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.
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.
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.
OpenRA is the only thing that really works for an ad hoc LAN party on whatever laptops we have with us when we get together with the old crew.
We join over public servers, so we skip the classic LAN curse (spending an entire day getting it all connected properly, then only having time left for maybe 1 or 2 rounds of actual play).
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.
I don't know if they explicitly allowed it, it seems more likely the CD code was only checked locally so there wasn't much the game could do to stop code sharing.
For instance, the Diablo CD, it could be installed either as "full" or "multiplayer", if you had the multiplayer install, you could only join games, but not start a single or multiplayer yourself. It was very cool.
This isn't true. Yes, it's only checked locally, but you can store the key-code used and if you connect to another player with the same keycode it can prevent you from playing together. This is something many companies did to their games. But many others didn't, and they were treasured for LAN parties.
Yah I remember some folks had all these pirated game installers, so you’d arrive at the LAN, access a shared folder and install whatever game everyone was playing. Then at some point we’d switch and repeat.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
System linking IMO came of age even earlier, in the PS2. The original PS2 hardware could system link over 4 pin FireWire (I-Link in Sony speak or whatever they branded it). Late generation ps2 hardware dropped the FireWire port.
Connecting two PS2s via FireWire/I link, two multi-taps and two big tvs for 8 player time splitters 2 is an all time favourite memory of mines.
Memory is fuzzy, but I think Gran Turismo 3 also could do this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
We had four on a projector in a room, and then another couple down the corridor on a TV. Glorious. Lots of yelling between rooms.
After each game, the stats screen would motivate all sorts of trash talking. 20 years later, we still talk about the time someone called out at the friend with the lowest shots fired count: "You know the bullets don't cost anything, right?"
I can never understand why modern CoD lacks so many great post-game stats they could otherwise be showing.
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.
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).
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.
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.
