“Just a bunch of idiots having fun” – a photo history of the LAN party

“I think lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the early 2000s, like a lot of people, I think, in their 30s.”

That’s one of the first things writer, game designer, and podcaster Merritt K said to me in early November. At this point, everything about gaming, and being online in general, was fundamentally simpler than it was at the turn of the century. You can now play intensive triple-A games on a cheap phone, provided you have a cloud gaming subscription and a decent wireless connection. You can instantly set up a chat room for free, build an online presence and even publish videos. Performance-oriented and customizable PC gaming hardware is just a few clicks and a few days away from showing up at your door.

And yet we’re both hopelessly wistful for something completely different: LAN parties. Merritt K so much so that she is writing, curating and crowdfunding a book: LAN party. It’s a collection of original amateur photos – many scaled up through AI – and short essays about a period when multiplayer gaming meant desktop towers, energy drinks, and being physically present in some awkward spaces. It’s been over a year in the making, but she’s been thinking about it for a lot longer.

“Some of the reasons for that are just nostalgia, like, ‘Remember when you were a teenager, listening to emo music, going to LAN parties and stuff.’ But there’s another aspect, where the internet, which I think is a lot like Gen X, older millennial or mid-millennial people who grew up, is basically falling apart,” said Merritt K. “We felt us like this thing that was so important to me, internet culture and being online and technology and all these things – it was so hard growing up, and it gave me a way to talk to people and make connections.

“And now it’s just the opposite of that. Real life is where you can have meaningful interactions with people, and online is where you have to present this brand, this manicured identity. I think there’s something that appeals to people, and me, about LAN parties is that they’re kind of symbolic of this earlier era of technology when things were a bit rougher.”

From late night tweet to AI scaling

The demise of truly DIY consumer technology, the 20-year nostalgia window, the isolation of COVID-19 – some or all of these guided a late night tweet from Merritt K’s in September 2021 to almost 100,000 likes. Over four brightly lit images of people clearly wearing millennial clothes: “I want to make a coffee table book with just pictures of LAN parties from the 90s and 2000s.” Two minutes later: “Don’t steal this idea, it’s mine, someone please publish this.”

Someone is indeed publishing this: British video game history publisher Read-Only Memory. Merritt K searched for original photos and heard from hundreds of enthusiastic fans. Some had to sift through old media and hope that entropy hadn’t started yet. Some still had image directories on long-neglected but public web servers. Merritt K had seen many of the famous LAN party memes: the games of the San Antonio Spurs StarCraft on a plane next to their NBA championship trophy, the man duct taped to the ceiling – but was surprised by how rich the lesser-known photos she received.

“The composition in some of these is so good by accident,” said Merritt K. “They reveal so much about the era in terms of fashion, food, drink, and even the interior. I think that appealed to a lot of other people as well.”

The people who attended LAN parties were generally early adopters, and that included digital photography: grainy, yellow-timed, single-digit-megapixel, point-and-shoot digital photography. Untrained photographers shooting in dimly lit spaces with Y2K-era equipment lent much charm to the images Merritt K collected, but also made it impossible to print many of them in high resolution.

Enlarge / LAN party uses Gigapixel AI to upscale the low-resolution, grainy, often dimly lit photos of the titular events.

LAN party / read-only memory

Enter Gigapixel AI, learning software that can scale images up to 600 percent. Gigapixel has scaled up famous 1896 movies of arriving trains, helped another AI win a controversial art fair, and further blurred the line between digital photo and illustration. Some interesting shots had to be left out because they were just too dark or blurry, even with AI help. Others caused Merritt K and her editors to question the line between dark basement reality and the need for images that worked in a physical book. It was a tricky balance, said Merritt K, but the overall spirit was enlightenment and entertainment, not accuracy of light balance.