Hah, in the title photo with all the PCs, the far-right black case is what I’m still using at home. Ripped out a lot of the 2.5" drive bays to fit my GPU.
Early Blizzard games actually leaned into this. I remember the original Diablo allowed you to install a “spawn” version of the game. Basically, a copy of the game which was locked into playing in a LAN game. My group spent so many hours in that game, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear and others. We’d all drag our systems to one person’s home, setup and spend a long weekend just playing. Taking a massive CRT monitor to someone’s home was always a PITA, but goddam it was worth it.
I had a friend with multiple PCs, so all we’d need to do is show up. He worked at a computer store or something (I think Circuit City), so he had discounts or something. We’d bring the pizza and whatnot and he’d provide the computers.
That was less cool when I got older, so we instead brought consoles to each other’s houses. I remember having Halo LAN parties where we’d connect two systems in different rooms and do red vs blue battles. Between the rooms, we’d have a table with pizza where we’d talk between matches and sometimes redo the teams. It was super fun despite having a pretty big skill gap.
At one of my jobs, we’d play OG Starcraft on our office LAN as well. We’d all be in the same room, but not about to see each other’s computers, so it worked out pretty well.
That just doesn’t exist anymore, except maybe on the Switch, and I’m not sure if anyone actually does anything like that these days (I’m not old with kids).
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