The closest I ever came to a lan party was when I was at my friend's house and another kid came over with his Mac. The two of them connected their Macs to each other directly and played some game while I watched.

I YEARNED to be cool enough for a lan party

Having been to several lan parties, I can assure you that's not where the "cool" kids were :D (me included)

Funny thing is that it's totally cool to be a gamer now. My lil brother and his friends, who's 20ish years younger than I, actually get laid because of it! Absolutely blows my mind. I've had to explain to him that "we walked, so you all could run".

We got to where we are by standing on the shoulders of giants.

I dug the article and am interested in the book. In particular, I liked how they mention that one of the reasons for the death of the lan party is that we don't own anything anymore. We don't host our own servers and technically don't own the games. It's something that I really despise in our current Everything-as-a-Service model of "ownership", and am glad they bring it up. A lot of these lan nostalgia articles I've come across fail to mention that. At least the ones I've read.

The lan party experience is one of the fondest I have with my friends before we all "grew up". I member putting a seatbelt on my heavy af 24in CRT so it would travel safely to a party. That thing was so damn heavy! Ahh the memberries.

I think at least in part the real death of the LAN Party comes from everything having been made too convenient.

For me and my friends back then, the only way to play Warcraft or Quake against each other was to drag your computer to their place. You couldn't play online, because that didn't exist yet, and via the then-era 2400 baud modems, latency just made things unplayable.

Then when we no longer had to drag our computers around because internet came around, we didn't. We'd just play online. And when matchmaking meant you didn't have to specifically get your friends in, but you could play with anyone, that community around it started to disappear.

You could play anywhere and anytime, but I ended up playing less (especially with my friends), and the magic was lost.