IT STARTED WITH A CABLE

I was 15 when I learned that computers could transfer data between each other faster than dial-up.

Ethernet.

That realization changed everything.

FIVE COMPUTERS. ONE HUB. ONE DIAL-UP CONNECCTION.

There were no gaming routers. No one-click party systems.

There was a hub, Ethernet cables, Windows Network Setup Wizard, and a lot of trial and error.

We connected five computers together and spent late nights playing games across the network.

When we wanted to get online, we shared a single dial-up Internet connection between all of them.

It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t elegant. But it worked.

WHATEVER WORKED

A LAN setup didn’t need a gaming desk.

Sometimes an ironing board worked just fine.

CRTs, towers, keyboards, mice, ethernet cables — whatever it took.

I hauled computers around in the front seat of my S10 because that was simply how you got your computer to the LAN

You unplugged everything. Loaded it up. Drove across town.

Then you connected everything over again.

Photo credit: “LAN-Party” by Sanza29, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

THE FIRST UPGRADE

Eventually, playing games on my first computer wasn’t enough.

I had to know what was making the computer work.

TigerDirect catalogs became a study guide to the internals and externals. RAM, video cards, hard drives — every part could be replaced with something better.

Money trickled in, upgrades started.

I understood the correlation between a video game and what was inside the metal box I was playing it on.

IT BECAME MORE THAN A HOBBY

Late nights of gaming and hardware changes started adding up to something.

Setting up networks, troubleshooting hardware, replacing parts, and figuring out why things did or didn’t work became useful knowledge.

Knowledge became far useful outside the hobby of LAN’ing.

THE INTERNET CHANGED

The internet got faster and everything got easier.

The time and commitment to what you had became less personal as you could share it with everyone in a second.

We stopped carrying computers across town. Server browsers became matchmaking buttons. Forums came and went. Communities grew on Discord and things felt smaller.

WHY H4CK.GG

H4ck.gg exists because we miss what the internet used to feel like.

Not the slow downloads or dropped connections when someone picked up the land line phone when you were downloading.

We miss the community and the people when simple was enough. When ray tracing did not exist.

We miss how things used to be and we are not ashamed to represent the generation who created it all. The foundation that things were built on.

Computers created ——> 2026 ( We are all involved in creating the foundation of computer gaming.

Let people know you are apart of it.