A look at Doom's LAN games on its thirtieth birthday.
  • ShadowEnglish
    37•1 year ago

    Man I miss the early days of lan parties. Struggling to figure out how to plug my friends computer into mine via BNC cables (didn’t know we needed terminators) when we got our first ever network cards. Then later the big lan games of blood, duke 3d, quake, even starcraft.

    Good times.

    • @NibodhikaEnglish
      16•1 year ago

      Your comment unlocked repressed memories of having to rewire ethernet cables for direct connection between PCs. And to make my father take me and my desktop+CRT monitor to my friend’s house for a weekend of HL+mods, AoE, and whatever new game one of us had found that month…

      Fun times, online matches are great, but the feeling of a Lan party is something that I think it’s mostly lost.

      • @JoeKroganEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        AoE on lan was the shit. So much fun

    • @[email protected]English
      5•1 year ago

      Same. It was a good read though. Getting old sucks for everyone, but I can’t help but feel like we grew up in a particularly magical time where you can remember dial phones all the way through smart phones. It kind of set the wow factor baseline a little high. I don’t know if other people in history have had a similar experience, but I kinda doubt it.

      • ShadowEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        Maybe, or maybe in another 30 years people will just be commenting how nice it was to be alive during the birth of the metaverse and giant corporations.

        Probably not though.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        Someone born in 1875 could have gone from gas lamps and horses to light bulbs, refrigerators, and cars by the time they were 50. May be comparable?

    • @allroyEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I don’t know why I assumed these was an experience isolated to me… ha!

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      Hmm, somehow I never really used 10BASE2/5 stuff.

      My first memories of “LAN” parties was playing Doom, OMF2097 and other DOS IPX games over a null-modem cable (which I made myself by hacking up a regular serial cable - was so proud of myself when I got it to work lol). Of course, it was only limited to two PCs, but still fun nonetheless. After the DOS era, my first “proper” LAN party was over 10BASE-T (Cat3) during the Win 9x era, and then we quickly moved into the Cat5/100Mbps world. So somehow I completely skipped over coax LANs, even though I started with MSDOS, RS232 and BBS door games. Or maybe I used them unknowingly at school or something. But it feels really strange to hear others reminisce “fondly” about T-connectors and terminators, when even though I’m from the same era, I never even saw them. Or maybe I’m from an alternate timelime where they didn’t exist at all…