I was having a dig around in my photos and I came across some pictures of the first LAN I held at my house when I was a teenager. As I examined the image I rofled heartily at the horde of beige plastic, hulking great CRTs and network cables. The one LCD screen present was a wonder to behold, and expensive remember. That 15 inch 20ms screen probably cost over £300.

I then found the pictures of the second LAN I held, which is equally as amusing, as the CRTs have just gotten bigger along with the towers and number of people.

Fast forward to the present, through many more parties, and we arrive at the present state of affairs. Just compare the difference for yourself, its ridiculous. Its so strange to look back and see how the dynamic and technology has changed.

Do any other GOGers have old-school LAN party pictures or stories to share? It would be a shame not to document our experiences - retrospectively :)

I've never been in a LAN party (though it would be fun to try), since houses here in HK are small and it's not really ideal to fit five computers in the same room.

my first lan party, was also the first time I got drunk.
I was sixteen and didn't have internet at home, so when we weren't playing DOTA or Q3A, I was downloading porn like a mother fucker.
I remember going to this big mall like place, but it was for actual businesses, and then getting served jack in the box through the drive through..

I've never been a LAN party, although I've always kind of wanted to. It's just that all my friends were more into console gaming, or point and click games.

HAHA the good old days of CRT and irritating glare
Truthfully I prefer LCDs to CRTs, but then again I only changed from CRT to LCD in 2006, so I may not have experienced the painful transition that many others have

I've never been to a LAN party either, I don't know how I could be a LAN party

Probably involves surgery
Never been to a lan party either. Its easier to understand in my case because I'm a friendless, antisocial, claustrophobe who freaks out in crowds and also mostly doesn't like multiplayer gaming. The closest I've ever gotten to a lan party is playing gears of war 2 online with 9 other random people

I once went to one of those national lan parties when I was in Europe (Minhos campos party, if you feel like googling it) and I was pretty disapointed with the fact the only games played were Counter Strike, wich I dont like and Starcraft, where I was defeated like the miserable noob that I am. Other than that though the Internet Speed was about 100Mb per user wich meant i was able to download at about 11MB/s. Needless to say my hard drive came out of there full of warez..

I remember starting LAN parties with really only me and one other friend. We had our big hulking pc's with the old school serial link cable between us. Just goes to show that you don't need more than two people to party.
Of course, I have not really been doing any LAN parties in the last 10-12 years, except for one, because online games just made it easier to play through the Internet without having to lug all the equipment around. However that one LAN party was really fun, because it was half of the office that occupied the office and we spent the whole saturday drinking beer and playing games. And nothing really beats being able to laugh your mates in the face when you just gibbed them with a rocket in Quake 3.

that sounds like a precious childhood experience that should be treasured forever
i was born about a decade too late for lan parties
i keep trying to get one going, but none of my friends game except for stupid halo 3. i have to explain to all of my friends what a lan part is and why it would be awesome, and then i usually just get called out for being a nerd and no one is interested.
man, a GOG community lan party would be the most awesome thing ever. too bad everyone lives in different countries.

I never went to LAN parties until I got my LCD monitor. Actually, last LAN party we did have an old CRT so one of the Mac guys could play a Windows game with us. It was kinda funny having that fossil amidst all the sleek laptops and streamlined monitors.

I'm too old for LAN-parties. I went to demoscene parties, where I would swap games and demos on floppy disks. I was a filthy little pirate back then. :-(
But those were good days, back when the Amiga was still popular and Counter-Strike still wouldn't be released for many years.

LAN parties... I was on a few, with my friends - in fact, we're planning another one, it'll just be a tad easier since we all have notebooks :D
First one was also my first time I managed to stay up for 3 days straight. We've played Warcraft 3. After a day or so, we found ourselves too dumbed by staying awake to play it, so we switched to Red Alert 2 I think. It was awesome, but too complicated for sleepy mind after some time. And then, we sticked to Counter-Strike :D
Heh, in fact, P in my nick comes from LAN party - me and my friend were talking about <p> (HTML tag, we were working on a web) and most other people had some porn on their monitors running. After some time, whole room was at my computer, watching me and my friend arguing about using <div> or <p>, with moaning naked porn stars all around. That gave us 2 things:
A) being creative is a tad more interesting than porn
B) I have the best P ever!

Out of curiosity, when was your first LAN? Looks about 1996-1997?
I have similar photos from a similar era that I will post when I get home. We started as 6 people in a shed, and ended up as organisers of a 100+ person not-for-profit LAN party, complete with tournaments and sponsored prizes.
The dynamics of our group definitely changed. In the beginning we'd stop lanning for hours at a time to help someone fix their networking problems and resolve IRQ conflicts. In the end (I've largely stopped LANning now) we would find ourselves almost alone, cleaning up after 100 people at 5AM in the morning, and then discover that one of the lanners had broken the penis of one of the venue's statues for kicks.

I'm quite jealous. The scene barely made it out of Northern Europe, let alone all the way to Australia.

It was 1998-99 I think. We all had only recently got Half Life from what I remember so it must have been the winter or spring. Heh, mine never got that mega, it was just the same bunch of dudes. Can't wait to see these pictures though. HELL YEAH. The amount of hours that used to take. I'm not kidding when I say someone I knew turned up WITHOUT a network card to my LAN. Now a days is all wireless, its usually no problem at all. No one needs a peen bust'n, that's just unnecessary.

I actually managed to find some photos from another LAN. It must have been the one which we played Tribes: Vengeance as I can just spot the case in the picture; that was one EPIC LAN game to play. It still holds its own as a multilayer game, as the dynamic was so well done.

Edit: Anyone notice the link between this picture and this one (and I don't mean the obvious ones e.g same room/computers etc)?