3 ms·
> The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough. Every lan party wo
by eterm 17d ago
> The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough.
Every lan party would have that one guy who turned up with nothing pre-installed or patched, and would finally, after a couple of hours, get their copy of Unreal Tournament working and join the game just as everyone had grown tired of it and were ready to hop into another game instead. This would rinse and repeat for almost every game.
I had some sympathy, but not too much, because we were generally fairly organised about sending out game lists in advance.
There was something delightfully chaotic about trying to get a good game of anything actually played, because even without technical problems, you'd get a situation where at most a third of the players were keen, another third were mildly amused and another third were basically just barely tolerating it because they wanted to play something next and didn't want to ruin the vibe, but clearly would much rather be playing almost anything else. Of course, as games rotated, so did these groups.
There was also that corner of people who had no intention of playing anything and were just there to utilise the ability to privately swap their terrabyte sized "anime" collections across fast ethernet ( or via physically handing over hard-drives ). I tended to leave them well alone.
- ssl-3 17d agoYeah. The chaos was indeed delightful. I actually didn't get much gaming done on those days since I didn't usually have much of a gaming machine for myself at that time. My focus was instead mostly directed at getting everyone else up and running. Every now and then I'd take a turn at someone else's computer. It worked fine. Except that one day when I did bring a reasonably-capable machine with a Voodoo3 2000 card. On that day, I was the one having computer issues and it seemed like getting updated drivers from 3dfx was the correct move to make. But nVidia had just announced their purchase of 3dfx. And 3dfx's own website was dead like it had never really existed; as if someone had walked into the closet where it was hosted and yanked the plug out of the wall. It was at that time that it became clear that the early web tendency to scatter mirrors of important things all over the place had become a lost concept. I spent hours trying to find drivers. It felt like all of my well-honed Google-fu was a spectacular failure. But I did eventually succeed at finding recent drivers, and they did fix my problem, and games were then played. The specificity of the occasion pins down the date very precisely: Saturday, December 16, 2000.