30 Pictures of LAN Parties You Can Smell

Before broadband internet was the standard, you couldn’t just drop into a Fortnite match with a random 12-year-old if you wanted to play multiplayer video games. Gamers would hold events called LAN parties, where they’d bring their computers to the house of whoever had the chillest mom and play games for hours and hours on end.

Take the sweat from lugging those towering blocky 90s PCs down the basement stairs and combine it with the sweet aroma of Mountain Dew and pizza, the hot plastic smell of a dozen computers working as hard as they can to run Quake II, and the baseline body odor that comes prepackaged with every video game enthusiast. That’s the smell that emanates from every pixel of these photos.