of this. I'm almost 40 and for me it comes in waves. I dumped like 100 hours into ARC Raiders over the past few months and had a great time with it, and before that I've loved obsessing over single player adventures like Spider-Man and RDR2, as well as indie darlings like the Hollow Knight games.
But there are always gaps in there where I don't feel as drawn into it. Right now I try to get in a few rounds of Deep Rock Galactic every week with my twelve year old, and that hits the right things as far as having some progression for us to chase together while still being time-boxed to clear rounds and not having a huge survival/base-building component to it like Minecraft or Valheim or Don't Starve Together.
Basically... I expect this pattern will remain for the remainder of my adult life. I'm not going to retire and suddenly be like "ah yes now I will revisit six decades of forgotten gems sitting in my backlog" but I'm also not going to completely walk away from it. Rather certain things will grab me and I'll obsess over them for a bit, and then I'll take a break to work on a coding project or build something with my hands, or putter around the garden, or whatever else it is.
Our high school computer science team did a StarCraft LAN party on a flight coming back from a coding competition. We felt like the coolest kids in the world when we did that.
We did this on a train! Also StarCraft, also a coding competition, also felt like the coolest kids in the world.
Don't you tell me the competition was in New Jersey...
One seat plug per laptop, and a bonus one for the network switch haha.
My core memory of LAN parties was the one I organized at my university and there was so much power draw it threw the breaker for the entire student lounge building.
Had to run a massive extension cord across to the next building to spread it out a little so we wouldn’t keep tripping it.
The article opens by saying LAN's chief advantage was "nearly eliminating latency" and closes by saying revival is as easy as sharing your Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi and a wired switch are not the same thing. The one thing that made LAN parties technically distinctive is the one thing the revival pitch quietly removes.
There's a huge difference between the latency you get from connecting to each other via the Internet, and the latency you get going via a local network, even if that network is a wireless one.
There's an even bigger difference between that, and going online via the Internet back in the days when LAN parties were really popular, because the most common method of connecting to the internet was via modem.
The distinction they're drawing isn't WLAN vs LAN but WAN vs LAN. Remember that in the peak days of the LAN party it was an alternative to gaming on dial-up or DSL - even if you had a good connection it was unlikely the whole game had one. A reasonable Wi-Fi connection today is miles beyond the WAN connections of Y2K.
Lan? Still awesome.
For my kids' parties I have 3x OG xboxes. Each has 4 controllers. Plug them into a router.
12 player lan. Halo, Nascar, (6 player) crimson skies, mechassult.
https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/wiki/Xbox sort by per console and total players.
I promise they have vastly more fun all being in the same room playing each other all at once than anything with modern graphics.
I think lan parties are set for resurgence since we're almost at the point where a small handheld can run almost any game. What killed lan parties wasn't the internets. It's having to schlep a CRT to my friend's house.
But LAN parties were probably more common during the CRT era.
I wonder how much of an impact harder to crack games has had, as well as many titles removing LAN play as a form of DRM. PC LANs were basically driven by piracy.
This is still very much alive in the fighting game scene. At least in the US, every major city has at least one local running a bracket and casual sets regularly. This has many of them, not all: https://sk-tekken.com/tracker
My own efforts in this area amount to creating the game, Space Nerds in Space[1], which is a LAN game in which everyone gathers in a room with their computers, and each computer acts as one of the stations on the bridge of a starship: navigation, weapons, science, comms, engineering, damage control, etc. Multi-bridge is supported as well, so if you can overcome the insurmountable task of gathering enough people together, you can indulge in that luxury. This is in the same genre as such games as Artemis: spaceship bridge simulator and Empty Epsilon, but with the additional hurdle that it's linux only. Good luck mustering enough spacenerds. If there are missing features, well, it's open source, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.
[1] https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space
Quake Arena and LAN parties during college created some of the best memories I have related to computer games.
In wired LAN mode you can play Mario Kart 8 deluxe with up to 12 players, or Mario Kart World with up to 24 players.
(picture of original/SNES Mario Kart reminded me of this; note you can also play it on the Switch)
Studios have "forgotten" even more than players. My friends and I regularly have Age of Empires 2 LAN parties, and you can't even connect to each other without an internet connection and steam or Xbox account.
It feels a bit dystopian considering that 25 years ago the very same game let me pop the CD out and put it in another computer to set up a LAN.