Hi everyone. Today I finished my latest project which was archving 1584 photos (+2 videos) of LAN parties in Tasmania ranging from 1996 to 2010. Previously these photos were lost to time until I got in contact with the right people. Looking through the photos is a great blast of nostalgia, I hope you get some enjoyment from looking through them too!
This is really cool. Looks like there isn't a single download where one can get all the images though, which is a shame.
You can see a list of the uploads here: https://archive.org/details/@issung
Then either download the ones you're interested in manually as packs, as IA makes that very easy. Or, search through GitHub to find one of the bunch of IA downloading tools available.
I'm interested in all of them, but not enough to go to every single page there.
Nice work! I ran some LANs ("LANded NT") and went to lots more up in Darwin, Northern Territory between 1999-2002, largest being ~150 people but sadly I think all related media has been lost. Previous had website, and was forum chatter with some photos about the events, but these days can't find anything. Photos you've got hear reminded me of these events, good times!
Good times indeed
Good times Thank you
I miss LAN parties... I miss the custom cases, the fancy drawings, the spilled sugary drinks that stuck to the table, and the open shares where you would copy the whole `Movies` folder on a 100Mbits connection..
I modded my case of course, and it was crappy. I'd integrated a glass window on the side, so people could (would!) look at my custom water cooling setup. And of course, the glass (held by hot glue), would fall down at the most unfortunate time. Great memories!
I never understood the appeal of all the gaudy gamer PC aesthetics, just as a piece of furniture you keep at home it looks ridiculous.
But thinking of it in the context of lugging your PC to a LAN party, now I'm picturing a fork of Fast and Furious but instead of all the tricked out cars revving their engines with their hoods popped, its a row of gamer PCs running DirectX benchmarks, and the length people go to make an original piece of art out of their motherboard suddenly make sense.
I feel bad that I feel this way but I really dislike them, but I can't believe those gamer chairs became the mainstream chair to see over the last few years. A few years ago they would get clowned, then it was less, and less, but it is cool that we're being more inclusive about chair themes.
I know it was twitch and them giving free chairs away to get more people to buy them. Great marketing.
Writing this from my aeron tower.
I'm in my 30s, and somehow people think it's a miracle I don't have bad back problems after sitting at least 6 hours a day in front of the computer, while the only miracle performed is me going to a store to get a personalized recommendation based on how I like to sit, and invest hard in getting a proper chair.
First thing I ask when people complain about bad backs, is what chair they use. Often they've just grabbed some chair after going window shopping, instead of aiming for personalized recommendations from a professional. Often, they're using these shitty "gaming" chairs. Sometimes though, they've just read a bunch of the internet about how good Aeron chairs are, so they bought those, not understanding not every chair fits every sitting style...
Written from my Humanscale Freedom.
> I never understood the appeal of all the gaudy gamer PC aesthetics, just as a piece of furniture you keep at home it looks ridiculous.
I don’t get it either but I appreciate that we are not all the same. I enjoyed marvelling at someone bringing a huge rig, oversized ultra wide screen monitor and loud custom keyboard + LED headphones that resembled a light show.
I wonder what could be today's alternative to the environments of LAN parties of early 00s (I never attended to previous ones).
Even if one were to recreate the events, I feel lots of the activities of these meetings (meeting the selected few gamers face-to-face, sharing media, and only finally gaming) are somewhat obsolete or not needed anymore.
Part of me wishes we still had these but that would mean removing lots of improvements and putting up barriers to entry to computers, games and the Internet.
Dunno, I might be rambling but perhaps one should just be happy to have been part of that scene back then and move on?
For me, the closest I got to that has been participating to hackathons (although many misses) even though those tend to be more stressful than the LAN parties.
Why do you think these activities are obsolete? Meeting the other people face-to-face will always be nice, or not? And also playing together in the same room is much nicer than when you are separated.
I'm quite sure you will still be able to find such events, if you want to try. I know a couple of friends who still do that.
Speaking of something which has a similar feeling: There are the hacker events, such as the CCC, which is even right now: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/infos/index.html
(Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend any of these since a while due to having small kids... But I definitely will join them sooner or later again. Maybe then with my kids.)
Also related: https://lanparty.house/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977)
Ehhh, we have people there with their 2yo, just don't be alone with a small kid (bring the other parent).
Board game or comic book shops often do board game nights that are unchanged from the aughts. They capture a lot of that energy.
There’s usually D&D at those stores but it doesn’t scratch the same itch imo.
I think with how much more social gaming is nowadays, and the prevalence of team games, I'm not really interested in attending a LAN party alone. I want to play with my squad. And with the internet, that squad is pretty spread out so a get together at a LAN party is going to be difficult to coordinate.
Though on the opposite end, locals are still common for 1v1 fighting games. Shared screen games that doesn't require everyone to bring their own setup, just their controller, for a lower barrier of entry.
LAN parties were way more social than "I play with my team (whom I ve never met IRL) over the Internet".
We were playing Warcraft 2 over a LAN between my house and the neighbors home and then we d run to the other house to discuss the game over a drink.
Or playing Warcraft 2 on laptops using some power inverter hooked to the car s battery in a truck, at night before going to sleep, on a surfing trip.
If anything gaming today is way less social, with most people playing online with people they ve never met.
A LAN meant we were physically close.
Exactly, I think that's the main difference. Before you had to be together, now people need the foresight to value in-person activities as well as wanting to play together. That's a combination which makes many not make the cut.
My take on all of this stuff: 20 years ago, you were young. That's all there is to it. There is no alternative today, not for you at least, because you are no longer young. Whatever the corresponding phenomenon might actually be, it will make you angry, or disgusted, or repelled, or you will reject the theory that it is even in any way equivalent - or some combination of. Anyway, my advice would be to move on, definitely. Whatever it was, it happened, and you were young, and you were there. Time for somebody else to have their turn.
I agree with this. I’ve tried to relive my enjoyment from playing the whole Halo series but the love isn’t there anymore.
I'm so glad I got to live through the late 90s in my teens. It was truly a magical time with the advent of the modern internet. Looking at these pictures brings back some of that feeling and really reminds me of what a different place the internet and technology was back then. I still remember pulling up my first website with Netscape Navigator and a 14.4K dialup modem, the images rolling in bit by bit at what would be considered a truly glacial pace today. The realization that this digital canvas was mostly untouched and any of us could claim our own territory and make it into whatever we wanted. Just thinking of it makes me want to fire up the IDE and build something.
You can just smell the sweat, ozone, phenolic resin, and pizza grease on those photos, even after all these years.
There is something special about looking at dated photos, even if they’re relatively banal. The lower fidelity corresponds with the fuzziness of memory, and is powerfully nostalgic if you lived though that time. I wonder if this effect will be lost as we enter an era where every photo is taken in high-definition on a high-quality camera phone, or if the improvement of sensors will continue to make older photos evocative.
In that vein, did you ever peruse the Internet K-Hole: https://internetkhole.com/
> high-quality camera phone
Citation may be needed. Phone cameras today are still pretty crap compared to DSLR/mirrorless cameras due to physical limitations. Particularly in challenging scenarios like night. Except now, instead of getting a totally grainy mess, you get a moderately grainy mess crippled with excessive sharpness, local contrast, and whatever other algorithmic hallucinations the phone manufacturer dreamed up. Bad photos will always be bad photos, I reckon.
The best camera is the one you have on you which makes for far more 'good' photos nowadays compared to back in the day when only those with Minoxes and such got to carry their camera around at will.
Will we ever have crystal clear night photography?
One thing that strikes me about the photos I've flipped through so far, is being that LAN parties rarely have adequate sunlight, they're pretty consistently flash photography on film, and I think this effects how people respond (or are otherwise caught in the act) to having their photo taken. Nowadays phones have sensitive enough sensors to not need flash, and have infinite storage so you're unlikely to just take one 'snap' and move on -- so for anyone in the field of view of a person holding up their smart phone, you don't know precisely what moment was captured, or whether its a video being recorded, and I just think there's a subtle shift in behavior when you don't know whether an image is being captured or not.
Just thinking out loud, as someone who's recently picked up film photography again to see how it changes what pictures I get. Thanks for the effort collecting all these in one place.
> One thing that strikes me about the photos I've flipped through so far, is being that LAN parties rarely have adequate sunlight
That's because you'd want to be able to see what's going on on the monitor without the sun getting in the way. It also happens to be a fact that LAN party types tend to be part troglodyte and thus prefer the darkness of caves and such.
I still do LAN parties every once in a while with a group of friends. Meeting in the same room with laptops and bulky desktop PCs to play old 00s games is still a lot of fun!
For Christmas I purchased an N64 +4 gamepads +GoldenEye +SmashBros +MarioKart
==
Instant group nostalgia, a $100 Craigslist success.
Is it possible to still play something like CS 1.6 on a LAN without needing an internet connection on modern computers? Occasionally I'll pop over to play-cs.com but curious if there'a a local mode...
My first LAN Party was sponsored by the Uni... Quake3. The two dept sysadmins took on the freshmen class (16 of us) and smoked us. Was hilarious.
CS 1.6 never required internet to host a LAN-accessible server. It would be trivial to setup and play even today.
Some games support it, some don't, but why does it even matter? Surely internet connections are sufficiently ubiquitous these days that nobody is trying to play PC games while totally offline? You can still have the players in the same room without necessarily having the game server there.
If a game doesn't support LAN play, just install the game server one of the local machine.
Back then we relied on games offering LAN support (without needing a dedicated game server) but nowadays people just run the game servers locally.
I was a kid in Virginia in the 80-90s and never got to do any of this stuff, but I was on irc and I saw people all over california and in college doing lan parties. Made me so jealous. My friends didn't have the internet until the 2000s and they used it for research and AIM.
It's crazy how regionally the internet spread across the USA absolutely massed from California.
I also grew up in VA (southeast) in that time period and there were lots of LAN parties! What part of Virginia were you in?
I was 6-teens in hampton /vabeach (84), i didn't have friends IRL doing anything with computers ever as a kid. Computer stuff was considered super nerdy. Dad was army so he'd be gone for 2-4 years at a time and all I had to do was hockey and computer stuff (linux/games). IO had tons of car friends because of the bases.
They might have a family PC in the living room for research and papers but everyone used consoles.
In 2024 some of my genz friends have grown up doing their research/papers on their iphones. I could never. I get mad typing on mine, I need a keyboard and an ultrawide.
It’s a shame LAN parties aren’t much of a thing anymore, given how powerful of a gaming computer you can pack in a mini-ITX case these days and the complete ubiquity of flat panel displays. You wouldn’t even necessarily need a wired network (though still desirable).
It died really because you can actually game on home internet unlike in the dialup era.
"MOM HANG UP THE PHONE I'M ZERG-RUSHING!"
I couldn't even play runescape on my dialup connection, not even play and have a laggy experience but play the game at all because they had a speed test check.
If everyone there had a beefy rig, you'd seriously need to consider power draw and running another circuit or two or extension cords all over the house depending on how many people you have.
If you like it there is also slengpung in the same spirit (https://www.slengpung.com/). The website archives thousands of demoparties photos from 1989 to 2018)
Wow this has some great stuff, thanks for sharing!
We have many more photos from RFLAN in Western Australia which ran 3-4x a year from 2002-2020. They are all on Facebook currently: https://facebook.com/redflaglan
What a coincidence, today is the annual LAN party with my school friends. We've been doing this once a year between christmas and new year for many years, and I enjoy every second of it.
saw a photo with like a dozen PCs running quake on a long table.
I guess a recent model of iphone or flagship android phone is more than capable for running 12 instances of quake at 30fps in parallel?
Exponential's a helluva curve
CS:GO was the king even back then:)
I've got some CS1.6 / CS:GO / CS2 photos from Australian LANS https://www.flickr.com/photos/dfragtv/albums/