LAN Party

A loving photographic celebration of the energy-drink-fuelled, furniture-rearranging, multiplayer gaming trend and its nocturnal participants

  • $40.00

In production now after being successfully funded on Volume. Estimated shipping date Autumn 2023.

LAN Party $40.00

Overview

Before high-speed internet connections and online servers, playing a multiplayer PC game meant hauling your bulky monitors and towers to a friend’s place, convention centre or church basement for a LAN (local area network) party. These sweaty, junk-food-enriched glory days represented the origins of real community spirit in computer gaming’s early days. It’s strange to consider that, as gaming has moved away from physicality towards online spaces, images of gawky teens huddled around computers running Quake or Starcraft have since become subjects of genuine nostalgia.

Many LAN party attendees were early adopters of new tech, so digital cameras abounded at these events. The photos produced by these devices were often low-resolution, blurry and badly lit. In their imperfections and limitations, they represent the messy, ad-hoc approach to computing typical of the LAN party – network cables snaking across recreation centre floors, a monitor perched on a kitchen counter, burned CD copies of games labelled in marker pen.

LAN Party will be published by specialist gaming-history imprint Read-Only Memory and includes exclusive contributions from the likes of Rupert Lomas (Gamer Network, Eurogamer), Kat Bailey (IGN) and more.

Author

Merritt K

Imprint

Read-Only Memory

Genre

Videogames

Design

Atelier Muesli

Specification

280 × 180mm
176 pages
Hardcover
Printing in six colours

Me and my mates in Rio, around ’99, would carry our PC towers, monitors, and backpacks of cables, keyboards and tech paraphernalia to one of our apartments in Ipanema and set up wherever we could. There’d be maybe four to six of us…. We still talk about epic Starcraft battles, insane coop Quake run-throughs and the day Diablo II came out and we played twelve hours straight!

 

holografix, Hacker News

Our LAN parties were this strange alternate universe where the captain of the football team hung out with the science fair nerds. We even had cheerleaders come to our LAN parties.

ModernMerch, Hacker News

Meet the author

Merritt K is a writer, editor and podcaster living in New York. She is the creator of Forgotten Worlds, a video series exploring Y2K-era internet culture, as well as several works of interactive fiction. Regrettably, she never owned anything resembling a gaming PC during the heyday of the LAN party.