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If you\u2019re nostalgic for the era of lugging your desktop to a friend\u2019s house to play Unreal Tournament<\/em>, software engineer Kenton Varda doesn\u2019t have exactly<\/em> the solution \u2014 but he thinks he has something better. The Cloudflare Workers tech lead has spent more than three years and at least a million dollars to transform his Austin house<\/a> into the ultimate local PC gaming pad, complete with 22 machines and a dedicated hardware room. It\u2019s dubbed the LAN Party House, and you\u2019re probably not invited.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n LAN (short for local area network, as many readers likely know) parties were the best option for \u201conline\u201d gaming in the era of dial-up internet<\/a>. While some are large-scale events<\/a>, Varda\u2019s house is aimed at having groups of friends drop by, pull a gaming station out of a hidden wall or table panel, and start playing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Much of the house was specifically designed to hold PCs. There\u2019s 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. A large table in the latter also unfolds to reveal an additional six gaming PCs plus two personal workstations. (In case you\u2019re wondering, each PC contains an Intel Core i5-13600 CPU, a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, and 32GB of RAM.) <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some of these machines are discrete desktops, but most are monitors that connect to a central room that holds and cools the towers. Varda says the 22 PC stations collectively cost about $75,000, but the full-house project was \u201ca 7-digit number.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Varda \u2014 who\u2019s apparently hosted LAN parties as frequently as every other weekend \u2014\u00a0says most of the people who drop by are \u201cnot actually hardcore gamers.\u201d They focus on team-based games like Deep Rock Galactic <\/em>or the non-deathmatch modes of Unreal Tournament 2004. <\/em>One room also includes four built-in Dance Dance Revolution <\/em>(DDR) pads. These aren\u2019t public events \u2014 \u201csorry, you must be invited,\u201d Varda says. \u201cI\u2019m sure you understand: For security reasons, we can\u2019t just let random people on the internet into our house.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n