LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution

by Merritt K.

A loving photographic celebration of the energy drink-fueled, furniture-rearranging, multiplayer gaming trend and its nocturnal participants. Transport yourself back to the golden era of multiplayer PC gaming, when the internet was a place you built with your friends and the only in-game purchases were pizza deliveries. Ad hoc and adventurous, sweaty, and unsupervised, LAN (local area network) parties embodied an open and optimistic era in computing that’s been forgotten in today’s always-online digital world. Featuring personal recollections alongside hundreds of crowdsourced photographs ranging from kitchen-table gatherings to massive convention hall-filling tournaments, LAN Party will bring you back to the Mountain Dew-fueled glory days of gaming. In addition to documenting the nostalgic era of LAN parties, the photographs are unique artifacts of the peculiar cultural and technological moment, when gaming was tipping over from niche hobby to mainstream obsession. They reveal not just the home decor and personal fashion styles at the turn of the millennium but also a different world, one that existed before the internet took shape and we started carrying it around with us in our pockets. True to the community spirit of the book’s content, author Merritt K pitched the idea for this publication through Twitter and received over 100,000 likes. LAN Party is her sought-after idea brought to life in a high-quality photobook format and includes exclusive contributions from the likes of Naomi Clark (faculty at the NYU Game Center), Kat Bailey (IGN), and more. 221 color illustrations

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Video Games

176 pages, Hardcover

Published January 30, 2024

Reviews

[Farouk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really great book comprised of both archival photos and various personal essays depicting an era of the internet and video games that seems so alien to the one we have now: when you actually had to hang out together and form community in physical space in order to play games together.

This is a wonderful encapsulation of this particular segment of early internet/Y2K era culture, and makes a strong case for how the modern internet culture we live in today has perhaps been led astray. With the internet being more hostile and separating than ever before, this book is in some ways aspirational and revelatory in its depiction of a time when games and digital culture didn't have to be feel so bad, where community felt real and possible. Perhaps this book is a way to look back on what once was, and help us imagine what it might look like to steer us back onto a more proper course for combining evolving technology with actual human connection.

[Alaina · Rating 4 out of 5]

this has been sitting on my desk at work for a bit - i skimmed through the photos with coworkers when it first came in but i finally got around to reading the essays and looking through it myself

i sort of just-missed the heyday of lan parties. i was a poor kid, i didn't have a pc of my own, and i wasn't playing computer games at the time either (aside from sleepovers at my friend jenny's place, where her dad had a pc AND computer games and we spent many nights playing 'leisure suit larry', 'phantasmagoria', 'shivers', and some 'king's quest' - perfectly appropriate titles for a pair of 13yo girls!). i spent a lot of time at the library on their computers, but moreso hanging out in sonic the hedgehog roleplay chatrooms lol

but i have fond memories of quasi-lan activities. friend rob showing off his pc games, and also teaching me how to put together and fix a computer. memories of lugging me and my husband's pc's over to friends' places (and vice versa) to just hang out on the internet together

i remember, sometimes after 2010, taking a back shortcut through a neighborhood i lived near and seeing a whole live lan party in someone's garage in the middle of summer and i felt wistful for a thing i was just not quite in the right demographic at the right time for

the essays in this are equal parts humorous, touching, introspective, and even a little wistful about something ephemeral and short-lived, all things considered

[no · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to forget that culture comes downstream from the mere fact of what people are doing at a given time, yet through that lens LAN Party collects visual artifacts and testimony of a sorely under-appreciated era that bridges the extremely online 2020s and the internet era's early adolescence in the 1990s. Yes, that often looks like cheap digital photos of boys brashly flipping off the camera (the essays, brief and all worth reading, provide scaffold for how this young-male-dominated subculture might be understood within a larger pro-LBTQ framework), but the challenges to conservation efforts that digital photography pose are part of the general challenge of creating a historical record of the internet era. More viscerally, LAN Party is a touching portrait of the early days of computers when their culture remained vitally human, beautiful in all their ugliness, and, look, if you show me a CRT monitor with StarCraft: Brood War on it, I'm going to get a little misty-eyed.

Takeaway:
"LAN parties were where I got a taste of what acceptance could look like."

[Tabish Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a brief period when multiplayer gaming had taken off but high speed Internet hadn’t, LAN parties were how people came together to play video games and this book of photographs and essays captures this short-lived cultural phenomenon. It’s a major dose of nostalgia for me

[Tristan Damen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely beautiful artefact brimming with warmth and texture.

[Josef Ploski · Rating 3 out of 5]

An honest portrait of geek culture from the mid nineties to the mid-2000s. Even if you were never a LAN player, you will most likely recognize people in your life who you knew.

[Bud Winn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great trip down memory lane; I'm glad someone made this book.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun coffee-table book; technology has changed and our ability to come together has as well, but the same fun depicted in these pictures can still be had.