In the early 1990s, playing a computer game against your friends usually meant carrying your computers to the same room. Fabien Sanglard, writing about id Software’s Doom (1993), puts it plainly: connecting computers was difficult and expensive, and most of the time “playing with friends meant getting all your computers into the same room (a LAN party).” A LAN is a local area network, the cables and cards that join computers in one building. By 2000 the German magazine PC Player was telling its readers that network parties were springing up like mushrooms, and at the largest, in Sweden and Norway, thousands of people came with the computers they had brought from home.
Fast facts
- What: players bring their own computers, connect them to one network and play together, often through the night.
- Catalyst on the PC: Doom’s network play, for up to four players over the IPX network protocol.
- Size: from a handful of friends to 440 players at a British event in 2000, and 22,810 visitors at DreamHack in Sweden in 2013.
- Also known as: network parties (Netzwerk-Partys in German); in Scandinavia many grew out of demo parties.
Doom and the coaxial cable
Doom shipped with two ways to play together. One program linked two computers through a serial cable or modem. The other, IPXSETUP, linked up to four over a local network using IPX, which needed no setting up because it used each network card’s own hardware address. According to Sanglard, the cheapest option was a $20 “null-modem” cable between two PCs’ serial ports, and it only worked for two.
More than two players needed network cards and 10BASE2 cable. Each PC’s card had a BNC connector, the players’ machines were chained together with coaxial cable, and a terminator at each end of the chain stopped the signal reflecting back. The harder part, Sanglard writes, was “convincing a parent to let four teenagers come to their house where they would scream all night.”
Doom’s network code caused trouble of its own. John Carmack later recalled that the first release sent its game data as broadcast packets, which every computer on a network had to examine. On campuses built from bridged IPX networks, “a few dozen Doom players could cripple a network with a few thousand endpoints.” The day after release a network administrator phoned him to complain, and Carmack changed the game so that it broadcast only to find other players.
Hubs, switches and hundreds of players
By the end of the decade the coaxial chain was out of favour. PC Player’s crash course on network parties, in January 2000, warned that anyone who turned up with a 10-megabit BNC card would quickly be sent home: a coaxial network stopped dead every time a player plugged in or out. Organisers now used 100-megabit cards with RJ-45 sockets, each plugged into a central hub or switch, so that one player joining did not halt everyone else’s game. The magazine recommended a switch, because on a hub everyone’s game slowed down while people copied files to each other, which it said was the normal state of affairs at a bigger network party.
In Britain the events grew from rooms to venues. In March 1999 up to 300 users and staff of Wireplay, BT’s online games service, were due at Bicester in Oxfordshire for Insomnia ’99, three days of “non-stop” gaming. PC Zone reported that Wireplay called it the largest LAN party it had organised, and probably the largest of its kind yet held in the UK; the first 90 places went within six hours of booking opening. A year later Swindon Town Football Club hosted what Edge called the biggest LAN party the UK had seen: 440 players, each paying £40 and bringing their own PC and monitor, for 56 hours from 9am on Friday 24 March 2000. The organiser, Gameplay, ran it with Multiplay. The event was heavily oversubscribed. Organisers had “complained of hygiene difficulties” at earlier events, Edge noted, so this time there were showers and a list of cheap bed-and-breakfasts. That autumn the Gamer LAN 300 in Glenrothes promised Scotland 300 players.
From demo parties to LAN parties
In Scandinavia the big gatherings had begun as demo parties, where programmers, artists and musicians met to show their work in competitions. As more people came to play, the gamers took over. In March 1997 Thies Edeling of the online magazine RAW told Amiga Computing that the people at The Gathering in Norway “mostly consist of PC-gamers”. In October 1998 the Danish magazine Amiga Advis complained that The Gathering, The Party and Assembly, each with more than 3,000 visitors, now drew every nerd who could play Quake. In 1999 some 4,300 people were connected to The Gathering’s network at once.
DreamHack in Sweden followed the same path. It began in 1994 as a party for about 30 people in a school canteen in Malung, had 800 people connected at a shopping-centre arena in Borlänge in 1997, and kept running demo competitions after it moved to Jönköping in 2001. At DreamHack Winter 2013, Guinness World Records counted 22,810 visitors, 8,714 of whom had brought their own computers: the largest LAN party on record.
Sources
- Fabien Sanglard, Game Engine Black Book: DOOM (2018), chapter 2.5, pp. 71–72: LAN parties, the null-modem cable, 10BASE2 networks and IPX; chapter 5.21, pp. 279–280: IPXSETUP and SERSETUP, and John Carmack’s account of the broadcast packets, first published by Kotaku in “Memories of Doom”.
- “Crash-Kurs: Netzwerk-Party”, PC Player (Germany), January 2000, pp. 262–263: network parties springing up like mushrooms (“sprießen zur Zeit wie Pilze aus dem Boden”), BNC and RJ-45 cards, hubs and switches.
- “From the Wires”, PC Zone issue 75, April 1999, p. 159: Insomnia ’99 at Bicester.
- “Swindon hosts UK’s biggest LAN party”, Edge issue 84, May 2000: 440 players, £40, 56 hours, showers and Multiplay.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 88, September 2000: the Gamer LAN 300 in Glenrothes, 16 and 17 October.
- “Scene Amiga”, Amiga Computing issue 110, March 1997, p. 23: Thies Edeling on The Gathering.
- Amiga Advis (Denmark), October 1998: “the big three” parties and their visitors.
- Hege Nordli, The Gathering: Computer parties as means for gender inclusion, SIGIS project deliverable D04, appendix 2.1, NTNU, July 2003 (web, secondary): the 1999 network record. http://pdf.textfiles.com/academics/sigis_d04_2.01_ntnu1.pdf
- SVT Nyheter, “Så blev Dreamhack störst i världen”, 26 November 2015 (web, secondary): DreamHack in Malung and Borlänge. https://www.svt.se/kultur/sa-blev-dreamhack-storst-i-varlden
- Guinness World Records, “Largest LAN party” (web, secondary): DreamHack Winter 2013. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-lan-party