Couple spends close to $1,000,000 making their Texas family home 'optimized for LAN parties' and the result is pretty staggering
Some people dream of a life working the land, while others fantasise about running away to a commune. For others, the big thing occupying their thought bubble is a LAN party house. Few achieve this nostalgic dream, making do with the distance of modern online play. But then few are software engineer Kenton Varda and his wife, the entrepreneur Jade Wang, who together have built a house that embodies the dream (via TechSpot).
After first moving their family to Austin, Texas in 2019 in part to be closer to their respective teams at Cloudflare, the pair embarked on additional construction from 2021 to 2023. In some ways, the house is very much a family project; besides both Kenton and Jade's contributions, the project's lead architect was Richard Varda, Kenton's father.
The result is a family home "optimized for LAN parties," complete with a total of 22 high-end gaming rigs, miles of managed cable, and even a hidden Dance Dance Revolution dancefloor.
So, what are they playing in this private LAN castle? According to the project's official website, primarily cooperative games to ensure a fun meet for all players, as not every regular attendee is a hardcore gamer.
Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2's Mann vs. Machine mode, and even Overwatch— «back when it was good» —used to be the go-to's, but apparently the reigning favourite for the last five years has been none other than Deep Rock Galactic. Rock and stone, baby!
Alright, let's talk tech. All 22 of the gaming PCs boot from the same network drive, allowing each to be maintained using the same disk image. This means that not only is keeping all of the machines up to date a doddle, but new games only need to be installed once to the disk image for the entire fleet to be able to play. Each machine gets their own copy-on-write overlay so LAN party guests can make adjustments to their individual set up without these being shared across the group.
As for what's under the hood of the machines themselves, each one features a
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