If you’re nostalgic for the era of lugging your desktop to a friend’s house to play Unreal Tournament, software engineer Kenton Varda doesn’t have exactly the solution — 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 into the ultimate local PC gaming pad, complete with 22 machines and a dedicated hardware room. It’s dubbed the LAN Party House, and you’re probably not invited.
LAN (short for local area network, as many readers likely know) parties were the best option for “online” gaming in the era of dial-up internet. While some are large-scale events, Varda’s house is aimed at having groups of friends drop by, pull a…