Hi everyone. Today I finished my latest project which was archving 1584 photos (+2 videos) of LAN parties in Tasmania ranging from 1996 to 2010.
Previously these photos were lost to time until I got in contact with the right people.
Looking through the photos is a great blast of nostalgia, I hope you get some enjoyment from looking through them too!<p><a href="https://issung.com/posts/lanphotosarchive/" rel="nofollow">https://issung.com/posts/lanphotosarchive/</a>
I miss LAN parties... I miss the custom cases, the fancy drawings, the spilled sugary drinks that stuck to the table, and the open shares where you would copy the whole `Movies` folder on a 100Mbits connection..<p>I modded my case of course, and it was crappy. I'd integrated a glass window on the side, so people could (would!) look at my custom water cooling setup. And of course, the glass (held by hot glue), would fall down at the most unfortunate time. Great memories!
I wonder what could be today's alternative to the environments of LAN parties of early 00s (I never attended to previous ones).<p>Even if one were to recreate the events, I feel lots of the activities of these meetings (meeting the selected few gamers face-to-face, sharing media, and only finally gaming) are somewhat obsolete or not needed anymore.<p>Part of me wishes we still had these but that would mean removing lots of improvements and putting up barriers to entry to computers, games and the Internet.<p>Dunno, I might be rambling but perhaps one should just be happy to have been part of that scene back then and move on?<p>For me, the closest I got to that has been participating to hackathons (although many misses) even though those tend to be more stressful than the LAN parties.
I'm so glad I got to live through the late 90s in my teens. It was truly a magical time with the advent of the modern internet. Looking at these pictures brings back some of that feeling and really reminds me of what a different place the internet and technology was back then. I still remember pulling up my first website with Netscape Navigator and a 14.4K dialup modem, the images rolling in bit by bit at what would be considered a truly glacial pace today. The realization that this digital canvas was mostly untouched and any of us could claim our own territory and make it into whatever we wanted. Just thinking of it makes me want to fire up the IDE and build something.
There is something special about looking at dated photos, even if they’re relatively banal. The lower fidelity corresponds with the fuzziness of memory, and is powerfully nostalgic if you lived though that time. I wonder if this effect will be lost as we enter an era where every photo is taken in high-definition on a high-quality camera phone, or if the improvement of sensors will continue to make older photos evocative.
One thing that strikes me about the photos I've flipped through so far, is being that LAN parties rarely have adequate sunlight, they're pretty consistently flash photography on film, and I think this effects how people respond (or are otherwise caught in the act) to having their photo taken. Nowadays phones have sensitive enough sensors to not need flash, and have infinite storage so you're unlikely to just take one 'snap' and move on -- so for anyone in the field of view of a person holding up their smart phone, you don't know precisely what moment was captured, or whether its a video being recorded, and I just think there's a subtle shift in behavior when you don't know whether an image is being captured or not.<p>Just thinking out loud, as someone who's recently picked up film photography again to see how it changes what pictures I get. Thanks for the effort collecting all these in one place.
I still do LAN parties every once in a while with a group of friends. Meeting in the same room with laptops and bulky desktop PCs to play old 00s games is still a lot of fun!
Is it possible to still play something like CS 1.6 on a LAN without needing an internet connection on modern computers? Occasionally I'll pop over to play-cs.com but curious if there'a a local mode...<p>My first LAN Party was sponsored by the Uni... Quake3. The two dept sysadmins took on the freshmen class (16 of us) and smoked us. Was hilarious.
I was a kid in Virginia in the 80-90s and never got to do any of this stuff, but I was on irc and I saw people all over california and in college doing lan parties. Made me so jealous. My friends didn't have the internet until the 2000s and they used it for research and AIM.<p>It's crazy how regionally the internet spread across the USA absolutely massed from California.
It’s a shame LAN parties aren’t much of a thing anymore, given how powerful of a gaming computer you can pack in a mini-ITX case these days and the complete ubiquity of flat panel displays. You wouldn’t even necessarily need a wired network (though still desirable).
If you like it there is also slengpung in the same spirit (<a href="https://www.slengpung.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.slengpung.com/</a>). The website archives thousands of demoparties photos from 1989 to 2018)
We have many more photos from RFLAN in Western Australia which ran 3-4x a year from 2002-2020. They are all on Facebook currently:
<a href="https://facebook.com/redflaglan" rel="nofollow">https://facebook.com/redflaglan</a>
What a coincidence, today is the annual LAN party with my school friends. We've been doing this once a year between christmas and new year for many years, and I enjoy every second of it.
saw a photo with like a dozen PCs running quake on a long table.<p>I guess a recent model of iphone or flagship android phone is more than capable for running 12 instances of quake at 30fps in parallel?