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![[OpEd]](/v2/images/stories/insight2.png "[OpEd]") ![[Retro]](/v2/images/stories/retro2.png "[Retro]")
As I sit down to finish this week’s "Retro", it is snowing, not just a little. I mean it is really snowing. We have had four inches of snow in the last three hours. The reason that I mention this is that it reminds me of one snowy evening, back in the “old days” when some friends and I had a party. This was not just any party; this was a LAN party.
The time was the late 1990’s when the Internet was young. The most popular search engine of the time was Yahoo, but there was this upstart named Google that was just coming into the ranks as a search engine.
 Gaming via the Internet was difficult, if not impossible, because the most popular means of connecting to the Internet was dial-up. If you wanted to game with your friends you either had to be in the same room, or you were forced to endure a very slow, choppy, gaming experience. A group of guys and I had been talking for weeks about getting together for some serious head to head gaming, and we decided on a LAN party.
We started to work out some of the logistics of the LAN party; we would “borrow” a decent Pentium 1 class computer and set it up as our server. One of the other guys was able to obtain a 16 port hub (not switch) from work for “off-site testing”. We all pitched in and scrounged anything that we could to make this party work.
We made arrangements to have the party in someone's basement since his parents were out of town for the week. The plan was go over to his house on Thursday night to clean up, Friday night to setup, and then Saturday morning to play.
I went over to his house on Thursday night to help clear space for the LAN party. We went in to his basement and started to clean up, moving boxes of old National Geographic magazines to a corner of the basement (Why would you collect something like that?). I then moved the cat litter pan to another corner so we would not have to deal with what cat food smells like after it comes out of the cat.
After clearing the rest of the room, only one item remained: the pool table. Eric grabbed one end of the table, and I the other. We gave a mighty grunt and with that, the table did not even budge.
“What the $#^@*& is this thing made ?" I asked.
"Just slate."
An executive decision was made: the pool table would stay put. This turned out to be fortuitous since since we were able to put a couple of pieces of plywood on top and use it as our gaming table.
 Friday night came and we all showed up with our computers. Remember, this was the days before small form factor desktops and powerful laptops. It was a time when most IT guys and uber-geeks had large tower computers so that they could pack as much stuff into the box as was possible.
So there we were: six guys, walking in and out of the house in a snow storm (much like today) tracking mud, snow, and water everywhere. After what seemed like more than three hours, we had all of the computer equipment in the basement sitting on top of our converted pool table. There were 15 and 17-inch monitors everywhere, and LAN cables running like a disorganized spider web. In the middle was a big black box with strands of cable running in no particular order.
After we had gotten everything plugged in and re-routed some power cables (we blew a circuit breaker twice before we realized everything was on one circuit), it was time. First, the Quake server was brought online, then a few of our computers. We tested whether or not we could actually communicate with the server.
 This is of course where the whole party plan changed. Since we were only testing and the party was not to start until the next day, we figured that we would connect to the server and play “for a minute” to see if the network and server worked. Since two of the guys were sick and had gone home to rest, there were only four of us left. We started to play and gameplay seemed to be smooth and uninterrupted so we figured, "Great we are all set. "
That is when it happened in the game; Eric came out from behind a wall and shot me in the face.
“OK, it's on!”
I proceeded to respawn, hunt him down, and kill him with a pipe bomb. Little did we realize that this scenario would play itself continuously over the next 16 hours. That’s right, the “We'll just test this” turned into an overnight gaming marathon of biblical proportions.
There were many frags that weekend; many, many bags of chips and caffeine laden drinks consumed. I am certain that our weekend was the start of a few cases of carpel tunnel syndrome, but it firmly cemented the love and enjoyment of multi-player gaming as part of our gaming history.
One person has commented on this article. 1. Untitled
testmonkey, Registered Great story Dave I love HISTORY 
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