I host LAN parties about twice a year (now that I have space for it). I've been hosting LANs since 2012 and even back then LAN parties were already dying. The hardest part of hosting a LAN these days is convincing your guests to get off their couch. I think in person connection is worth the effort of dragging your PC across town, but it's a hard sell. Online gaming has matured to a point where, from a technical perspective, you don't gain much from playing on LAN at all. In fact many modern games require Internet play, even for private matches!

Anyway I wrote up some more of my thoughts about modern LAN parties here: https://justinbecker.dev/blog/2026/08/05/how-to-host-a-lanpa...

Cool! I went to a LAN party in a retired nuclear bunker in 2000. I remember someone had one of the first TFT screens. It was muddy, had zero visibility unless you were directly head on, and what felt like around 3fps. They were trying to play Counter-Strike. (Everyone else had a CRT and laughed at it.)

What a great read. Thank you for sharing. I didn't go to my first lan party for a couple of years after this was written but it's a nostalgia trip nonetheless.

The linked lanparty.com is also a great exploration. (The first archive is from a few months after the article)

https://web.archive.org/web/19981212015213/www.lanparty.com/

I'm pretty sure my friends and I used this resource when setting up: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202184536/http://www.lanpar...