If you're nostalgic for the era when you took your desktop computer to a friend's house to play games unreal tournamentsoftware engineer Kenton Varda has no exactly the solution, but he thinks he has something better. Cloudflare Workers' technology leader has invested more than three years and at least $1 million to transform your home in Austin on the ultimate local PC gaming platform, complete with 22 machines and a dedicated hardware room. It's called LAN Party House and you're probably not invited.
LAN parties (short for local area network, as many readers probably know) were the best option for “online” gaming. in the era of dial-up Internet access. While some are large-scale events, Varda's House is intended for groups of friends to come over, pull out a gaming station from a hidden wall or table panel, and start playing.
Much of the house was designed specifically to house computers. There is a basement room with 12 gaming stations built into folding wall cabinets, two call rooms equipped with their own gaming stations for private meetings, and an office space used for board games. The latter also folds out a large table to reveal six additional gaming PCs plus two personal workstations. (In case you were wondering, each PC contains an Intel Core i5-13600 CPU, a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, and 32GB of RAM.)
Some of these machines are discrete desktop computers, but most are monitors that connect to a central room that supports and cools the towers. Varda says the 22 PC stations together cost about $75,000, but the entire project was “a 7-digit number.”
Varda, who apparently hosts LAN parties as often as every weekend, says that most of the people who stop by are “not really hardcore gamers.” They focus on team games like galactic deep rock or non-deathmatch modes Unreal Tournament 2004. One room also includes four built-ins. dance revolution (DDR) pads. These are not public events: “sorry, you have to be invited,” says Varda. “I'm sure you understand: for security reasons, we can't allow random people on the Internet into our house.”
This is actually the second LAN party house that Varda has created, having completed a previous property in Palo Alto, California in 2011 That also went viral. That 1,400-square-foot house was smaller than his last property, according to Varda, who says “it was a pretty impressive bachelor pad, but it would have been a little cramped for raising a family.” He lives in this house with his two children and his wife, businesswoman Jade Wang, who is apparently a DDR fan. The new place was funded with money from the couple's long career in technology, as well as the $1 million profit they apparently made from selling the old house. It's far from the worst thing you can spend a tech industry windfall on.
Varda acknowledges that this setup is not exactly the classic LAN party model. And, in fact, his first house was built so that people could bring their own machines. “Nobody ever did it,” he points out. “Not once.”
