Software engineer Kenton Varda, who is the head of technical at Cloudflare Workers, spent more than 3 years and at least a million dollars to turn his Austin home into the perfect venue for local gaming parties. This house, known as the LAN Party House, is equipped with 22 computers and a special server room. However, not everyone receives invitations to such parties.
LAN parties (Local Area Network) were the best way to play games together in the era of slow dial-up Internet. While some LAN events turned into large-scale events, Varda’s house is designed for groups of friends who can come over, pull out a gaming station from a hidden panel in the wall or table, and start playing right away.
Part of the building is specially designed to accommodate computers. In the basement, there is a room with 12 gaming stations built into folding cabinets, two meeting rooms with gaming stations for private meetings, and an office area for board games. The large table in this area also hides 6 more gaming PCs and 2 workstations.
Each computer is equipped with an Intel Core i5-13600 processor, a GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card and 32 GB of RAM. Some of the machines are standalone desktops, but most stations consist of monitors connected to a central server room where the main computers are housed and cooled. According to Varda, the equipment for the 22 gaming stations cost about $75 thousand, but the entire building project cost «seven figures».
LAN parties are held here every two weeks, but Varda’s guests — are mostly not «hardcore gamers». They prefer team games like Deep Rock Galactic or non-competitive modes of Unreal Tournament 2004. One of the rooms also has four dance panels for Dance Dance Revolution.
All events are held by invitation only.
«We can’t let random people in from the Internet for security reasons», — Varda explains.
This is Varda’s second LAN party house. The first one, created in 2011 in Palo Alto, California, went viral on the Internet, although it was much smaller (130 square meters). Varda says that his previous home was «a great bachelor pad» but not suitable for family life. He now lives in the new home with his wife, entrepreneur Jade Wang, and two children. By the way, Wang is a huge Dance Dance Revolution fan.
The new house was financed with the couple’s profits from years of work in the tech industry, as well as $1 million received after the sale of their previous home.
Varda admits that his concept is a bit different from classic LAN parties. At the first house, guests were encouraged to bring their own computers, but no one ever did.
«Never»,” he recalls.
Source: The Verge