| There was a lanshop that had a T1 of their own (this was '99) that had their machines (two dozen - there were a dozen in each room that had a partition so that people could play against each other). The "clan tag" that they used was [LPB] standing for Low Ping Bastards as this was the time when people often were in the middling three digit pings - they were regularly in the low two digits. Human Head even had a release party of Rune there and they hosted one of the servers that was consistently up - it was a fairly popular one because it was always up (this is back in the days when many game servers were at the other end of an ISDN line that the owner would power down when not playing) and it had good ping times. It was a shock to some to find that not only did they have good ping times, but also there were some people with [LPB] that had ping times in the single digits. When asked about it the response was "I can touch the server." It was a nice place to hang out and play games. This was also in the days before voice chat across the net was practical. It was a game changer to have a group of three or four people all coordinate a tank in Tribes - or a spotter and a mortar working together where they could talk rather than needing to pause and type to communicate. The thing that killed the lan shop was that the college dorms started getting wired with acceptable networks and a good chunk of the player base could play on their own machines. There was still some "get a dozen people together to play" but not enough to pay the bills. https://web.archive.org/web/20010406031620/http://www.ping-t... --- Regarding LAN parties : https://www.lanreg.org When I lived in Eau Claire, I knew people who went to https://www.lanreg.org/winlan/winlanxi (noting that it was a thing last year, but doesn't appear to have been scheduled for this year - would have been last month). |