This house is made for LAN gaming parties

If you’re nostalgic for the era of taking your desktop to a friend’s house to play unreal TournamentSoftware engineer Kenton Varda does not have Absolutely Solution – But he thinks he has something better. Cloudflare Workers Tech Lead has spent more than three years and at least a million dollars transform her austin home With 22 machines and a dedicated hardware room, in the ultimate local PC gaming pad. It’s called LAN Party House, and you probably aren’t invited.

LAN (short for local area network, as many readers know) parties were the best option for “online” gaming. In the age of dial-up internetwhile there are some large scale incidentsThe purpose of Varda’s House is to bring a group of friends, pull out a gaming station from a hidden wall or table panel, and begin playing.

Much of the house was specifically designed to house PCs. It has a basement room with 12 gaming stations built into folding wall cabinets, two call rooms that are 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 and two personal workstations. (In case you’re wondering, each PC has an Intel Core i5-13600 CPU, a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, and 32GB of RAM.)

Some of these machines are individual desktops, but most are monitors that connect to a central room that heats and cools the towers. Varda says the total cost of the 22 PC stations is about $75,000, but the full-house project was a “7-figure number.”

Varda – who apparently hosts LAN parties as often as every other weekend – says that most of the people who come “are not really hardcore gamers.” They focus on team-based sports like deep rock galactic or non-deathmatch mode Unreal Tournament 2004. One room also includes four built-in rooms dance dance revolution (DDR) PAD. These are not public events – “Sorry, you have to be invited,” says Varda. “I’m sure you understand: For security reasons, we can’t let random people on the Internet into our home.”

This is actually the second LAN Party House that Varda has built Completed a previous property in Palo Alto, California in 2011 Which went viral in the same way. That 1,400-square-foot home was smaller than her latest property, according to Varda, who says it “made for a great bachelor pad, but would have been a little cramped for raising a family.” He lives in this house with his two children and his wife, entrepreneur Jade Wang – who is clearly a DDR fan. The new place was funded with money from the couple’s long careers in tech, as well as the $1 million profit they apparently received when they sold the old house. This is far from the worst thing you can spend a windfall on in the tech industry.

Varda admits that this setup isn’t exactly a classic LAN party model. And in fact, his first house was built for people to bring their machines. “No one ever did,” he notes. “not once.”