How Can I Host a LAN Party?
Hosting a LAN party is a great way to get together with friends, play computer games and have a fun time. A LAN party involves two or more people but can have hundreds of participants. Party goers are linked by a LAN, or local area network, and play the same computer game, either cooperatively or competitively. While a LAN party has theoretically been possible since the days of the Atari, it wasn’t until the game Doom came out in 1993 that a game was really designed with a LAN party in mind. Doom allowed up to four players to either work cooperatively through the missions or to face off against each other in a death match. As gamers learned the fun of fragging friends when they are within screaming distance, LAN parties became more popular, especially given the low speeds of internet connections in the mid-1990s. Local area networks don’t have the lag time that internet gaming suffered back then. Since that time, the LAN party concept has blossomed. Low-cost ethernet systems, hubs and
