LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :)

I am moderately obsessed with LAN parties, so I built a file sharing tool for LAN parties specifically, if you want to check it out https://justinbecker.dev/blog/2026/05/16/why-i-built-lanbuck...

As kids me and my friends used to muse over the fact that growing old, eventually moving into a care home would be awesome. Pension, you say? Well, what's that if not an unending LAN party!

It turns out reality is different - the older I get, the less interested I have in computer games. It feels like I've seen it all at this point, and I'd rather see grass twice than a virtual anything.

When me, and my generation, are old enough where people start getting shipped into care homes, I suspect there won't be any interest at all, save perhaps a nostalgia trip every now and again.

This is still very much alive in the fighting game scene. At least in the US, every major city has at least one local running a bracket and casual sets regularly. This has many of them, not all: https://sk-tekken.com/tracker

My core memory of LAN parties was the one I organized at my university and there was so much power draw it threw the breaker for the entire student lounge building.

Had to run a massive extension cord across to the next building to spread it out a little so we wouldn’t keep tripping it.

I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3

It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experience possible for participants :3

[1]: https://tg.no (no English site exists unfortunately)

Our high school computer science team did a StarCraft LAN party on a flight coming back from a coding competition. We felt like the coolest kids in the world when we did that.

Lan? Still awesome.

For my kids' parties I have 3x OG xboxes. Each has 4 controllers. Plug them into a router.

12 player lan. Halo, Nascar, (6 player) crimson skies, mechassult.

https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/wiki/Xbox sort by per console and total players.

I promise they have vastly more fun all being in the same room playing each other all at once than anything with modern graphics.

The article opens by saying LAN's chief advantage was "nearly eliminating latency" and closes by saying revival is as easy as sharing your Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi and a wired switch are not the same thing. The one thing that made LAN parties technically distinctive is the one thing the revival pitch quietly removes.

Quake Arena and LAN parties during college created some of the best memories I have related to computer games.

In wired LAN mode you can play Mario Kart 8 deluxe with up to 12 players, or Mario Kart World with up to 24 players.

(picture of original/SNES Mario Kart reminded me of this; note you can also play it on the Switch)

Studios have "forgotten" even more than players. My friends and I regularly have Age of Empires 2 LAN parties, and you can't even connect to each other without an internet connection and steam or Xbox account.

It feels a bit dystopian considering that 25 years ago the very same game let me pop the CD out and put it in another computer to set up a LAN.