Gabe Newell’s new yacht enables him to host LAN parties on the set of an immersive sim
In my life I have attended perhaps five LAN parties in total, and one of those doesn’t really count because it was just lugging my 486 over to a friend’s house so we could play Quake deathmatch. Two people is not enough for a LAN party, in the same way that it’s not enough for an orgy: you need enough people for it to feel like a crowd, and coincidentally they also have to be OK with being sweaty and very close to people in a domestic setting that wasn’t really designed for it. (Also, everybody brought something alarmingly large and brightly coloured from home.)
Nowadays LAN parties feel somewhat anachronistic, replaced by the internet: there are still larger-scale events like Epic.Lan or bring-your-own corners of PAX, but bringing PCs together in one place feels like a dated relic of a former age. I was delighted, therefore, to belatedly discover that Gabe Newell has included LAN parties in the spec for his latest $500m megayacht, built by the firm he recently purchased and kitted out to serve his marine research enterprise.
The facilities of