> It's cool that coworkers were doing LAN parties 15 years ago
LAN parties have been around a lot longer than that. Friend of mine used to play DOOM deathmatch with his housemates at uni back in the 90s.
One of them was really good at designing levels but really terrible at the game, so he'd always hide the BFG somewhere that obviously only he'd know about so that he could go and grab it and then wipe out the other players relatively easily.
The others quickly got wise to this and, of course, DOOM was really easy to mod. For example, changing sound effects was simple: you could just overwrite them with different sound files on disk, I believe. So what they did is replace the sound that played when somebody picked up the BFG with the full length theme from The A-Team. DOOM didn't have the most sophisticated sound engine by today's standards, but it did have directionality, and sounds did get quieter the further away the source, and louder the nearer it was.
So the upshot was you had early warning that the guy had picked up the BFG and could either avoid or sneak up on him as appropriate. Apparently this used to really annoy him.
Not quite as cool, but my brothers would consistently break my records on minesweeper in the nineties until one day one of them admitted that if they put the PC in sleep mode just before they got to the same time as I had, then restarted it, the clock would stop and they could take as long time as they wanted to solve it.
(This was on an IBM Aptiva with Windows 3.1. You could set it in sleep mode just by pressing the power button. This was amazing for its time (1995) I think - I didn't see that feature again on any machine I had access to until a laptop in 2003 or so.)
there was also a cheat code that would change the top-left pixel of the screen black or white depending on whether you were hovering over a mine or not
A friend an I had neighbouring rooms in our halls of residence, and both had an Amiga 500 so ran a serial cable through the wall to play Populous PvP. That was 1989.
Now that is super-cool. I also had an Amiga 500 but never got to play anything that supported connecting computers together with a null modem cable. I didn't get my Amiga until 1990 but multi-machine multiplayer would have been absolutely living the dream for me at that time.
Those head to head player games were great, but there was one catch on the Amiga.
The DB25 serial port on the A1000 (first Amiga) was different from other systems of the day. Not just the obvious gender difference, but the pinouts were different as well. I knew a couple guys who tried a A1000 <--> A500 hookup, and blew one or both computers.
My university's network policy specifically banned Doom and other networked games my freshman year because they didn't like network traffic being taken up by games. Apparently Doom had rather chatty netcode as well, meaning that LANs of the era could easily get bogged down if there were even two people online fragging it up.
Game netcode got better, and so did network infrastructure, so in time this ban got lifted. Though part of me thinks that they couldn't actually enforce this ban without punishing half the school. Doom was that popular... at least until Quake came out.
I was trying to remember if it had been a false memory of mine that that had been possible with Lotus 2, but thanks for confirming that it's not. Never managed it but would have been awesome. Actually pretty tempted to pick up another Amiga just so I can do this. I assume it would still work with a null modem cable between an A500 and an A1200.
No sure on Lotus or the amiga, but a null modem cable simply crosses the rx and tx between the two systems (so rx on one device goes to tx on the other and vice versa). Same principle of how a crossover ethernet cable was always used to back to back, for example, two machine nic's or two ethernet switches before auto MDIX.
LAN parties have been around a lot longer than that. Friend of mine used to play DOOM deathmatch with his housemates at uni back in the 90s.
One of them was really good at designing levels but really terrible at the game, so he'd always hide the BFG somewhere that obviously only he'd know about so that he could go and grab it and then wipe out the other players relatively easily.
The others quickly got wise to this and, of course, DOOM was really easy to mod. For example, changing sound effects was simple: you could just overwrite them with different sound files on disk, I believe. So what they did is replace the sound that played when somebody picked up the BFG with the full length theme from The A-Team. DOOM didn't have the most sophisticated sound engine by today's standards, but it did have directionality, and sounds did get quieter the further away the source, and louder the nearer it was.
So the upshot was you had early warning that the guy had picked up the BFG and could either avoid or sneak up on him as appropriate. Apparently this used to really annoy him.