‘I dreamed of blocky pixels’: the strange, sweaty, sociable early days of gaming – in pictures

Back in the early 2000s, multiplayer gaming meant lugging huge PCs to friends' houses or school halls and connecting them with wires to have Lan parties. Early adopters remember that heady time. Introduction by Merritt K

Today it is trivially easy to play games on a computer, games console or phone with your friends over the internet. But before the wide availability of high-speed internet, things were more complicated.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, 3D graphics in video games were becoming more and more complex, but the low network speeds of the period meant that these games, unlike slower-paced and less graphically intensive strategy games, were nearly unplayable over an internet connection. In this moment, in which communications technology was being outpaced by graphical power, the Lan (local area network) party was born.

Euskal party, Bilbao, Spain, 2004. Photograph: Koldo Aingeru Marcos