This was the first gigantic LAN event I ever attended. It took place at the Santa Clara convention center and easily had a few hundred people there, and it was called the Big B.A.N.G.G II (which stood for Bay Area Network Gaming Group). It was a good event, although I did not yet know anybody. It was clear from the amount of people that did know each other that these types of events had built up quite an active community.  This was definitely something that I wanted to be a part of. 

This is what I posted to the TMC website on February 24th, 2001:

I, Warhawk have returned from the mother of all LAN parties in this quadrant of the galaxy. It was put on by a group called the Bay Area Network Gaming Group. 166 warriors were signed up for this massive clash. The Santa Clara County Convention center was left a pile of smoking ruins after the carnage had subsided..

Here are some entries from the BANGG website that explain some details of how the event went:

• February 21st, 2001

Woo, only a couple more days to Big BANGG II!

The hours of BB2 will be:

Saturday:  10am - midnight
Sunday:    7am - 10pm

The Quake 3 RA3 Tournament will be starting at 3pm Saturday, and the Counterstrike tournament will begin at 10am Sunday.

Maps for the tournament will be announced at the event.  We won't be throwing any weird maps at you or anything, they'll be standard maps.

Payment stuff:  if you are going to be paying by check, I recommend you get it in the mail TODAY.

Also: It seems that there is some confusion about the payment. IT IS NOT $35 PER DAY.  The $35 fee pays for BOTH saturday and sunday.  Most people figured this out on their own, but I've been hearing thru the grapevine about how BANGG was "too expensive" when the pre-pay price is less than $20 a day.

If you are paying by PayPal, you have until 2pm Friday afternoon to get your payments in.  At 2pm, I will remove all of the "pay via PayPal" links from the site and post the final paid list at around 2:30p (to give time for the last minute folks to finish entering their info).

If you can't make your payment by then, you get to pay the full price of $45 at the door.

All the info you need to make a payment can be found here.

Unfortunately we were unable to meet the minimum order for the sandwiches, so everyone that paid for meals will get a $20 refund at the door.

• February 23rd, 2001

Tomorrow's the big day!  There's supposed to be rain this weekend, so don't forget a towel or two to keep the rain off your gear when you bring it from your car.

Since we aren't going to be doing setup until tomorrow morning, the cutoff time for prepayment has been extended to 8pm tonight, so if you want the $10 discount, get yer payments in now!

• February 28th, 2001

Whew!  Now that I'm all recovered I'll try to summarize this weekend's event.

The first thing that happened was really really weird.  We had TONS of Counterstrike players.  This is the first time ever that a Quake engine game wasn't the dominant game at BANGG.

Anyhow, the first day was a ton of pickup counterstrike games, plus some 6 year old kid 0wning on the Q3 Excessive server.  When we finally got the RA3 tournament going we got to use a new software package that GameTraveler brought up with him.  It made running the tournament much much easier :)

Anyhow, Coalition (3 members of VrX and one other guy from another clan) beat McP-1 in the final, winning themselves some BAWLS and the choice of booty from our booty pile.  Here's what the tournament brackets looked like:

After the tournament, things settled down, and people started playing Counterstrike like good little crack-monkeys.  However, an insidious virus-like program started to appear on many monitors as the night wore on, spreading slowly through the population of the party.  Every LAN has to have some little game that everyone ends up playing, and this time it was Bridge Builder.  Any explanation I could give wouldn't do it justice, so just go download it and play. :)

Sunday morning we had to delay the CS tournament a while so we could get as many people registered as possible.  We finally decided to change the format of the tournament to Round Robin (every team plays every other team once) in the interest of making the tournament as fair as possible.   -Myths- walked away with the pick of the booty pile,  winning with a 6-0 record.  Since they were so desperately in need of it, the two teams that finished 0-5 each got some BAWLS.  Here's the final tournament standings:

After the tournament was over, Counterstrike pickup games were the order of the day.  As the day wore on, Bridge Builder continued it's unstoppable spread across the LAN, and at any given time about 20% of the monitors showed trains crashing into the riverbed when the fatal flaws of their bridge designers were revealed to the world.

That's it from me. . . coming soon:  Spawn and GT's impressions of the event!

__End Web archive__

Unfortunately that's all we have about this event as there are no pictures that appear to have survived.

The only other memory of this event I have was finding out later when I met SweatyMex at Octane LAN that he was also in attendance at this event.