Deathmatch Before Broadband: The LAN Party Years

Before you could just jump online and play, multiplayer PC gaming in Australia mostly meant physically moving the whole setup: tower, monitor, keyboard, a box of cables, into a mate's garage or lounge room, plugging everyone into the same network, and playing until someone's mum asked what time it was and hinting you should all go to bed. No matchmaking, no servers full of strangers. Just whoever you could fit in the room.

The game that made the hassle worth it

Doom is where this really starts. id Software shipped it in December 1993 with a deathmatch mode for two to four players over a local network, a term John Romero coined once the team started running four player sessions against each other. It spread so fast that university networks were banning it within hours of release, because a sudden rush of players trying to frag each other overwhelmed campus systems that had never seen traffic like it. John Carmack had a patch out the next morning. None of that mattered to anyone running it over their own cabling at home, which is exactly where Doom deathmatch ended up living for most Australians who wanted to play it against each other.

Early networks for this ran on coaxial cable, 10BASE2, strung from machine to machine with a BNC connector on the back of the network card. It worked, until someone unplugged the wrong end and took the whole chain down with them. T-Pieces and Terminators were a must-have commodity to avoid the whole crew turning up and not everyone being able to play. Twisted pair cabling and a hub, 10 megabit if you were lucky, gradually took over because one bad cable didn't kill everyone else's game.

Quake raised the stakes

Quake, out in 1996, kept the same basic shape, LAN or direct connection, but pushed deathmatch further into a real competitive scene. QuakeWorld, released that December, rewrote the network code with client-side prediction specifically so laggier connections could still play cleanly, a trick that's become standard in every online shooter since. Quake also produced one of the most famous moments in early esports: Dennis Fong won John Carmack's actual Ferrari at the Red Annihilation tournament in 1997. But while a few of us played directly connected dial-up with a friend, taking turns on hosting to 'even out' the latency disparity, it was still a LAN game first if you wanted a fair fight.

Half-Life, Counter-Strike and StarCraft close it out

By the time Half-Life landed in November 1998 with its own deathmatch modes, and the Counter-Strike mod started taking over LANs not long after, the pattern hadn't really changed, it had just gotten better games to run it on. Counter-Strike turned into the thing half the room wanted to play by the end of the night, team against team, round after round, long after anyone would admit how late it had gotten. StarCraft, out in March 1998, filled the same role for anyone who wanted real-time strategy instead of a shooter, and its online service Battle.net grew 800 percent after launch, but in Australia a StarCraft LAN at someone's place was still the easier, cheaper way to Zergling rush someone else in real time.

What it actually took

None of this happened without effort. Someone had to own a hub or switch big enough for everyone's machine, and someone had to be willing to crawl under a desk to find which cable had come loose. A full LAN meant lugging a CRT monitor that weighed more than the PC itself, plus the tower, keyboard, mouse and a tangle of cords, into a car and then into whoever's garage or lounge room was hosting that week. Snacks and bad music were assumed. So was the Red Eye and Jolt Cola energy drinks and loud taunting.

Why it stopped being necessary

Public dial-up internet had actually existed in Australia since 1989, through Pegasus Networks, but it took the market opening to full competition in 1997 before access and pricing made it something most households would bother with for gaming. Even then, dial-up's latency and early per-minute costs made it a poor substitute for sitting in the same room as everyone else's machine. Telstra didn't launch consumer ADSL until August 2000, and broadband subscriptions only started climbing toward the numbers that made online play reliably playable years after that depending on which city you lived in.

For the stretch between Doom and the point dial-up became something ordinary households actually used for gaming, the LAN was simply the only way to get a fair, low-latency game against another person in Australia. That's the window this piece sits in. What came after it, dial-up gaming, the ping jokes, and everything that followed once broadband actually arrived, is its own story. As is Newcastle's own LAN history...