[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.

[coldpie]

> To get everyone at the LAN to play the same game no longer meant passing the CD around

Pretty sure I spent more time installing games and fighting with cracking software than I did playing games at LANs :)

[giantg2]

I also played a lot if Halo LAN parties on consoles. I don't think I ever had a PC LAN party (probably too young).

[thrown_22]

> 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.

You should have gone to better parties.

[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.

[thrown_22]

Until you dropped your screen on the drive way into your friends house and heard the magic sound a CRT makes when it implodes.

[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.

[Mistletoe]

One of the greatest gaming experiences of my life is when I and my three younger brothers hooked up two original Xboxes with a network crossover cable and played the original Halo 2v2 split screen in separate rooms.

Split screen LAN may not have been the norm but it is fantastic.

[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

[22c]

In addition to the argument that "I can just play online with my friends", I'd also add that many games started to require internet in order to play. Around that same time, many host venues did not have enough bandwidth to support everyone playing online reliably at once.

[bestouff]

I (roughly) hear it on the tune of "video killed the radio stars".

Yes I'm old.