[TravHatesMe]

Gaming companies contributed to the death of LAN parties too. They killed the "split-screen" gameplay that would support 2-4 players on the same machine. They wanted each player to require their own copy of the game. They killed LAN support, forcing you to play on their servers. Culturally we saw a shift towards social isolation. People are more comfortable talking over a mic.

[jwie]

I definitley think it's on the product side that LAN parties died. The relationship between the player and the game, and the LAN community and the game were way different.

Gradually the companies figured out how to inject themselves into the social structure. Your relationships became mediated by these products. Rather than a social lubricant they became the relationship itself. They monetized that social capital.

You didn't play WoW with your friends anymore; you played WoW because that product allowed you access to your friends.

Some superguilds figured out how to hop games and maintain that social structure, but only the most organized and intentional. Gradually these LAN groups eroded as people got jobs, families, etc. Perhaps that was why the MMO declined; those friendship structures became compromised by the product, and people also developed constraints on their time by things like, spouses, children, and careers.

[fxtentacle]

Fully agree. I still regularly organize LAN parties with the same crew as back then. 24 years and counting... Family has made finding a suitable date much more difficult. But the biggest obstacle is finding LAN-capable games.

10 people joining Dota 2 from the same IP results in instant ban for everyone. StarCraft 2 is horribly laggy when 10 PCs compete for UDP traffic to the internet server. GTA 5 keeps load-balancing us into different lobbies. Most new games just cannot handle a LAN party anymore. And yeah, I remember the time when I paid for a WoW account despite not playing because the WoW guild chat was the quickest way to reach all of my real-life friends.

Warcraft 3 fun-maps, Left 4 Dead 2, Flatout 2 are the games that reliably work well.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

LAN parties used to be the only way to play together because playing over the Internet wasn't practical. Once that changed, it was so much more convenient to just play over the Internet, that the demand for LAN parties dropped quickly.

From my memory, companies ending LAN support came long after LAN parties were mostly done for the experience and mostly by people who had done them before.

[LtWorf]

Games explicitly allowed you to play in like 3-4 using the same CD code.

Now you need all the friends to buy the same (usually expensive) game.

[rakkhi]

This. I remember lugging even a midi tower but a 17 inch crt in my car to my friend's house each week and back. It was so much fun when you were there but the logistics were a pain. As soon as the Internet was fast enough to allow people to play from home and still have a lot of the interaction via video and voice that to me was the death of the Lan party not so much game support.

[no_time]

The fact that fucking AGE OF EMPIRES II/III DE doesn't have LAN is ridiculous.

Atleast for AoE III DE there is a server emulator because MS servers only do matchmaking.

[evolve2k]

Yeah that’s rubbish.

Not exactly the same but I’ve had a few LAN parties with 0ad. It’s still in alpha and lags up during the mega battles , but that’s been pretty fun too, watching armies crash together is slow motion when u finally throw everything at each other.

I’d definitely recommend 0ad for a small 3-4 player LAN party.

0ad.com

[grubbs]

Attended a LAN party in Manassas, VA back in early 2000s. It was literally in a barn with 100+ people. No Internet as it was pretty rural. I don't think this would even be possible now with no LAN option in modern games.

[giantg2]

"Gaming companies contributed to the death of LAN parties too. They killed the "split-screen" gameplay that would support 2-4 players on the same machine."

Even consoles suck with this now. It seems like none of the big games support more than 2 players.

[Farbklex]

Exactly. I wanted a coop split screen shooter for the PS 5. I checked out 4 games. None had coop splitt screen. 2 were alway online which would require me to get a PS Plus subscription.

Games were: Back 4 Blood, Call of Duty Vanguard, Rainbow Six Extraction, Alien Fire Team Elite.

I still invite friends for Xbox 360 LANs. Just connect two consoles and play with 8 players. It is super fun and the hardware is dirt cheap.

[_the_inflator]

I disagree. My monitor's weight was around 20kg and it was a lot of work, to get it together with my large tower into the car.

Even though we enjoyed the gatherings, we hated doing the grunt work before and afterwards.

[loloquwowndueo]

There were plenty of us who didn’t mind the “grunt work”. Laziness was not the reason for The demise of LAN parties :)

[iso1631]

Sure, but that made it all the more worthwhile. You put actual effort into it, and were rewarded with a weekend of fun.

[kodt]

I don’t think split screen has anything to do with it unless you are talking about consoles.

The biggest factor was companies removing LAN play as an option from games. Forcing you to be always online and not allowing you to run a local server.

When you can play an offline LAN game you can also use pirated copies or reuse cd keys, which was always necessary to get everyone up and running.

[jrnichols]

I also think that the rise of quality gaming consoles helped kill off LAN parties. the xbox/etc took over pretty fast.

[lelandfe]

Xbox System link was a thing, for a time.

Xbox Live and co. was probably the real death knell of LAN.

[_carbyau_]

Only 10 years ago I had two people over to LAN game. Newly released Far Cry 3 had some co-op bits in it!

Didn't work. Despite each machine being on the same network they tried to connect via the routers external IP and failed at the UPnP/NAT traversal stage.

Honestly, a "direct connect" option solves many things.

[wink]

I don't think I remember ever playing a single game via split screen on a LAN party (except that one year someone brought an... N64?).

The server thing is true though, also just not paying for dialup by the minute.

[robryan]

Probably after they were already dead but also Discord. Online communication is so easy and good now. My friends have talked about having some LANs again but it is so easy to just play online that it never happens.

[BananaaRepublik]

I believe there is a resurgence in LAN-like in-person social gaming when competitive multiplayer mobile gaming became a thing. It can take place literally anywhere, a quick few minutes during lunch, before classes.

[thrown_22]

Split screen was never a part of lan parties. The reason why lan parties stopped was because it was hard to move a tower around.

Even during that period it was much easier to go to a lanshop and play there either as in lan or on the proto cloud servers they had.

Many fond memories of early battle.net and much fewer of steam.

[elif]

That's just not true. All but a handful of the smallest LAN parties I attended I the 90's and early 00's included console gaming. It was pretty much assumed there would be consoles at a LAN.

Halo, which was arguably the first professionally competitive game, had it's entire birth at LAN parties as it did not support online play at all and had to be done with a LAN.

Smash brothers had a similar Genesis story at LAN parties I attended. LAN continues to be the preferred competitive environment for every game due to latency.

I'll tell you what killed LAN parties I attend, it was the year steam became standard. To get everyone at the LAN to play the same game no longer meant passing the CD around, but in /socially pressuring your peers to make a digital purchase/ That was the death of LAN.

[pedrogpimenta]

> The reason why lan parties stopped was because it was hard to move a tower around.

No, no. The effort played itself. As OP said, it was a cultural change with companies piggy-backing on it. Split screen is not a major reason, no, I don't think so. But luggaging towers? That's not the reason.

[dudul]

Agree with your 1st statement, I dont think split screen had anything to do with LAN parties. There was no network with split screen.

However I don't think LAN died because of tower size. Maybe towers got a tad bigger at some point, but monitors got way thinner. I've done a few LAN parties on laptop even. I think they just died because it was easier to play over global network, and subsequently LAN mode disappear from games.

[shagie]

There was a lanshop that had a T1 of their own (this was '99) that had their machines (two dozen - there were a dozen in each room that had a partition so that people could play against each other).

The "clan tag" that they used was [LPB] standing for Low Ping Bastards as this was the time when people often were in the middling three digit pings - they were regularly in the low two digits. Human Head even had a release party of Rune there and they hosted one of the servers that was consistently up - it was a fairly popular one because it was always up (this is back in the days when many game servers were at the other end of an ISDN line that the owner would power down when not playing) and it had good ping times. It was a shock to some to find that not only did they have good ping times, but also there were some people with [LPB] that had ping times in the single digits. When asked about it the response was "I can touch the server."

It was a nice place to hang out and play games. This was also in the days before voice chat across the net was practical. It was a game changer to have a group of three or four people all coordinate a tank in Tribes - or a spotter and a mortar working together where they could talk rather than needing to pause and type to communicate.

The thing that killed the lan shop was that the college dorms started getting wired with acceptable networks and a good chunk of the player base could play on their own machines. There was still some "get a dozen people together to play" but not enough to pay the bills.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010406031620/http://www.ping-t...

---

Regarding LAN parties : https://www.lanreg.org

When I lived in Eau Claire, I knew people who went to https://www.lanreg.org/winlan/winlanxi (noting that it was a thing last year, but doesn't appear to have been scheduled for this year - would have been last month).

[thenthenthen]

The Internet killed the LAN party

[krolden]

I'm happy about the death of split screen gaming. It was just an awful experience. Especially when your friends were screenlookers

[godzillabrennus]

We were all screen lookers… it’s not like any other player had more advantage…

The death of split screen keeps me in retro games.

[giantg2]

We'd run 2-4 consoles in separate areas, with each console being a team.

As a kid split screen adversarial was common, and the screen looking was never really an issue. If someone was better, you'd play 1v2, 1v3, or 2v2 with the best and worst player on the same team.

If you were at a LAN party and were too good, then it was you and the worst kid on one console vs 4-6 kids on the other 2 consoles. Haha good times.