Check Out These Pictures Of Late ’90s And Early 2000s Gamers “Hanging Out And Goofing Off In Person”
Soon, she was flooded with DMs and emails from people sending her pictures from LAN parties they attended 20 years ago. The pictures represent more than just the communal experience of teens playing video games together. They capture the artifacts that defined the technological revolution that was sweeping the world in the first decade of this century: Long cables snake across floors, desks, and countertops; bootleg copies of games burned on discs labeled with magic marker lie scattered under cardboard plates filled with half-eaten slices of cake; and oversized headphones sit next to gaming mice.
Most photographs are from the US, where the space afforded by large suburban homes to set up a dozen or so computers made LAN parties popular weekend pursuits. But Merritt was also able to get pictures from parts of Europe, Africa, and South America.
Tracking down the rights to each photo was tough, according to Merritt. But there was an additional challenge — most of the pictures in her book were taken from digital cameras of 20 years ago, devices that had considerably lower resolution than today’s smartphone cameras. This meant that printing them in a book would be nearly impossible.
To get around this, publisher Read-Only Memory is using Gigapixel AI, image-processing software from Texas-based Topaz Labs that upscales low-resolution images using machine learning and neural networks.
But why not just make a website instead of a book? “There’s a poetic resonance between the physicality of a LAN party and the physicality of a book,” Merritt said. “It just makes a lot of sense to me.”
Soon, she was flooded with DMs and emails from people sending her pictures from LAN parties they attended 20 years ago. The pictures represent more than just the communal experience of teens playing video games together. They capture the artifacts that defined the technological revolution that was sweeping the world…
