The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Computer cafés were common back in the late 1990s; not everyone had a computer or the Internet in their home yet, and people wanted a way to check their emails and surf the web.

One such computer café was LAN-play. It was located in Walsall, a town known for its arboretum and for its proximity to the shit city of Birmingham.

LAN-play was not the place to check your emails or have a cup of tea though. It was a gaming cafe, which means the clientele were teenage boys shooting each other in the heads virtually.

Because the computers were linked together in a local area network (LAN) instead of via the internet, there was no lag in the games, which was great because then you could play the games properly. Most people, like me, had shit internet connections at home and trying to play Counter-Strike at home was like trying to run underwater.

All-nighters

Sometimes LAN-play would hold "all-nighters", where teenage boys would be hunched over computers all night, only getting up to go home when the first rays of the morning sun touched their palid, grey, ashen faces the next day. What's more, the kids would smoke (both cigarettes and weed) and drink alcohol too, much of it underage. I don't know if any of that could happen today or whether it was an experience unique to the 1990s. I also don't know how their parents allowed it. Booze, weed, fags and violent videogames? All night? It seems incredible.

You can tell this is pre-2007 because 2007 is when the smoking ban came into force. You couldn't get those photos of fag smoke drifting around today.

The time I went to LAN-play

I only went to LAN-play once, but the experience was so strong that I still think about it to this day.

I went with my friend Michael Whitehouse. He was one of LAN-play's regular customers. It was a weekend afternoon and we were the only ones there. We played Counter-Strike together. All I remember is we were playing on the de_aztec map, and he thoroughly kicked my ass. He didn’t even let me have a pity kill, which is like a pity fuck, but instead of letting the other person fuck you, you let them kill you in a video game instead. He was far better in the game than me, probably due to his many nocturnal hours spent refining his killing techniques while I had been sleeping like a pussy.

I wanted to go back to LAN-play but I never did, because a) I lived ten miles away and b) LAN-play charged something like £6 an hour to play on their computers and I had no money.

The end of LAN-play

LAN-play shut down in 2002, just three years after it opened, probably because it didn't have enough customers to sustain it. Most people had computers at home at that point and computer cafés were a dying business.

It seems to me that LAN-play could have only existed in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Before this, the web hadn't been invented yet, so there were no online games because there wasn’t an online to speak of.

After this, most people had fast Internet connections at home so there was no need for internet cafes anymore. What’s more, information travels faster today. If LAN-play existed now, it would quickly become widely-known that teenager boys were smoking weed and drinking booze, there would be an uproar and LAN-play would be shut down.

In this sense, LAN-play was like a mayfly or like the blossom of a blossom tree. It only exists for a little while before it's gone.

But I still think about LAN-play and I wish I could go back. I want to be a greasy, pimple-faced teenager again, and play computer games all day with other teenage boys. And I would be, too, if it wasn't for Father Time fucking it all up for me.

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