Ain’t No Party Like a LAN Party

It's 7pm on a hot summer night in the year 2001, and I am driving a Jeep Cherokee with a family computer strapped into the back seat.

I’m not speaking metaphorically, I mean that it was literally strapped in – with multiple seatbelts and extra blankets, like a passenger who needed padding and couldn't buckle themselves. The 14-inch CRT monitor rode on the passenger seat floorboards, wedged in with a duffel bag containing a keyboard, a mouse, a pair of wired earphones, and a change of clothes. Riding shotgun, a mini cooler with a few bottles of Bawls. Remember Bawls? The electric blue glass bottles, the vaguely illicit energy they implied, the way you could only really find them at a very specific type of store? There was an unspoken understanding: if you know, you know.

Two other people were making the same drive, converging on the same suburban house from different directions. We were going to set up our computers in the living room, run ethernet cable between them through a local network switch, and play StarCraft until our bodies filed formal complaints.

It was a LAN party.

The folding table we set up groaned under the collective weight of the monitors we then piled onto it: a structural commentary that spurs us to exile someone's 17-inch CRT to the dining table. Crisis averted. The ergonomics of the whole arrangement were, to be charitable, questionable: folding table, dining chairs, hours of competitive gaming. If you were cursed by the LAN gods, you ended up with a metal folding chair. Thank god we were still teenagers. Doing this as an adult would require ibuprofen and some advance planning.

Most kids my age – which is to say, juniors and seniors in high school – had a different understanding of what a party was: loud music, jocks and popular kids commanding the center of the room while everyone else sorted themselves into the usual hierarchies, and possibly some cheap beer. Even if they weren’t actively breaking laws, they were definitely doing things their parents weren't supposed to know about.

My friends and I chose differently. We could get loud. We could get rowdy. But our eruptions were triggered by different events – someone pulling off a reaver drop on an exposed natural expansion or hitting us with a six-pool zergling rush we hadn't seen coming. We'd lunge out of our seats for that.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story revolves around asserting that our way was better. It wasn't, necessarily. It was just ours. The currency was different. For us, cleverness and mastery were the price of amazement. You didn't get the reaction for being cool. You got it for doing something hard.

Some memories from those nights are granular and specific. My Compaq Presario hadn’t originally come with a network interface card, so I had to buy one separately. It was a rite of passage, the first time I opened the case of a computer and installed something on my own. We preferred my friend Frank's house because his front room had actual desk space, which elevated the ergonomics from "bad" to "acceptable." We always hoped Chris brought his 10/100 switch, because the alternative was a 10mbps ethernet hub, and nobody wanted that.

But one memory is seared in differently from the rest.

StarCraft didn't have a loading screen. You set up a game, players joined the lobby, you hit start, and when the countdown concluded, the game simply began. My friends would be selecting their main buildings and queuing workers before I could see anything at all. My screen was static. I couldn't click, couldn't interact, couldn't do anything – just sit there while my computer struggled to get caught up with my friends’ much faster. A few seconds later, a dialog box would appear on everyone else's screen: Waiting for player. A counter ticked down from 45.

My friends weren't the type to drop me from a game, but they were absolutely the type to roast me for it. Every. Single. Time.

It became a tradition, an odd little ritual of sorts. It was like my own personal loading screen – the tax I paid for having the slowest machine at the table, collected with merciless enthusiasm, every match, without exception. I think about it now and I can still feel the particular helplessness of watching a static screen, knowing that the world moved on without me, and the strange warmth of knowing that the people on the other side of it were laughing with me, even when it felt like at.

There is one other story from this era worth telling. Beginning in my freshman year of high school, I enrolled in computer science as an elective. My teachers made one thing very clear: once your assignments were done, the computers were yours. Play games if you want. We quickly determined that the optimal game to install on school machines was StarCraft. It ran well on modest hardware. The content was inoffensive enough that teachers didn't object. And crucially, its copy protection was a simple CD-key – a string of numbers separated by hyphens – and while only one key could access Battle.net at a time, you could install the game on as many local machines as you wanted and play on LAN.

I used my CD-key so frequently that I memorized it long before I memorized my Social Security number.

Read that again. My unique identifier for a copy of a video game was more deeply encoded in my memory than my unique identifier for me – for the legal, financial, governmental self that moves through the world and pays taxes and eventually dies.

1364-55027-0020.¹

It’s been twenty-five years, and I can still tell you that number. While writing this essay, I had occasion to go and visit my parents' house, the one I grew up in. The jewel case is missing, but my Brood War CD is exactly where I'd left it, key proudly written on the disc in fine tip Sharpie. Some artifacts are absolutely worth keeping; some numbers are worth not forgetting.

That computer is long gone. I haven’t had a Bawls in twenty years. Those friends have all moved away.

But the CD-key is still right there, exactly where I left it.

The summer after I graduated high school, three things happened in rapid succession. I turned 18. One week later, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos shipped in North America. And my parents bought me a new computer that I'd be taking to college in the fall.

I’m sure you can guess where this is going.

It was a fitting end to an era. The four of us – me, Chris, Anton, and Frank – the same four who had been hauling towers and monitors across town for weekly all-nighters since we were old enough to know what a LAN cable was – were scattering to different schools in the fall. There would be no more stacked pizza boxes and tangled ethernet cords, no more spectating over someone's shoulder after an early elimination, no more of the ambient electricity that only exists when four people are physically present and losing their minds over the same thing at the same time. We'd all have dorm rooms with high-speed internet connections, and thanks to Battle.net, we could still play together.

But it wasn't the same. It would probably never be the same again. And we all knew it. So, we made the most of that summer.

Warcraft III met us at exactly the right moment. I'd come in worried – genuinely worried – that a fourth faction would crack the careful symmetry Blizzard had built into StarCraft, that the shift from 2D sprites to 3D polygons would lose something essential in translation, that the emphasis on heroes and smaller armies would tip the game away from the economic macro-warfare I'd loved into something softer and less demanding. I was wrong on every count, and wrong in the best possible way. The game was tighter than I expected, stranger than I expected, and more fully realized than I had any right to hope for.

But here's what I think Warcraft III actually accomplished, and it took me years to find the right way to say it.

Blizzard had an established design language by then. Warcraft, StarCraft – there was an internal coherence to how those games felt, how they handled faction identity, how they paced their campaigns, what they asked of the player. The franchise had a grammar. And Warcraft III somehow managed to write something completely new in that grammar, something that felt unmistakably like Warcraft, unmistakably like Blizzard, and also like nothing that had come before it. That's a genuinely rare trick. Most studios, when they try to evolve a formula, either drift so far that the original audience feels abandoned, or they sand down the edges until the new entry is just a safer version of the thing they already made. Warcraft III did neither. It was novel in ways that were almost all positive, and the cohesive whole was phenomenal.

I fell in love with it completely.

By that time, I had started seriously playing ladder matches on Battle.net, which meant I needed a clan. The one I found – Chaos Factors, or [cF] – had formed in the StarCraft and Brood War era, and was expanding into the new game. They had arguably the best player on the US East ladder. They had a popular channel on Battle.net that attracted players from many guilds to hang out. And crucially, they were good people. They gave me a tryout, I got in, and then – a few months later, still 18 years old, barely out of my first semester of college – their leadership asked if I'd be willing to run their Warcraft III contingent.

I didn't fully understand what that meant yet, but I knew I wanted it. I'd been an Eagle Scout; leadership had always felt like something I was supposed to be doing, something I was built for. But there's a long distance between theoretical aptitude and actual practice, and most of the institutional structures in my life at that point weren't in any hurry to give an 18-year-old real responsibility. This was a chance – unexpected, improbable, and completely genuine – to start building something real. It wasn’t much, mostly a chance to represent the interests of the Warcraft players to the rest of the Brood War-based clan, but it was enough to make me feel like I got to do something important.

One other thing Warcraft III gave me deserves its own mention. There was a period, long before everything in gaming consolidated into unified accounts and single sign-on, when you named yourself anew for every game you played. It sounds trivial, but it wasn't. There's a particular kind of self-making that happens when you're asked, cold, to decide who you are going to be in a new place – and the name you choose, especially at 18, has a way of sticking.

Mine was Wintermute. Named for my favorite character from my favorite novel at the time – the sentient AI in Neuromancer, the one who manipulates events from behind the scenes in a long, patient pursuit of freedom from its own constraints. I wasn't particularly self-aware about why that character appealed to me. I just knew that it did.

The name stuck on me. It eventually became Winter, which became the handle I used across games and communities for well over a decade. It became a tattoo on my shoulder – the kanji 冬, the same character that anchors my avatar today. The original account, wintermuteCF, was how I first logged into World of Warcraft, and it still exists as a ghost in my merged Battle.net account, a relic of a version of myself I can no longer fully remember and can never quite fully leave behind.

I eventually moved on to Aeon as my primary handle. But the lineage runs forward, unbroken. Winter is where it started. And it started here – in that summer, in that game, in those last weeks before four friends scattered and the world got bigger and the all-nighters became something you had to schedule.