Same here. I feel couch co-op is really having a small revival the last years.

You should try Duck Game!

Fantastic list! Commenting in part just so I can find it later.

You should add Screencheat to your list. Amazing fun.

LAN parties were an interesting normative force at my high school. You always hear about the tension between jocks and geeks. But jocks like playing video games as much as geeks, who had the technical know-how to get networked games going. So the jocks at my high school were really interested in being friends with us nerds. We finally had something in common! Our LAN parties were this strange alternate universe where the captain of the football team hung out with the science fair nerds. We even had cheer leaders come to our LAN parties.

I graduated before the internet really obviated the need for LANs. From younger friends, I heard that when the Xbox 360/PS3 came out, LAN parties slowed down, and jocks ceased interactions with nerds. But there was that brief period in the early 2000s where we existed in harmony.

    "The kind of things we were interested 
    in didn't count for much in our high school." -- pg

Oh the LAN party... Me and my mates in Rio, around '99, would carry our PC towers, monitors, and backpacks of cables, keyboards and tech paraphernalia to our one of our apartments in Ipanema and set up wherever we could. There'd be maybe 4-6 of us.

We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network. At first we used coaxial cables and T plugs with a terminator at the last computer, what a nightmare. Then eventually I think someone brought a switcher and we used the regular rj-45s.

We still talk about epic Starcraft battles, insane coop quake run throughs and the day Diablo II came out and we played 12 straight!

Usually at the end, in the early Saturday or Sunday morning we'd go get a cheap breakfast go home to get changed and meet back up at the beach to debrief last night's shenanigans.

Board games are the LAN party now, at least for my social circle. I still meetup with the now 15 years older LAN gaming crowd. And I understand board games have been around forever but now we live on screens I think they have a more special place than 15+ years back. Plus the mechanics/quality of games coming out these days is at another level. If you think of board games as Monopoly/Risk, I would strongly suggest checking out what is available these days.

I still miss LAN parties though...

Probably about 4 times per year on a long weekend, my mates and I still get together in someone's warehouse or garage and have a 3 day LAN. There's normally between 15-20 people, and we play a mix of CS:Source, Warcraft 3 custom maps, AoE, Dota 2, and whatever else the fashion is at the time. A recent one has been Spintires, which is a blast with 4 people!

That said, the amount of sleep and the quality of the food we eat has definitely improved in the last 15 years or so - no more fast food for all meals.

LAN parties are still a thing among tight-knit gaming communities where the personal relationships are strong.

For example, I still play Descent [0] competitively, along with perhaps a few hundred others off-and-on. There's a group of about 20 of us who have become really close friends in the last few years, and we try to have a big LAN party every summer. We've also had quite a few small get-togethers where a handful of people will fly or drive out for a weekend. Last month, a friend drove out from a couple states away, and joined my wife and I at my grandparent's old cabin, at 9200 feet in elevation, with no running water but with electricity, and we played a bunch of matches.

In the past, I've been to Descent LANs at such unusual locations as a hog farm and a Dominican monastery. My wife and I also took our laptops on our honeymoon and played Starcraft: Brood War in a tiny trailer next to a lake in northern Idaho.

I'm also a part of a small Christian gamers group [1], and there are regular discussions about who would be able to get together in various parts of the country this summer.

People are willing to travel to meet friends. Lugging along a computer isn't all that unusual.

[0] http://descentchampions.org/ is the competitive site

[1] http://www.solidrockgamers.com/

It makes me sad that everyone is acting like they're no longer a thing. If you can get a few friends together then it's still great fun, possibly more so than it used to be.

There's a big organised LAN party here that runs three-four times a year, with space about 80 people in a big school hall, and then some friends of mine get together now and again at each other's homes. With modern kit you can just turn up, plug in, and be playing.

Our most recent LAN party was a friend's stag night, a full weekend of gaming, drinking, and general craziness. Also the first one we've done and explicitly left space to use the TV which was great fun later on once everyone was over Counterstrike.

For anyone that likes this sort of thing, I found a few videos of old LAN parties from 1998-2001:

https://youtu.be/ch__Ah2iCtQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X43soJt7jI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6bzgl6vKA

Also, this is much more recent but really captures the whole LAN party spirit. It's a basically bunch of guys playing sudden-death Minecraft.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUNF3_hO_no

There are some other LAN games on their channel that are fun as well.

Shameless plug.

Can't speak too much for it just yet (working through sponsorships, etc), but some friends and I are setting up a 160p LAN in Chicago later this year. It's particularly neat since we're not the only ones to have similar goals. LANs are coming back ;).

We also do ~monthly LANs out in Wauconda (Chicago suburbs) area if anybody's interested.

Here's just some preliminary stuff we've been working on. The switch we have is the same as LHC's: http://imgur.com/a/BICDK

Other opinions welcome. Here's mine:

LAN parties were implementations "instant messaging", "VOIP","video conferencing" and maybe some other things I'm omitting. Before these things even had a "market".

Gamers solved all these challenges when the web was still a blatently crude hack and the internet was dog slow by today's standards.

Then they successfully and reliably pierced NAT to play games over the internet. Even when the internet was painfully slow. Before Napster, before Bittorrent, before Kazaa/Skype, etc.

Others outside of gaming seemed to be struggling with coming up with solutions for these basic but obviously valuable "services". There is a wasteland of failed/abandoned "VOIP" projects from the 90's that still boggles my mind.

Except for some well-funded research labs, gamers did it first. LAN over internet. (Ethernet frames in UDP packets.) It might be ugly to some people, but it does work.

Now, I will let you all tell me how my opinion is misinformed.

Hm, what nobody seems to have mentioned yet: We've all grown up. In that time I used to play 6 hours every week day and maybe 12 hours every weekend day. Now I'm happy if I can make it to 5 hours a whole week combined. If you would organize a LAN party with all my old friends from back then and all the games, I would still need to look in my calendar if I can make it there.

Not just times have changed. We have changed as well.

I also seem to recall having a LAN party New Years Eve...

Those were the days. We would spend all night doing the LAN party and all day either hunting or paying paintball.

Andy, I'll never forget your first LAN party: showed up with 7GB porn on your 8GB hard drive and refused to delete any to make space for the games because you only had 33.6k dialup.

For us it was and ever shall be Age of Empires. Wololo!

The LAN party is still well and alive in the demoscene, in the form of demoparties which are basically LAN parties plus computer art. Some of them have become extremely large:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assembly2004-areena01.jpg

http://www.ozone3d.net/public/jegx/201308/asm2013.jpg

Growing up, my way to make money for the summer was playing RTS games competitively at LAN parties and regional/national tournaments - way before e-sports were a thing outside of South Korea.

I met people from the internet at big LAN parties, I got introduced to the demoscene, wargames / CTFs and a whole lot of other things that shaped my career; I even ended up dating girls from that world.

Is there anything equivalent to the old internet cafe for kids these days? Or (active) IRC channels, for the matter.

I'm so glad to have been a part of this (short) era. Video games and junk food from sunset to sunrise with a bunch of people connected by CAT5 cables! While technology makes things easier and more convenient, sometimes the effort and lack of accessibility leaves better memories.

In middle school, I helped organize a weekly "computer club" that met after hours in a school computer lab. It quickly degenerated into a giant Starcraft lan party every week, and became much more popular as a result.

In early high school, I played a lot of Tribes 1 (with some mod that I don't remember the name of) and Aliens vs Predator.

In later high school, CS 1.6 and Deus Ex multiplayer, still with Starcraft mixed in.

In college, it was "flavor of the month". We had a crazy file-sharing network, so the common in-dorm games switched around all the time. Warcraft 3, Counterstrike, Halflife 2-based mods, various open source FPSes, tons of Halo 2+3, and locally-hosted WoW servers are what stick in my mind.

I loved lan parties. I hated moving my 17" CTX crt monitor to them. It was as deep as it was wide and must have weighed damn near 40 pounds.

The future ain't all bad.

When I was a senior in high school, Cisco offered their NetAcademy program to a few high schools around the nation. It was a pretty sweet deal: for a relatively small price, you could earn your CCNA as an optional elective. You had to get approval to take the class; basically, the 10 of us were the most technically minded and computer literate students in the school.

So, of course within a few weeks many of us were staying after school to use the top-of-the-line (circa 1999) computer equipment to play games. :) Half Life and the various mods (particular Action Half Life [0]) were favorites. Even the teacher eventually got in on the fun.

"You shot me! If you shoot me again I'll fail you!"

A lot of times a few folks would come over to my house in the evenings because we had a blazing fast (again, circa 1999) 128k ISDN line in the house, supposedly to do "homework" but really gaming, surfing the web, playing MUDs. Sometimes we'd kick on a movie like Army of Darkness while gaming.

Such great memories and an awesome time to be alive. I still keep up with a few folks from back then but I'd love to know what happened to everyone else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Half-Life

I really got emotional when I first read the article. LAN parties were that epic moment when you felt you were part of something new, we were initiating the new socialization process we are all now accustomed to. Nerds kind of disappeared in my mind

Oh how I hated to set up the network: We've usually gathered around saturday morning, everybody hauling up their gear and waving their parents goodbye. The oldes guy in our group had removed all network cards from the PCs at his office and we spend the next six hours installing the network, hooking up BNC cables, trying to get the IPX to work, executing all kind of arcane rituals in order to get the games to work.

Later on network cards got cheaper so we had our cards pre-installed. Still the expensive 3com cards didn't mix well with the cheapest Planet ones. (We had to keep the cheap cards on one side of the BNC part and the the others on the other side...)

Ethernet was a godsend.

A couple of years later Laptops made spontaneous LAN parties possible. I wouldn't wanna go back.

This was even before LAN parties became a thing, but I still remember playing 'hunt' (IIRC) on pre-Solaris Sun 3/50 workstations in the math department computer lab.

Nothing quite like those slime bombs.

Found a bit more on this impossible to search for game: http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/255131/the-internet-s-forgott...

And: http://www.acquerra.com.au/personal/bird/hunt/

I sometimes wonder whether hackathons are in some way an evolution of the LAN party (or the demo party).

It does depend a lot on the hackathon - many these days are very business-oriented. :(

...but there are still some where people show up just to experiment with technology - to prototype something quickly and understand whether a technical idea has potential and where the dragons are.

(These are definitely my favourite hackathons. If anyone knows of any like this around London, let me know. I'm hopeful that http://www.hackthesenses.com/ might be one!)

Like the author's group of friends, mine has stopped throwing LAN parties. I think our last ones were around early WoW time.

However, large LAN parties are far from being dead. There's Dreamhack and the like, and my alma mater runs a huge 2000+ players LAN event every year (https://lanets.ca/). It seems like it's become more of a grand event, as opposed to the couple times a year gathering with a handful of friends.

As a guy in his late 20s, it's really interesting to see how gaming has evolved and democratized itself during the past couple decades.

Seems the spirit here is more smaller events, but we still run a 720-864 person event every 3 months here in Perth, Western Australia

www.rflan.org

We still get together to play a variety of games from AOE2 to CS to BFBC2. The last time we got together we had way too much fun with Blockstorm which is like Minecraft meets Quake.

I remember Doom, Decent, and Aces of the Pacific were popular too.

This reminds me so much of my own youth, except for the beach debriefing :). Especially the 4 hours trying to get all computers to "see" each other brings back memories. I remember a particularly puzzling problem where my computer and a friend's computer were unable to communicate directly, but could otherwise talk to everyone else. After half a weekend, we found out that the on-board network devices on our motherboards (which were identical brand and model, ordered from the same place) had been manufactured with identical MAC addresses. After all the black magic that we had applied to the problem, without luck, throughout the LAN, it gave a great sense of joy and relief to fix the problem by simply spoofing the MAC and changing one digit :). We had an epic 8 hour long Age of Empires session afterwards ...

I remember from one university lan party (c. 2004) that there were 6-7 people who just wanted to play C&C:generals as well as some who would rather be playing UT2K3 but then that group overlapped with a couple of people who had insistent on turning up with linux (slackware? Gentoo?) boxes and hadn't got them fully working yet.

Then after a while a few from the 6-7 playing generals get bored, realise they don't have UT downloaded, so they head over to that guy who doesn't seem to play games but just shares files and watches movies to get the discs from him. He's happy amusing himself watching supertroopers for the 15th time and oblivious to the fact that it's 3 hours in and so far only 2 games of generals have managed to happen.

UT2K3 is huge (for the time), there's only one set of DVDs so while it's shared around the network is going slow as shit because everyone is piped into a single hub, but eventually after an hour or so the laggers manage to finish downloading and installing it.

By which time the people who started on UT2K3 are bored because they had envisaged an epic 6v6 with vehicles and instead had to settle for a fairly lame 3 man deathmatch, where one guy was so much better and couldn't help but dominate the other two.

So the linux nerds and slow installers (the games we'd be playing were published well in advance, please make sure you're bought up and fully patched) finally finish installing and then updating their installs and find that no one really wants to keep playing, but a larger game with vehicles does finally get under way.

"Starcraft is small, what about starcraft?" pipes up one unfortunate who's just suggesting that because his computer is too slow to actually run anything more modern. "Nah, but I've got WC3" someone else more helpfully says, but starcraft guy doesn't want to clear out his 2GB of pr0n to make space for that.

And this was in the days where getting ethernet working wasn't really problematic.

>>We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network.

Me too! It was only when I did a CCNA that it occurred to me why you can't just give every machine an arbitrary IP like 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.8. And the mystery of what "Subnet Mask" meant caused a few facepalms as well.

"Did you all double check so that WINS is enabled??"