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 gaming station out of a hidden wall or table panel, and start playing.
Much of the house was specifically designed to hold PCs. There’s 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’re wondering, each PC contains an Intel Core i5-13600 CPU, a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, and 32GB of RAM.)
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 “a 7-digit number.”
Varda — who’s apparently hosted LAN parties as frequently as every other weekend — says most of the people who drop by are “not actually hardcore gamers.” They focus on team-based games like Deep Rock Galactic or the non-deathmatch modes of Unreal Tournament 2004. One room also includes four built-in Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) pads. These aren’t public events — “sorry, you must be invited,” Varda says. “I’m sure you understand: For security reasons, we can’t just let random people on the internet into our house.”
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Image: Kenton Varda
This is actually the second LAN party house that Varda has created, having completed a previous property in Palo Alto, California in 2011 that went similarly viral. That 1400 square-foot house was smaller than his latest property according to Varda, who says it “made for a pretty awesome bachelor pad, but would have been a bit cramped for raising a family.” He lives in this house with his two children and his wife, entrepreneur Jade Wang — who’s apparently a DDR fan. The new place was funded with money from the pair’s long career in tech, as well as the $1 million in profit he apparently got when selling the old house. It’s far from the worst thing you can spend a tech industry windfall on.
Varda acknowledges that this setup isn’t exactly the classic LAN party model. And in fact, his first house was built to let people bring their own machines. “Nobody ever did,” he notes. “Not once.”