Anyone here ever ran a LAN party in the works office?

Big wealthy companies usually have big costly security/infrastructure systems in place to stop things like installing games (or any software not required or licenced)

14 years ago I used to play LAN Quake but it was at a small company that my friends father owned

Also, unless its a graphic design company or something, even high spec PCs do not have graphics cards capable of todays games. Its all about access times, storage and security (generally)
 
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We did it a while back when I was at Evesham technology play css 1.6. I doubt very much I would do it now, although it's been mentioned a few times in the office...
 
If your sysadmin says yes, go for it but in my experience even decent office PCs don't have the graphics grunt. I've got an i5, 16GB of RAM and a GeForce 620 :(
 
We are planning this for next month... we need to play older games anyway because we're entirely Linux so we'll probably go for Quake 3 Arena and other games that are no freely available and they should run fine on a modern processor without hardware acceleration.
 
I've not played multiplayer games at work, but at my last place I had a gaming PC hidden away in the server room. My manager decided that we needed top of the range PCs, so we had systems with AMD X2 processors, 2GB RAM and ATI X1800 XT graphics cards. They were pretty much as powerful as my home gaming machine was at the time, though I had more RAM. I decided to put mine in the server room, and used my laptop at my desk. As you can imagine, I spent most of my time in the server room :)

Sadly my current work PC has an ATI HD 5450, so no such luxury these days!
 
TaKeN said:
Crikey, I'm guessing it wasn't just office staff then? Else surely they'd have all been fired.
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Games weren't the issue, we all spent Christmas playing things to collect the Steam items. I was even instructed to install Steam at one point by my line manager :D.

It was signing a bunch of non employees onto the work PCs as admin's that got him fired.
 
bledd. said:
^that's like offering people heroin to help them relax a bit :D
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We're talking back in the day where the IT teachers were just other teachers that had no other lessons and were just reading from books/manuals themselves and the tech support guy used 'Jesus' as the master password. ;)
 
Well we all have laptops which are pretty powerful and can install anything we want on them.
We have our own network on a DMZ so isolated from corporate with a 60 mb leased line, plenty of switches... it could be done easily enough ;)
 
We did it once at a PC retailer I used to work for about 13yrs ago before the company closed it's European operation and we all lost our jobs. We had 10 demo machines in the showroom of which about 5 had a spec decent enough to run CS.
We invited a few friends of employees who brought along their own rigs and we setup a backroom training machine as a dedicated local CS server, was a good laugh. Think in total we had about 20 people playing that night.
 
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TaKeN said:
Big wealthy companys with nice overspecced PCs capable of more than just office work! ;)
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You got the big + wealthy bit right, but over-specced PCs? Over-spec, my ass! I'm still using a P4 2.8 HT with 80GB HD which is a 2003 spec.

Hades said:
If I did that I'd lose my job :)
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Yup, same here. Plus our machines are fairly locked down so that you can't even change the wallpaper or font sizes. That said, it's Windows XP, so not as bad as NT 4.0. NT 4.0 was tight as a duck's ass! You couldn't even double-click on the time on the taskbar to see what the date was because it said you didn't have permission to see the pop-up calendar wtf.

Resident said:
Back in the 90s when I was at school the new IT suite was capable of running games like Doom2, Quake 2 etc.
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Yeah, even though we weren't supposed to, we would play Warcraft, Doom etc on the school machines back in 1995/6.
 
Done a few UT99 and Quake 3 LANs, everyone is so serious these days though and many of the people I work with struggle with hoofing the mouse about Excel tbh
 
Worth doing 10+ years ago but nowadays when every tom, dick and harry has broadband and VOIP/chat software some of the major advantages of a LAN are severely diminished.

We did something similar around 1998-9 when I was at uni, getting up early to grab lab PCs so we could play Quakeworld on the LAN when we should have been sleeping off a hangover... :)
 
Back in the day they used to do Return to Castle Wolfenstein at lunch times. Sys Admin ran the server, and IIRC they 'paused' it at the end of lunch every day. Was one building against the other.
Doesn't happen now as far as I know. Think everyone realised that when you work in the centre of a world heritage city, it might be good to step out of the office at lunch.
 
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