I’ve never been to a LAN party, not even back in the ’90s and early 2000s when they were quite the common occurance. Both my family and various friends did have multiple computers in the house, so I do have fond memories of hooking up computers through null modem cables to play Rise of the Triad, later superseded by direct Ethernet connections to play newer games. LAN parties have left lasting impressions on those that regularly attended them, but since most took place before the era of ever-present digital camera and smartphones, photos of such events are rarer than they should be.
Luckily, Australian software engineer Issung did a lot og digging and eventually struck gold: a massive collection of photos and a few videos from LAN parties that took place from 1996 and 2010 in Australia.
After trying a few other timestamps and a few more web searches I sadly couldn’t find anything. As a last ditch effort I made a few posts on various forums, including the long dormant Dark-Media Steam group, then I forgot about it all, until 2 months ago! Someone reached out and was able to get me into a small private Facebook group, once in I could see I had gotten more than I bargained for! I was just looking for Dark-Media photos, but found another regular LAN I had forgotten about, and photos from even more LANs from the late 90s. I was able to scrape all the photos and now upload them to archive.org where they can hopefully live forever.
↫ Issung
I love browsing through these, as they bring back so many memories of the computers and dubious fashion choices of my teenage years – I used to combine different colours zip-off pants, and even had mohawks, spikes, and god knows what else before I started losing all my hair in my very early 20s. Anyway, the biggest change is the arrival of flat displays signalling the end of the widespread use of CRTs, and the slow dissappearence of beige in favour of black. Such a joy to see the trends change in these photos.
If anyone else is sitting on treasure troves like these, be sure to share them with the world before it’s too late.
This was my era (different country of course). I guess most of those people would be around 40 years old now.
I remember working crap jobs just to pay for the next hardware upgrade and music album. So every two weeks, I would get a new CD for $10 shipped from SF. And every Saturday night we would get together and connect our battle-stations, probably a half dozen of us and play UT or Half-Life or whatever against each other. There was also an rsync of the “Movies” folder for everyone and “Star Trek” meant porn folder. New music still had guitars in it and we would share that too. And then Sunday morning we would wrap the router back up and take it back to the store for a full cash refund because it “didn’t work.” I make 20x the money these days but it seems a lot more stressful when others are dependent on my salary.
There wasn’t a lot of alcohol if any at all. I remember one Jagermeister night that was really cold. I mostly associate that era with Code Red Mountain Dew. Funny to see all the sugar beverages in the photos, and then there’s one can of Coke Zero, the people’s choice these days.
I spotted someone in one of those photos running Windows with the “Whistler” watercolor theme. That’s how I ran my Windows 2000 system and that’s the proper way to have everything look flat, are you listening? It even had scrollbars, imagine that. I wish default themes today were half as inspired as that one.
I remember the big CRT’s. I had a small (by American standards, a Ranger) truck and if my girlfriend (she hated her red hair and always dyed it purple) came along, she knew she had to sit with the 17″ CRT on her lap while we drove to the LAN party. One day, one of my friends won a financial settlement and got $30k. He promptly bought a Dell or Alienware battlestation north of $5k and it came with the first flat panel display that I ever saw. So cool. I never got rid of my CRT until 2006. Other clothing style choices of the time were tongue rings for girls, frosted tips for dudes, and baggy pants with chains on them. And some dudes had these big rings in their earlobe. I had black painted nails. My wife had a piercing above her eyebrow back then. She impressed me by swapping out an ATX motherboard or something, at one of the LAN parties, the rest is history.
One time I made the mistake of getting an AMD Athlon and the stock cooler couldn’t keep it from overheating. I drove through the snow to Radio Shack to get another one but it still wasn’t good enough. So I bought a Dragon Orb 3 from TigerDirect. It sounded like a vacuum when we started it up and one of the guys mom’s thought that we were vacuuming up marijuana or something and came up to investigate why we were always running the vacuum. But it was just the CPU cooler. I had two hard drives, one with pirated Windows for games and another with FreeBSD for school work. There was some calculus software that worked on FreeBSD with Linux emulation. That was 25 years ago and maybe I will try FreeBSD again on my new Christmas gift laptop for 2025.
Eventually we all went to college a bit late (I got serious at 21) and got careers and all moved away. Some people passed away and others I can remember their faces and AIM/Everquest screennames, but not their real life name. Sometimes I bump into people and they are a bit heavier and have less hair. I do not have Facebook so I don’t know what’s going on with a lot of them. Every now and then someone emails me an obituary. The fentanyl crisis is real. But life goes on and one day it will be a memory so if you are of that age, enjoy the moment.