The LAN Party Playlist

“Flatout 2 Times the Fun”

Just the other night I went to a party.  But it wasn’t your average college party.  For one, it was in a church.  For two, there was no alcohol or drugs.  And for three, the party was entirely centered around playing video games on a local access network, or LAN connection.  In short, I went to my friend’s biannual LAN party, where I sat in a gymnasium and played video games for ten hours while hooked up to a power strip that was hooked up to an extension cord that was hooked up to another power strip that was plugged into the wall.  We only had a power surge once.

LAN parties are essentially (usually) gatherings of people who happen to all like video games and who also happen to be predominantly white, male, and good with computers.  There’s even an obligatory dick-measuring contest where people compare computer specs while they set up.  These parties usually involve all these people coming together and connecting to one network so they can all play games together, locally, without the need for internet access.  It leads to shenanigans, hijinks, tomfoolery, and a general building of camaraderie with laughter, jokes, friendly competition, snacks, and of course, video games.

I’ve been to a fair handful of these parties before, and they’re always a good time.  Locales ranged from my friend’s basement to his mom’s office and now to his church, and party size has ranged from around 8 people to close to 20 for this party, I think.  They generally last from 8 PM to 8 AM, and we play video games and screw around the entire time.  Sometimes we get breakfast together the next morning.  And then we take a break for six months and regroup for the next one.

These kinds of parties were bigger in the 90’s, with the rise of arena shooters like Quake or Unreal Tournament, though this roster of games was later joined by more contemporary additions like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Star Wars: Battlefront.  Having everyone bring their pc and getting everyone together in one place was more practical back in the day before high-speed internet connection, and I’ve heard of parties that got as large as 100 people or more.  There’s legends of a party that rented out a warehouse and filled it with over 1000 people, but I don’t know how accurate that is.  Probably stank to high heaven by the end of the night.

Local LAN parties fell out of favor once things like XBOX Live or online matchmaking became popular and easily accessible.  Ironically, Halo: Combat Evolved, one of the most popular games at the LAN parties I attend, was actually one of the first to make popular this distant, digital, online style of play, and diminish the practicality of the LAN party.  But, much like how a good round of Goldeneye or a group Super Smash Bros. tournament never goes out of style, the allure of getting a ton of people together for a party that just so happens to have a bunch of video games is always appealing to certain demographics, myself included.

The way these parties work is simple, and to demonstrate, I’ll walk you through the itinerary for my most recent party in case you want an example for yourself of how to throw a LAN party.  At the very start, I got there around 8 and said hello to everyone before setting up my computer station.  I built a more advanced PC over winter break, so I can finally play Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice like I always promised myself I would.  I used to just bring my laptop, but now with my new desktop, the setup process was a little bit more involved.  It really just boils down to plugging into the power, plugging into the ethernet ports, and installing the games.  For me, since I took my sweet time eating snacks and wandering around, this took about an hour and a half.  Also, we had to daisy-chain surge protectors onto each other in order to get the necessary cable length.  Pro tip: bring more extension cords than you’ll ever think you’ll need.

Speaking of snacks, every party we tend to cater some sort of food, like pizza or sandwiches.  People bring chips, cookies, drinks, and stuff like that, and we all share and eat everything available to us, sometimes ordering pizzas at 3 AM so we can get more food.  But a favorite tradition of ours is to mix M&M’s with Skittles into a single bowl, and then initiate the newcomers by offering them a fruity-chocolate handful.  It’s a good time all around.

Downloading all the games is a bit like smoking a joint, if you’ll excuse the analogy; you take this little stick and pass it around until everyone’s had a turn.  In this case the stick is USB drive and you just get the games from that and install them to you computer.  Of course, this can come with some roadblocks, as installation doesn’t always work right.  For example, the first game we played was COD 4: Modern Warfare, which I am royally bad at and got last place in almost every match we played. 

But of course, it took me a long-ass time to get into the game because it wouldn’t install correctly.  I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling this game about four times before I finally got it with some dumbass fix.  And you know what I did to fix it?  Plug in a headset.  The game refused to start because I didn’t have a microphone plugged into my computer.  What the fuck?  It was some of the most bootleg shit I’d ever tried before.  But what the hell, it worked.  And I still sucked at the game.

Anyway, after that nonsense we played Garry’s Mod for a little bit, which is just kind of a sandbox party game in which you can do anything you want, more or less.  We played a game that’s a bit like “Werewolf” or “Mafia,” in which someone is a traitor and has to kill everyone else, and everyone else has to figure out who the traitor is.  It’s a good game.  I also like the game where you turn into fruit and play hide and seek with physics objects.  That’s a good game, too.

There are a lot of different games that are popular at these types of events, though most of the games happen to be first-person shooters.  Of the pack of games that we got for our party, we have Modern Warfare, Counter-Strike 1.6, Halo, Halo 2, Quake III, Battlefront II, and Unreal Tournament 2004.  All of those are games where you run and shoot at enemies. They differ because you and the enemies have varying speeds and abilities.  Insightful. I like Halo the best because that’s what I’m good at, but Quake III is also a lot of fun and Battlefront II has space ships and Darth Vader, so that’s hard to beat.

Racing games are also weirdly popular at LAN parties.  Setting up Mario Kart on a nearby TV is always a good option, but so is Trackmania, Star Wars Pod Racer, and my personal favorite car game, Flatout 2.  Flatout 2 has a derby mode where you can just crash the shit out of everyone else’s cars and I love it.  I find the school bus to be particularly effective.

A couple times we’ve had large matches of the seminal strategy game Civilization V, which is a game where you build hexagonal cities and Gandhi nukes everyone to hell.  Civ V is always a good choice, but other strategy games work, too, though they can be a bit slower.  League of Legends is fine for smaller parties, as is Starcraft.  Sometimes Worms shows up, which is just a more complex version of the tank game that’s apparently on everyone’s phone.  And there’s Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, or as I like to call it, Jesus Christ Kyle Load the Fucking Nukes No Why Did You Shoot It At Our Space Station Now We Can’t Repair Oh Fuck We’re Out of Fuel Simulator.

There are some other team-based games besides Artemis that are worth noting, too.  Left 4 Dead is all about shooting zombies while they try to lasso you with their tongues, and it’s some of the best co-op gameplay out there.  You can also mod co-op into Half-Life with things like Sven Co-op, or there’s the built-in co-op of games like indie alien shooter Risk of Rain or virtual LEGO game Minecraft.  Oh, Minecraft, mother of a thousand minigames and a billion youtube videos.  Whether you want to build a house or go online and run around on some pizza, Minecraft has it all.

Then, of course, there’s the party games.  I played Overcooked! for the first time at this party, and I have to say, it’s good choppin’, slicin’, dicin’ fun, especially if you like running your friends down while trying to get an onion to the cooking pot so the food won’t overcook and catch on fire.  Oh, I get the name now.  But if you have enough controllers for everybody and a large enough screen, that one’s a winner, too.  You can throw in pixel swordfighter Nidhogg and television trivia game Jackbox Party Pack as some options, too.

If you’ve got the funds or know someone who does, Virtual Reality systems can be a good thing to bring to the party, too.  Of course, it isn’t much of  a multiplayer device, since every VR game I can think of is local singleplayer only, but having been able to try VR for the first time at a LAN party, I highly recommend it.  Honestly, modern VR is incredible and totally unreal.  I love it so much and think everyone should get a chance to try it out, especially Superhot VR or Gorn.  I just wish it wasn’t so damn expensive.

But it doesn’t all have to be just video games.  At this party, a couple of us got bored around 2 AM and decided to explore the church we were inhabiting.  We didn’t touch anything or take anything or do anything like that since we didn’t want to offend our very gracious hosts, but we did wander around for quite a while.  If you have a large enough area, or just want some fresh air, taking the party outside the main space can be a lot of fun.  In our case it was especially fun because that church was spooky as fuck and definitely looked like something out of a video game, so wandering around it was pretty fitting.

After the wandering we ate more food and played more games, and at some point we even broke out some board games to play.  Games at LAN parties don’t have the be strictly digital.  Pen and Paper games and physical games can be pretty popular, too, with the right crowd. 

But at any rate, after a while of playing all these games, we got tired.  I’d been there for a little over ten hours, and a few people had probably been up for at least 24 hours straight.  That’s usually how these parties end, anyway.  Everyone gets tired and/or bored and decides to head home for the night.  Or for the morning, because sometimes the parties don’t end until the sun comes up.  And, if the party involved alcohol, sometimes they don’t even end then.  But that’s a whole other story.

So I packed up my rig and said goodbye to everyone and went home, and that was that.  Another fun LAN party, and another great opportunity to see friends that I hadn’t seen in more than a year in a few cases.  That’s the other great thing about these LAN parties, at least for me; they’re a great group of people that I almost never see anymore, so having an excuse to spend hours together is something that I really appreciate.  It’s more than just for the video games.  It’s for the people, too.

Well, there it is.  A sort of how-to or a rough guide of how a LAN party might work, and the kind of games you might want to play.  At the very least it is a list.  A playlist, if you will.  I might update this blog with another article about some of the more interesting stories from my LAN parties after the next one this summer.  And I do plan on going to it, because I can play games every day.  But I can’t see people that I haven’t seen for six months all the time.  So is the LAN party is the way to talk to those old friends, then I’m all for it.