LANtastic: Most tech fans of a certain age have nostalgic memories of carrying their PCs and monitors to friends’ houses to partake in multiplayer games in a time before the internet made doing so quick and easy – albeit more impersonal. Maybe you used to think, “if I ever have enough money, I’ll make the ultimate LAN party home.” Well, one person really has, and it cost at least a million dollars.
For those who used to enjoy them, LAN parties are a fond memory: everyone crowded into one room, wires and empty pizza boxes all over the floor, the smell of snacks, soda, and sweat. Staying up to the small hours of the morning playing the likes of Quake, Starcraft, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Unreal Tournament, and Team Fortress 2. The games depended on your era, of course: this writer enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D and Command and Conquer at LANs in the mid-nineties.
Software engineer Kenton Varda decided to use the money he earned from his long tech career, including his current position as Cloudflare Workers tech lead, and the sale of his old home to transform his Austin house into a modern version of a LAN party location, filled with 22 machines and a dedicated hardware room. As reported by The Verge, the three-year project cost Varda over $1 million.
The LAN Party House, as it’s aptly called, sounds like a fantasy home for lovers of in-person gaming sessions, with much of the house designed specifically for this purpose. Not only does the basement hold 12 gaming stations, but they’re also built into folding wall cabinets so the machines can be hidden away while not in use.
The house also boasts two call rooms with their own gaming stations for private meetings. There’s an office space containing a large table that can be used for board games or unfolded to reveal an additional six gaming PCs plus two personal workstations. There’s even a room with four Dance Dance Revolution pads built into the floor and hidden under panels.
The PCs being used here are no Intel Pentiums with 3dfx Voodoo graphics. They each pack an RTX 4070 alongside an Intel Core i5-13600 and 32GB of RAM. There are a few discrete desktops, but most of the stations are just monitors connected to a central room that holds and cools the towers.
Varda says the cost of all 22 PCs alone was around $75,000, while the entire project was a “7-digit number.”
Varda says the LAN parties he hosts as often as every other weekend focus on team-based games like Deep Rock Galactic or the non-deathmatch modes of Unreal Tournament 2004. You can’t just pop along for a quick game, though: “I’m sure you understand: For security reasons, we can’t just let random people on the internet into our house,” Varda said.
Some might say not having to bring your own PC means this isn’t a real LAN party location. Varda explains that his first LAN party house was built to let people bring their own machines, but “nobody ever did. Not once.”
Images: Kenton Varda and Richard Varda
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