Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halo, all-nighters and junk food – you can almost feel the energy in these pictures!
A new book created by a popular podcaster packs a powerful dose of nostalgia on each page. The ‘LAN Party’ photobook will bring back memories of late 90s, early 2000s multiplayer games culture. It’s a photo archive of why early 2000s multiplayer games and tech were the best. Just look at that main image and tell me you’re not feeling nostalgic already!
The book will bring back memories of when hanging out with friends didn’t mean obsessively checking their Steam or Discord status hoping someone was up for a match. And when sharing a game or some with a friend meant physically burning a copy on a disk and taking it to their home. No wonder Blockbuster-style renting is making a comeback!
“That time — the late ’90s, early 2000s — was pre-social media.
It’s the era of blogs and forums. No one really had 24/7 access. So even though we were starting to get high-speed internet, it was still a place that you went, rather than just another part of your life. And this feeling of connecting to people in other parts of the world was cool. It wasn’t something that was taken for granted yet,” says writer and game developer Merritt K.
If you’re old enough to remember the days when you had a physical key on your PC’s storage drive and Nero wasn’t just a Roman emperor, do a browse through Merrit K’s “LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution” to relieve those glorious times.
The author pitched her social media following back in September 2021 about this book idea, and the answer was incredibly enthusiastic. Her tweet had almost 100K likes, a thousand responses and more than 10K shares.
Clearly, we all miss a time where technology was disjointed but our sense of community was strong.
Remember when your mp3 player didn’t send your data to a social media page, and games didn’t record your every step to sell that data? Pepperidge Farm does!
“We’ve kind of lost a lot of control, I think over our relationship to technology. We have lost a lot of privacy as well. There’s less of a sense of exploration because there just isn’t as much out there,” said the author of this photobook, and I’m sure a lot of us can resonate.
If you miss the early days of tech and gaming, here’s a list of books about tech history that won’t bore you to tears – especially the story of Doom, arguably the game that ushered in competitive play.
Also read: The 26 Lines of Code that Changed the World, A New Book You Should Definitely Add to Your List
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