gotta be either 8h nonstop hl1 deathmatch session with mate following phone calls of our host's sister (<3 crappy wireless phones & headsets), or starcraft until the next noon, missing school $

I remember LANning at school, we played Q3, StarCraft, and a little Audiosurf...nobody could beat me in any of the games :D

i failed math at school because we were playing the starcraft demo over the school network with people in other classes...

Hmm.. I'd have to say last summer actually had some of the best local LAN parties. Plenty of pizza, beer (We're all in our 20s), buds, good friends, and lots of games.

CTF Q4, CTF ut3, ffa Unreal Tournament (original) and even a whole lot of TF2 4v4.

I look forward to some more in the coming months, we're overdue!

see, that was never the case at our parties. the only games we could play all together was TFC and CS, because a friend and myself were too dominant in UT/Q3 and the others wouldn't even play with us.

cs was fun at times. the old versions where the weapons would still be there next round. hehe.

yeah, I'm fortunate that I'm a UT noob, and it evened out well with them being old school UTers, so it was pretty evenly matched, and they were alot better with the teleporters and maps.
In quake4, the handicap is built in, so I'd set myself from 100% to 70% and mostly did the flag caps, but my buddies on the opposing side had some nice rail skills, so in the end, fun was had by all.
:D

TF2 was cool, 'cause the wan connection was strong enough that we could all be on one team, and obliterate any team we'd play against that wasn't adept at using Vent, since we could literally shout at each other if we needed a hand.

Oh yeah, another one that was popular at our lans was Warsow, I suppose due to the ease of updating, it's free, and LAN meant the already very good netcode had very little work to do.

u could use just kb for that
a friend (good q2 player), he was choosing to play q2dm1 with handgrenades only against other guy; pb was he still won

yeah we did stuff like that a few times. and yes we also still won lol.

the best game for mixed lans is bomberman. everything else usually results in groups of 2-3 playing their favorite games.

I haven't got a particular moment that stands out but it was always fun just hooking up with your mates for 2 days of non stop FPS action.

When I used to do it often it usually consisted of UT,Q3, AvP, Delta force, Rogue Spear & CS. The good ole days.

Q3 was the best though. CTF + excessive mod o/ \o

My best private lan party memory is from 2002 or so, we had a 8-man quake lan at my friends house when his parents were abroad. It was the 2nd day into the nerding breach and I dropped a pretty potent micro dot on a whim while walking to the house.

Then we played a 2vs2 on dm6 and I took 2nd quad, and the acid started to kick in, the blue glow spread from the weapon model to the sides of my monitor and engulfed me in the process, minutes later I rushed the quad to 2nd level (stairs) spawn point with 20hp and the pg and wondered why I died :D :D

*oh and ninja edit*

My first lans were qw ffa ones at a friends basement :DD

Haha my man, you have just described the best story in this thread :D [+]

The earliest lans were funny, we just cheated on cs every way we could and sometimes took over channels, I once remember of us once kicking everybody out of #allstars .

The later lans became kinda lame because me and all of my friends had became distant - I discovered games like quake, while my friends continued on playing realistic shooters. Our last lan I just surfed ESR and sites and my crappy friends broke my bathroom door, puked on my adsl-gateway, stole my keys and pissed me off. I still wish I could keep lans if I had same-minded people to agree on my terms:

- no alcohol ( I don't really drink and I hate drunkards )
- everybody plays same game and it isn't a realistic shooter
- people can behave (eg. aren't idiots/dicks/typical finns)

everybody plays same game

That was a big part of what made private local LANs fun for me back in the day: everyone having the unspoken agreement that we'd all play any game. That meant you might own someone in quake 2 for an hour or two but then you'd switch over to playing dod or cs etc and basically people got a chance to even the stakes a little.

I noticed in the era of all the WW2 games like Medal of Honour a lot of the people who flowed into those private LAN parties were ridiculously anti-social kids who refused to play anything except the one or two games they played all the time at home. So basically you could either get raped by them while they camped some spot and killed you over and over, or you had to play Quake type games with half the ppl in the room while those douchebags sat doing w/e. Really ruined the experience.

I've noticed that emerging as a trend in general though. As a kid I would play pretty much any game on my friend's consoles etc. When my brother's friends come round to play on one of our consoles they refuse to play any game they don't own and are good at. So we can only play the games they practice nonstop and they refuse to play an NBA game I have for example which is pretty pick-up-n-play.

/endrant

"I noticed in the era of all the WW2 games like Medal of Honour a lot of the people who flowed into those private LAN parties were ridiculously anti-social kids who refused to play anything except the one or two games they played all the time at home. So basically you could either get raped by them while they camped some spot and killed you over and over, or you had to play Quake type games with half the ppl in the room while those douchebags sat doing w/e. Really ruined the experience."

That's actually true. We used to play all sorts of games, racing games, fps games, rts games and so on. But eventually someone got the illusion that they were "pro" and would only play their select game. During the end of my LANs your description is pretty accurate. We would have people only wanting to play some ww2 shooter and people only wanting to play warcraft3 and so on. People specialising in a single game certainly made LANs less fun.
I don't even know what the kids of today would play at lans? WoW?

I don't even know what the kids of today would play at lans? WoW?

that's why i was wondering if people even still go to private lans. if you ask a kid today what they play, chances are it's wow only.

dreamhack was full of wow players, which is fucking lol imo. :<

haha yeah, that was funny to see. funny and sad.. rows upon rows of people playing wow.

or cs.. I did see one other guy playing quake versus a mid skilled bot.

WoW. kids are idiots these days.

Probably in 98 playing 5v5 aq2 and q2 ffa and of course q2 ctf, what I wouldnt give to be 13 again playing great games with friends ;) Of course the last part is probably the wine talking... Anyway, lans back in the day = many many fond memories, the earliest was the best though, the older we got the wider the skill gap got and with it the fun went away...

Dont think I would enjoy a lan these days though, back then it was all fun and games but having played a gazillion hours of quake the only fun left is the competition and competing with a small group of friends seem pointless.

Due to my friends being horrible fps players , refusing to play me in any fps game , the most memorable private lanparty has to be this one time : we started out playing counterstrike (with most people being familiar with it) and after a few rounds of rape there was the usual ragequits and the postgame whine. It ended up with all of us getting shitfaced and playing lierox for soooo many hours.
The memories are limited but i just recall having cramps from laughing myself toward insanity :)

poor first post mate

Man, we used to rent this old gym and gather 10-20 people every 2 months or so, played mostly CS and DotA for 2 days while getting hammered thoroughly. The good ol' days u know...

we did the same, except it was the town hall of our small community. even the major would stop by and check out what us "crazy computer kids" were up to lol.

"however, communication with the other house was a little hard at times"
kenyan monkeys on the wire?

qw internal clan scrimmage all nighters (all of them) in an internet cafe that we were friends with, this was in Turkey.

all night of 4v4, 3v3, 2v2, and some friendly 1v1's thrown in between. Going out the street in the middle of the night for a food break, looking for a place open. Eat but wonder if it is real meat or something else you are eating, making fun of eachother while doing it.

GREAT times, i miss them :(

wanna know something... in central IOWA... there's absolutely no LANS. i know ONE... no make that THREE people that actually played in iowa... RIX... dan 'rix' hammonds played and won i think the first 2 quakecons ( don' t quote me on that) and a dude named CHANCE. Besides me and arny... those are the only 2 people i know that play quake here.
i want to go to a LAN so badly... iowa people... help me out here...

Best bet is to just gather your mates, their mates, mates of their mates and start one yourself. Do not expect a company to organize one for you.

3/4 days long 15-ish man lan in a borrowed city office of sorts with fellow quakers during ESWC 04.
Barbecues outside, lots of duels, ctf, tdm and ra3, with some hints of QW/Q2 thrown in for good measure, and of course being french, la moule was here with us, stronger than ever.

The organizers had bought a heap of cheap prizes for everyone at a 2€ store.
I left with "the golden keyboard and its floppy disk w/driver on it" (a spray painted 'board with a floppy and that text written on a napkin with a sharpie) as my runner-up prize in duel while the winner awarded himself the golden mouse (spray-painted intellimouse w/ball that wouldn't even work anymore). One guy got the golden mousepad. :)
I also got a big inflatable duck float and a Village People CD. Others left with flying hedgehogs (wtf ?) and we sneaked in 7" pop vinyls into some people's bags (i.e. Sabrina's "boys boys boys").
A barrel of laughs!

There have been several with the same people. From 98 to 2001 we played lots of games on these, Forsaken, Quake II, Age of Empires, Counter-Strike of course, Half-Life: Deathmatch, Delta Force, Moto Racer and more.

Before this, around 94-96 I think, a friend of mine and I played Doom over a null model cable, also great fun :P I cheated at times and used the LED-sound indicators on his boombox which he had his headphones connected to to see when I hit a rocket near him :P Fun stuff.

same here :) moto racer / delta force / hl dm and some forsaken. we didn't know anything about gaming but it was a lot of fun.
apart from that the very few 4 people 'lans' i went to were great. playing pro6 2on2 and getting high all night is/was simply great.

Hehe =)

I remember I was so satisfied with Forsaken, cause it was one of the first games (the first for me) that supported many different GPUs (many, not just a few), so my new Viper 330 (Riva 128, or the one before 330, not 550 which was later, which I also had) was supported as well, and it ran faster than the 3DFX cards (Voodoo chipsets) which I didn't like :P (mostly because I didn't have any of them..).

i went to a few lans ages back. i had fun but most of all i just remember the smell by day 2.

In Sweden everything smelled of Gorbys Piroger after 5 min.

Never lanned but I remember I did this course a couple of years ago and managed to sneak in my portable drive and basically had the entire room playing worms world party and pretending to listen to the tutor.

maybe nobody ever had room in their lans for you liam

rtcw mptest with the beach map, good times at school :-D

Q2 was so wonderful at private local LANs, not least cos I had shitty 56k at the time (and I mean shitty, as in the ISP gave me 200-300 ping to UK servers)

The time it took to overtake the people who played all the time online in clans was so satisfying. Skill curve of that game was a beautiful thing at the time.

Playing 8 player nsf2se is what stands out in my memory as the most fun I ever had at a lan. Glorious days when lan speed was literally thousands of times faster than your internet conn at home.

It's a bit sad that internet conns have gotten so good that you aren't forced to lan and socialise any longer.

~5 years ago (time goes so fast :/), 2 computers, 4 people playing Q3/CS 1vs1 all day and night xD

I was pretty good in dueling (not rly, just my friends were rly bad), so we made a rule, if friend frags me, as a reward we both drink full glass of beer.

So after 2 maps and scores like 30:5 comes favorite moments for me:), when we had to switch, both of us standing up after 30mins of sitting, my friend starts walking towards toilet, and forgeting he's kinda drunk smashes fullspeed into rooms door xD

Neighbours coming over at 3:00 complaining about noise xD

Now we quite often make 6 people 6 computers lans, playing mostly CS/FEAR and Q3 instagib/ctf, but that 1st one when we had only 2 computers was the best for me ;)

Was ~4 years ago.

We lanned 5 days in a 2 floor house with ~20ppl while the parents of a mate were gone on holiday. Lots of Quake3, CS, WC3 and stuff. I never did brake my "staying up"-record until now. 3 days of drinking, smoking, gaming without sleep.

The most fun was TFC on the map WarPath. We mostly did that in the early morning hours, when everyone was really tired, drunk and stoned.

At some point the firealarm in my mates room went on, because of the smoke and we were all freakin' scared of the police.
10mins later a friend rang the doorbell and banged on the door, to freak us out even more. :D

Surely a LAN Party at my friend's house a couple years back. There were six of us, and I was easily beating all of the people playing there in duel, but we mostly played CTF's at q3ctf1, which were pretty awesome ;)

I remember one game in particular, it was one of those ctf's, which was tied about 20 seconds before the end. My team mate was just next to our flag before making a cap when another guy holishitted him with his machine gun. Then, that guy with the MG picked up his RL and brought that flag all the way from our base to his and made that final cap. It was probably then that I made my loudest and longest "KUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" shout in my life. Those were pretty noob times, but still they were fun.

Also, we did a bit of movie making along with Szakal (we never finished our movie, because Szakal dropped and broke his HDD at a party next weekend), and partying at nights :)

I'm fortunate enough to know people who are still up for lans with classic RTS games and generally fun shit like teewars. Who cares if it's 2009! You can still get hammered while playing AoE and Starcraft!

I've got my first ever "public"/"competition" LAN event in just two weeks and even though it's my first time going abroad on my own, I'm doubting if it will be as fun as taking my computer round to a friends and hitting up Tiberian Sun all night. Maybe I'm just being unnecessarily negative, or maybe it's just the thought of playing FPS games on LCDs... meh, we'll see.

This whole thread makes me want to call up some friends and arrange a LAN, but I know there isn't a chance of that until after summer exams ;_;.