LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution

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

Merritt K is a writer, editor, and podcaster living in New York. She is the creator of Forgotten Worlds, a video series exploring Y2K-era internet culture, as well as several works of interactive fiction. Regrettably, she never owned anything resembling a gaming PC during the heyday of the LAN party.