Software engineer Kenton Varda decided to use the money he's made from his long IT career, including his current role as CTO of Cloudflare Workers, as well as the sale of his old house, to turn his Austin home into a modern version of a LAN party with 22 computers and a separate hardware room. This three-year project cost Vardova more than $1 million.
Software engineer Kenton Varda decided to use the money he's made from his long IT career, including his current position as CTO of Cloudflare Workers, as well as the sale of his old house, to turn his Austin home into a modern version of a LAN party with 22 computers and a separate hardware room. This three-year project cost Vardova more than $1 million.
The basement of the LAN Party House houses 12 gaming stations that are built into folding wall cabinets so they can be tucked away when not in use, The Verge writes .
The building also has two meeting rooms with their own gaming stations for private meetings. There is an office space with a large desk that can be used for board games or unfolded to reveal an additional six gaming PCs and two personal workstations. There's even a room with four Dance Dance Revolution game panels built into the floor and hidden beneath the panels.
The computers we use are not Intel Pentium with 3dfx Voodoo graphics. Each of them is equipped with an RTX 4070 along with an Intel Core i5-13600 and 32 GB of RAM. There are a few discrete desktops, but most stations are just monitors connected to a central room that holds and cools the towers.
According to the programmer, the cost of all 22 PCs alone was about $75,000, while the entire project was "a 7-figure number."
LAN parties are organized almost every weekend and are dedicated to the team games Deep Rock Galactic and Unreal Tournament 2004. However, you can't just drop in and play: "For security reasons, we can't let random people from the Internet into our house," says Varda.
