I was fortunate that kids I grew up with had computers all over their house. network cables up and down the stairs. one family had a room built on their garage

I was fortunate that kids I grew up with had computers all over their house. network cables up and down the stairs. one family had a room built on their garage setup for band practice and tables around the thing for lan parties since their dad was some high end coder or unix wizard or something. later we took over an old single theater in north branch MN (the battle shack) and kids just lived there for the summer. 24/7 lan party and movies and music and just wild stuff going on. you'd show up with your PC and hook up and wander around trying to organize games, check out people's crazy setups (kids with crazy workstation CRT monitors for each color in as coax) and stuff like that. After I got out of highschool we went to AWOL lans which I think died over the pandemic finally but they had like two days of games organized in a hotel with a huge arcade, laser tag, go karts.