‘I dreamed of blocky pixels’: the strange, sweaty, sociable early days of gaming – in pictures
Today it is trivially easy to play games on a computer, games console or phone with your friends over the internet. But before the wide availability of high-speed internet, things were more complicated.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, 3D graphics in video games were becoming more and more complex, but the low network speeds of the period meant that these games, unlike slower-paced and less graphically intensive strategy games, were nearly unplayable over an internet connection. In this moment, in which communications technology was being outpaced by graphical power, the Lan (local area network) party was born.
The term itself conjures up strong sensory memories for those who were there – sweaty bodies packed into a basement or convention hall, a dozen hefty computer monitors being manoeuvred into position. For those on the outside, these were scenes of incomprehension or ridicule. But for those who were there, the Lan party was a defining social occasion of the early 21st century. It represented the last gasps of the isolated gamer stereotype, ushering in an age in which gaming became not only mainstream, but a social, networked activity.
Euskal party, Bilbao, Spain, 2004. Photograph: Koldo Aingeru Marcos
Participants hauled their monitors, towers and peripherals to a central location where they would set up their machines and connect them through a network switch. This local connection provided speeds far beyond those available to the average internet user, enabling lag-free gameplay, not to mention high-speed file sharing at a time when downloading or transporting large files could be an extremely onerous task. Lan parties ranged from small, private gatherings to massive, multi-day events with thousands of participants. As accessible digital photography was emerging around the same time and – perhaps because computer enthusiasts were more likely than the general population to own gadgets like digital cameras – these events are extraordinarily well documented.
What do these photos show? Young people – primarily men – goofing off and playing games, of course. But it’s more than that. Technological and cultural artefacts of the era are strewn throughout, illustrating trends, obsessions and now forgotten relics. One of my favourites (below) depicts, among other things, a Windows XP error dialogue box; a beige Microsoft keyboard; a disposable film camera; a pair of wraparound headphones that I and nearly everyone else I knew owned in the early 2000s; and a pile of burnt CD-Rs. Junk foods and caffeinated beverages appear frequently in the collection, with the energy drink Bawls Guarana in particular popping up again and again.
Clockwise from top: Alaska, US, 2003; Minnesota, US, 2007; BaseLan, Winnipeg, Canada, 2004. Photographs: S Tordoff; Thomas Blade; Aaron Kostuik/AYBOnline
What has today become massively mainstream – anime, gaming, comic books and so on – was, in the early 2000s, still on the fringes of normalcy. This period also saw the birth of meme culture. Early internet memes like “Mr T ate my balls”, “All your base are belong to us” and 1337, or leet, speak spread through forums, giving young internet users a kind of shared secret language. In the late 2000s, as social networks like Facebook gained traction among college students, and more and more people got online, meme culture gradually became mass culture.
During Lan parties, participants brought computers into garages, basements, living rooms and other spaces, setting them up on any available surface, from dining-room tables or TV trays to kitchen counters. The raw excitement of the participants is evident in the sometimes absurd lengths they went to in order to participate in these parties – computer towers crammed between cushions in the back seat of a van to ensure their safe transportation across town; cables crisscrossing the floor to connect machines; CRT monitors balanced haphazardly around the room.
Left: Illinois, US, 1999. Photograph: NIU Computer Gaming League. Right: The Promised Lan, Portland, Oregon, US, 2002. Photograph: Matt Bailey/Egg Lan Group
There is a sense, in looking at these photos, that these people were on the brink of something – even if they weren’t necessarily aware of it at the time.
Making a Lan party happen took physical effort, technical knowhow and a willingness to hack things together. For people like me, who grew up during the 1990s and 2000s, it can sometimes feel like the exciting period of the internet and computing is over. Pictures of Lan parties represent that early era, when it was a place you visited rather than a parallel layer of reality. Since then we have watched that mysterious, alluring and perilous internet get progressively fenced off, paywalled and centralised by a few massive corporations.
Merritt K is a video game designer, developer and archivist
‘Everyone else was playing Doom in a perpetual Lan party. Before long, I joined them’
The last Mac I ever owned was the Quadra 660AV that I took to college in 1994. By the time I’d finished my first semester I was staying up late to play Marathon, a spooky, atmospheric first-person shooter, rife with rogue AIs and clacking-mouthed aliens that terrified me.
In theory, I could have played Marathon online with friends – but I was the only kid on my first-year dorm floor with a Mac. Everyone else was playing Doom in a perpetual Lan party, every desktop plugged into the dorm’s ethernet. Before long, I joined them.
High school Lan party, Mount Eliza, Australia, 2008. Photograph: Elliot Gates
A neighbour had his desk and computer right next to his front door, practically in the hallway. He kept asking me to take his place in the death match as he went to pick up a sandwich or a bag of cheap weed. I was thrust into a maelstrom of fluid, frantic motion that separated Doom from the thoughtful pace of Marathon. I was in a miniature world with three other kids from my floor, one that was made of vectors of force, not textual descriptions. We were flying off balconies, trying to reach coveted rocket launchers, spinning, shooting, getting fragged, respawning.
Before I knew it, I had gotten slightly better at shooting other people. My dorm-mate came back with his food and his weed, and kicked me out three hours later when he wanted to sleep. The next afternoon, I came back and asked if they were playing Doom again. Of course they were: every day was Doom. If someone was in class, then another student with a PC was roped in to play.
I had little desire to play from my own room, down at one end of the hallway, where my randomly assigned roommate slept for much of the day, covered head to toe in a blue bedsheet, looking for all the world like a body laid out on a morgue slab. I played in other people’s rooms, up and down the hall, overstaying my welcome too many times.
Top: Gamers of Diverse Strategy, New Jersey, US, 2000. Photograph: Toby Cherasaro. Above: DDD Games Netfests, New Jersey, US, 2003. Photograph: J Scotty Emerle-Sifuentes
Mostly, we kept our doors open, drifting in and out. Most of the Doom aficionados were guys, though not all. Some were college athletes, and even the ones who weren’t had dorm rooms that smelled like sweat or Old Spice.
I didn’t care. Or maybe I associated the constant motion of fragging, running, grabbing a weapon, getting fragged, with the smell of socks and dude sweat. I’d discovered a different, kinetic side to gaming, luring me away from the sly plot twists of first-person adventure games and fragmentary computer records. I dreamed of blocky pixels rushing past in a swirl, as I turned and turned.
Naomi Clark is an independent game designer based in Brooklyn. She teaches game design at the NYU Game Center
‘I’d spent about 10 months mowing lawns and saving up to buy a console’
My fondest memories from high school are of playing Halo. That and chasing girls. When console games began to support online multiplayer, I knew almost nobody with internet fast enough to run Xbox Live. Maybe two kids out of a few hundred. But David’s mother was the principal at a local grade school, and so one day he decided to borrow a nice router and some ethernet cables from that school’s library. I assume they were never returned. We installed the router in the ceiling above his basement and ran cables under the floorboards throughout his house: to the living room, to Dave’s bedroom, to his brother’s room. His house became the de facto Halo hangout for years.
Arizona, US, 2004. Photograph: Matthew Goldthwaite
After school, the ritual was always the same. The bell would ring at 3pm, we’d pile into somebody’s car, and we’d all go to David’s place. We’d pair up, two to an Xbox, sometimes with four consoles, and play Damnation, Headlong, Lockout and Foundation. We’d make up silly game types based on our strengths and weaknesses; we all thought Shotty Snipers and Rocket Sword were our inventions. We listened to Van Halen or Breaking Benjamin and played Halo till Dave’s parents finished work. They would arrive home at 5pm and say: “Hey, how ya doin’? Good to see you fellas. Get the hell out of my house.” Then we’d do it all over again the next day.
I, of course, remember a great deal of testosterone-fuelled mischief. The sound of controllers being smashed. Freshman year on Halloween night, we stayed up late playing Halo split screen in Dave’s basement, and I was the first to fall asleep. When I woke the next morning, bleary-eyed, I found a piece of chocolate had been thrown at me as I slept – now melted and smeared along the length of my forearm. I moaned a one-word observation, a term coined in that moment, which I won’t repeat here. But we shared a laugh about it at David’s wedding a decade later.
Top: Missouri, US, 2002. Photograph: Dane Oleson/Electronox. Above: StarQuest, Southport, UK, 2001. Photograph: Gareth Woods
One afternoon in maybe February of 2005, I loaded my Xbox into a backpack and fell on the ice in front of my house on the way to the car. When we got to Dave’s place, it wouldn’t read the disc for Halo 2. That Xbox never read a disc again. This was a tragedy, because I’d spent about 10 months mowing lawns and saving up to buy a console in 2002.
Mercifully, my parents found it in their hearts to replace it. They understood how much joy it brought me.
David got a job delivering pizzas, but for about two precious years our summers belonged to us. And we spent them golfing, swimming and playing Halo. When beautiful girls started hanging around, our routine didn’t change all that much. Dave dated a girl named Kelly, a total sweetheart, and she would come over and sit on the couch and watch us play. She seemed wholly supportive of our obsession.
He ended up dumping her because, according to him, he just wanted to spend time with his friends. I heard she had opened her own hair salon somewhere. I hope she found someone who spent their youth doing something more interesting than playing system link on Ivory Tower. But I wouldn’t trade those days for anything.
Alex James Kane is a games journalist and a senior editor at USA Today’s Reviewed
‘The week before the Christmas holidays, I was invited to a Lan party at a boy’s house’
I went to my first Lan party on the night of 13 December 2003 in Minety, a small village between the towns of Malmesbury and Swindon in the south-west of England. It was the day that US joint operations Task Force 121 captured Saddam Hussein in Adwar, Iraq, finding him in a hole in the ground after searching Wolverine sites One and Two.
The news broke on BBC Radio 1 as my mom drove me down the rural road between Malmesbury and Minety with our PC in the back of our blue, two-door Mitsubishi that we had bought for probably less than £400.
Missouri, US, 2003. Photograph: Kiel Oleson/Electronox
My dad worked for Lockheed Martin at Dobbins Air Force Base outside Atlanta, Georgia. He was a technician on the C-130J Super Hercules, a four‑propeller cargo plane that carried equipment and soldiers in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. At 13, I was too young to appreciate the dark forces he was involved in – and as more of a hangar worker than a consultant, he didn’t even have a big military contractor salary to show for it.
After 9/11, he switched to assisting foreign militaries with the Hercules’s onboard aeronautics computers. Then we got news that he would be sent to England for two years. My mom decided we would go with him.
I went to a state school in Malmesbury. The first thing I noticed was that, unlike in the US, there weren’t cliques. There were only two social groups – tough working-class boys who played happy hardcore on MiniDisc players, and everyone else. Everyone seemed to be friends. The second thing I noticed was that the boys in the main group would prank and dogpile each other viciously, with not much supervision. No one really “got in trouble”.
I had been a Nintendo kid since the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) and was never a big PC gamer, but enjoyed The Sims, Quake and especially StarCraft, even though I was (and still am) terrible at it. The week before the Christmas holidays, I was invited to an overnight Lan party at a boy’s house.
Clockwise from top: Bloodnight II, Ulm, Germany, 1998; Missouri, US, 2002; Oklahoma, US, 2003. Photographs: Dennis Spreen; Kiel Oleson/Electronox; James Joplin
After the news of Hussein’s capture broke in the car, my mom switched off the radio. Maybe sensing my growing independence, she launched into a “talk”: first about weed, then about sex and abstinence. We were a religious household – neither topic had ever come up before between us. There were no details, just vague warnings about unexpected pregnancy and the sin of sex before marriage. I scoffed and explained what we were getting into: a Lan party would never consist of drugs or sex. The PC in the back seat seemed to help drive the point home.
I told the boys the story of our conversation with a “Get a load of this, fellas,” attitude. Immediately, they started chuckling. One of them pulled out a huge bong. I had never even seen one before. They seemed so comfortable with it, and quickly corrected the record on how cool we were supposed to be.
Mom’s other warning came partially true when they crowded around one boy’s monitor as he showed off his collection of downloaded 480-pixels porn. It was pure spectacle – they mostly just laughed and winced. Eventually, the ringleader played the big clip of the evening, more of a blooper than anything arousing. They cackled and replayed it over and over. I thought it was pretty funny, too, but couldn’t show it. Struck by how easily they navigated their budding sexualities, I knew this wasn’t for me. This moment of male hetero bonding, the shift from prepubescent innocence to exploding teen sexual energy, was both fascinating and terrifying.
In the morning, we went out to a tiny pond where our host had crafted a miniature raft made of empty two-litre Coke bottles sandwiched by two square plank boards. Camera at the ready, he convinced me to hop on. Once I was just out of reach, they suddenly ran over to the other side of the pond. I realised what was happening.
Wisconsin, US, 2003. Photograph: Matthew Sweeney
The raft barely floated. Using a rope attached to a tree, I was able to find my footing, so they pelted the water around me with stones. I finally lost control and fell hips-deep into the mucky December water. Once his camera was off and the laughter stopped, the boy offered his arm to help me out. When my mom picked me up, she smelled spilt bong water on another boy we were giving a ride home. She didn’t say anything.
When I left the UK in 2005, my friend cut a video with the raft footage, edited to US-themed songs and jokingly calling me a patriotic hero. They showed love in a way that only teen boys know how to. My friend uploaded the video to YouTube in 2011. It’s still up as I write this, almost 20 years after it was shot. When I watch it I see cultural differences between our otherwise extremely similar countries, and I see a young girl finding her footing, never quite fitting in with the boys – even the nerds.
Kaye Loggins is an artist and producer based in New York, who releases music under the name Time Wharp
This is an edited extract from Lan Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution by Merritt K, published by Thames & Hudson at £35. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.