The LAN party did not die. It just moved to Norway and Taiwan

The floor of Taipei World Trade Center Hall 1 opened on Thursday to a queue, and behind the queue, about a thousand desks with power and ethernet waiting for computers people had carried there themselves. WirForce 2026 runs until Sunday: four days, three nights, ninety-six hours without the lights going off. Six months earlier and eight thousand kilometres away, a Norwegian speed-skating arena built for the 1994 Winter Olympics filled up with folding tables for the thirty-sixth time.

Both of those are LAN parties, a format the arrival of broadband was supposed to have made pointless about twenty years ago. Bring your own computer, carry it into a hall, plug into a local network, stay awake with a few thousand strangers. The interesting thing in 2026 is not that the ritual survives, but where it is growing, where it is collapsing, and what these events have quietly turned into.

Start with what the thing was. In the 1990s a LAN party was not nostalgia, it was the only way to play a fast game against other people: Doom shipped at the end of 1993 with networking over IPX, and home internet was a modem that took the phone line with it. The origin stories are correspondingly small. QuakeCon began on 15 August 1996 in a 1,250 square foot conference room at a La Quinta Inn in Garland, Texas, with around forty people plugging their machines together. DreamHack started in the basement of an elementary school in Malung, Sweden, and moved up to the school cafeteria in 1994. The Gathering's first edition, in 1992, drew 1,100 people to a hall in Lillestrøm when the organisers had expected 800.

They grew fast because the constraint was real. The Gathering moved into Vikingskipet in Hamar in 1996 and pulled about 2,500 people; by 1998 it was hitting the arena's ceiling of roughly 5,200. Then the constraint went away. Broadband, matchmaking, voice chat and digital distribution arrived one after another, and the reason to drive four hours with a tower in the boot evaporated. That should have been the end of it.

Norway is the clearest case of what happened instead. The Gathering has now run in the same Olympic arena for thirty years, which is what this year's theme, RE:Union, was marking, and it got there the hard way: online through the pandemic, back in person in 2023, cancelled outright in 2024, then returned in 2025 as RE:Start, which sold out. After that cancellation the organising body, KANDU — Kreativ Aktiv Norsk Data Ungdom, "creative, active Norwegian computer youth" — signed a three-year contract with the company that runs Vikingskipet. That unglamorous detail says more about the format's health than any attendance figure, because it is a venue betting on the event rather than the other way round. The 2026 numbers deserve the same honesty: the crew's own report puts attendance at about 3,500, a long way below the 5,200 the same arena absorbed in the late 1990s.

What fills those five days is the part outsiders miss. TG runs from the Wednesday of Easter week to Easter Sunday, and it is a computer party rather than only a gaming one, sitting downstream of the demoscene. This year it added 133 new productions to a running total the crew puts at more than 4,600 since 1992: demos, hand-drawn and textmode graphics, three separate music competitions, short films, a 48-hour game jam, a hacking contest in TG:Hack, and two competitions for things physically built in the hall out of whatever people dragged in. There is a main stage with concerts, and a ticket buys a seat, a network port and five days of not going outside.

The network is the other thing Norway does that nobody quite matches, and the crew documents it in public on its own technical blog as it builds. This year's is an Arista spine-and-leaf fabric with the two spine switches hung in the arena roof, distribution switches out on the floor, a Palo Alto firewall cluster that all participant traffic routes through, and native IPv6 on the participant network. Telenor is the Easter internet provider; in the crew's 2023 design post that line was 50 gigabits, delivered as five 10-gigabit links to Telenor's router in Hamar. Every seat gets a gigabit, and this year a limited number could have five, on something close to an honour system: run a cable to the nearest distribution switch, find the Tech crew, ask. The crew's own suggested phrasing was to shout the request at the switch.

Hamar is not the whole country either. Norway runs a dense circuit of small-town parties whose edition numbers tell you how long this has been ordinary there: Polar Party in Tønsberg reaches its 34th from 5 to 9 October, GlobeLAN its 38th, LANmine its 40th. AquaLAN fills the sports hall at Aquarama in Kristiansand from 28 to 30 September and bills itself as southern Norway's biggest LAN for children and young people; bLAN runs in Gloppen in early October; AgderLAN, InnLANet, SelbuLAN and BrøttumLAN fill out a calendar that mostly tracks the school holidays.

That last detail is the likeliest explanation for why the format never lapsed there, though it is inference rather than anything the organisers have published. These are volunteer-run, youth-club events, priced for teenagers and scheduled for the weeks teenagers are off school, with a national-scale version at Easter that the same people graduate into and then come back to crew. An event on its fortieth edition is not a revival. It is an institution the rest of the world stopped copying.

Taiwan is the growth story, and it is growing this week. WirForce was started in 2014 by the media company 4Gamers with a couple of hundred streamers, personalities and pro players; BYOC opened to the public the following year with 400 seats, and the event settled at the Taipei Expo Park. Now, for its twelfth edition, it has moved into the World Trade Center for the first time, onto a floor the organiser describes as about three times the size, with the mayor of Taipei at the opening ceremony.

The numbers 4Gamers gives for its own event explain the format better than any trend piece could. The thousand-odd BYOC seats sold out quickly, and the company reckons the hardware carried in is worth more than NT$100 million. Of the players who bought a seat in 2025, 97 per cent actually turned up, and the average stay was over 66 hours. That is not an audience, it is closer to a residency: people buy four days in a room and then use almost all of it. At the previous venue the event counted more than 200,000 visitors through the doors.

What the hall has to carry has changed as much as its size. Chunghwa Telecom has been the network partner since 2017 and supplies a dedicated 10-gigabit line, alongside an in-house system for managing the network under load, because the floor now handles game downloads, hundreds of broadcasters streaming live while moving around, and Taiwanese and Japanese VTubers performing together across sites. In 1996 the LAN existed because the internet could not do the job. In 2026 the internet can do the job, and the LAN is the venue.

Taiwan also produced the single best image of why any of this endures. In November 2022, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of NVIDIA, turned up at WirForce unannounced late on opening night, walked the BYOC rows table by table asking people what they were running, signed graphics-card boxes, had a go on an arcade light gun, and finished on the main stage shouting "GeForce Taiwan" at the hall. He stayed about an hour. No online event has a physical row of desks for the industry to walk down.

Elsewhere the picture splits. QuakeCon turns thirty this year, running 6 to 9 August at the Gaylord Texan outside Dallas with the BYOC hall live around the clock and the seats sold out. The UK's Insomnia, by contrast, had run 72 times since 1999 and drew tens of thousands to the Birmingham NEC as recently as 2024; its operator went into liquidation, a consortium announced a revival, and in March this year the comeback edition was cancelled anyway, with organisers citing industry-wide cuts in what tech and hardware brands will spend on live events. The pattern, offered as interpretation, is that the healthy events are the ones whose centre of gravity is the people carrying the computers, and the one that collapsed was a trade show with a LAN attached.

That is the honest shape of the revival: not a return to necessity, but a return to occasion. The 90s sold the LAN party as the only way to play. Norway kept selling it as what you do at Easter; Taiwan sells it as the four days when the rig you built gets seen by someone other than you — and going by a 97 per cent turnout rate and a 66-hour average stay, that turns out to be worth carrying a tower across a country for.