Code Like It's 198x

DreamHack

From a school canteen in Malung to the largest LAN party on record

EventsSource-checked

A Swedish computer festival started in 1994 by two 14-year-olds in a school canteen in Malung. It moved to Borlänge in 1997 and to the Elmia exhibition centre in Jönköping in 2001, ran demo competitions alongside its network gaming, and holds the Guinness World Record for the largest LAN party: 22,810 visitors at DreamHack Winter 2013.

The first DreamHack was held in a school canteen in Malung, in the Swedish province of Dalarna, in December 1994. Its organisers, Kenny Eklund and Martin Öjes, were 14, and their ambition was to fill the canteen’s 70 seats. “We were a few friends who used to meet in a club room and hack through the night,” Öjes told Swedish television in 2015. “The first time we got to borrow the canteen, 30 people came.” Nineteen years later DreamHack Winter drew 22,810 visitors, and Guinness World Records recognised it as the largest LAN party in the world.

Fast facts

  • First held: 9 to 11 December 1994, Malung, Sweden.
  • Founders: Kenny Eklund and Martin Öjes.
  • Where: Malung (1994–1996), Arena Kupolen in Borlänge (1997–2000), the Elmia exhibition centre in Jönköping (2001–2024), then Stockholm.
  • World record: largest LAN party, 22,810 visitors at DreamHack Winter 2013, 8,714 of whom brought their own computers.
  • Owners: sold to the media group MTG in 2015; merged with the esports company ESL in 2020.

A demo party in Dalarna

DreamHack began as a gathering of friends with computers, and the demo scene was part of it from the start. The Swedish Wikipedia describes the 1994 event as a demo party. The canteen soon became too small. The 1995 party drew 70 people, and two years after the start, SVT reported, visitors were sitting out in the school corridors.

In 1997 the party moved to Arena Kupolen, the exhibition hall of a shopping centre in Borlänge. That year 800 people connected their computers there, which SVT called the biggest LAN party Sweden had yet seen. A year later Öjes was telling SVT that the event used as much electricity as the centre of Borlänge, and the year after that it overloaded the power supply and short-circuited the whole shopping centre. By then, Öjes said, the party had reached the arena’s capacity of 2,500 visitors.

The results files from Borlänge show a demo party inside the LAN party. In 1997 there were competitions for demos, intros, four-channel and multichannel music, ANSI art, raytraced and hand-drawn graphics, a “wild” competition and one for the most useless utility; Cryonics’ Alvin Stardust won the demo competition. Doomsday’s Off won the 1998 PC demo competition with 988 points, nearly twice the runner-up’s 554. The organisers did not always keep up. The 1999 results on scene.org are unofficial ones, compiled for the disk magazine DemoJournal two weeks after the party, and they complain that no results had been published and that the sceners had uploaded their own productions to scene.org.

Elmia and the esports years

In 2001 DreamHack moved to the Elmia exhibition centre in Jönköping. The 2001 results still list PC demo, 64K intro, graphics and music competitions: Pandalization by Frogwize won the PC demos, ahead of Fairlight’s Virtual Vodka, and Cryonics won the 64K intros. The scene.org archive holds DreamHack competition entries up to 2014, with a demo competition in most years to 2013. Photography competitions appear from 2007, and the creative competitions, now called DreamHack Kreativ, take in photographs, drawings, music, 3D models, demos, games, animation and films.

From 2002 DreamHack was held twice a year, in summer and winter. Five years after the move, according to SVT, the event passed 10,000 participants, and the founders sold it for an undisclosed sum and moved on. On 28 November 2013 DreamHack Winter opened for four days with 22,810 visitors. Guinness World Records lists it as the largest LAN party: 8,714 of the visitors brought their own computers, and together they used 434 terabytes of internet data.

By then DreamHack was an esports venue. The first League of Legends world championship was played at DreamHack Summer in June 2011, and DreamHack Winter 2013 hosted the first Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major backed by the game’s developer, Valve, with a prize pool of $250,000. DreamHack took its festival abroad from 2011, to Valencia first, and in May 2016 held its first North American event in Austin, Texas.

In November 2015 the Swedish media group MTG bought the company for 244 million kronor. In 2020 it merged with the esports company ESL, with the two brands kept separate. In 2024 DreamHack left Jönköping: the winter festival moved to Stockholm, and the summer festival of that year was the last held in Jönköping. “Jönköping is our roots,” festival director Kalle Pilfalk told SVT.

Sources

See also

Checked. Verified against primary sources and signed off by a person.