[furyofantares]

> There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start.

Yes there was. It was a 3 person team. That's a good enough reason to not have almost any feature that requires any amount of work, including UI work, because there is always a whole mountain of stuff that you're not doing that you'd like to do as a 3-person dev team.

[fluoridation]

It's more work to implement the server as a separate program that you additionally have to keep running and load-balance than to build the server into the game.