Nobody in my friend group owned a gaming PC, so I started buying them. There are 20 old laptops in my house now.
LAN parties were most of my teenage years. Friends over, cables everywhere, soda and chips, gaming through the night. Battlefield 1942, C&C Zero Hour, Warcraft III, Left 4 Dead 2, Robot Arena 2, Soldat.
Then I got older, moved, and had kids. I kept gaming but never in the same room as anyone I was playing with. Most of my friends had stopped and nobody owned a gaming PC, so hosting a LAN didn't seem viable.
A few years ago I was feeling nostalgic and started searching for LAN parties then found this community. I realized a LAN didn’t need the latest games or high-spec machines, it just needed people getting together to play. So, I bought five Dell Latitude 5580s off eBay for $300 and set up Windows 10, Playnite, and my favorite classics. When my friends turned up the laptops were ready to go without all the patching and debugging. For four hours, there was shouting, food, drinks, and gaming. It was so much fun and it all came back. It was the social side of gaming I'd been missing.
It grew from there with more laptops and more people. Any time I came across someone who gamed IRL, I invited them to the next one. It's around 30 people and 20 laptops now, and my favorite thing is watching people rediscover games like Red Alert 2 and nerding out over them.
It's taken a long time to get the setup to a good state. Changing anything now means doing it 20 times which has been a real challenge. So I've been turning what I've learned into an open-source Linux distro built for exactly this job: flash a USB, image the machines, and they're LAN-ready with games installed, a launcher, local multiplayer with no accounts or internet, and a clean reset after every event. I have something working, but it's still early, I'll be testing it at my next LAN.
The part I most want to fix is joining a game. Right now sometimes there's someone shouting an IP address across the room and twelve people trying to find the right screen to type it in on. I want a list of what game servers are running in the room and one click to join.
I'm keen to share more once it's in a stable spot. In the meantime I'd like to know what I'm missing. What's the thing that always goes wrong at your LANs?