Event: Lan Surge 001- LAN Party Event Date: 11/15-16/02 Written By: Warhawk Date Written: 11/20/02

This past weekend, Manticore and I were able to make it out to the first LAN Surge LAN party in good ol Sac Town. The LAN surge is a brand new LAN party in the Sacramento area. After looking through their website I could see they had a lot going for them. One was a huge facility (apparently it used to be an indoor soccer arena) and the other was they were going to be giving away a lot of prizes. The ultra grand prize of the event was going to be an Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz processor.

Manticore and I showed up on the morning of the LANs second day. We found a huge, and I mean HUGE facility (and I'm talking 15,000 sq foot huge) with only about 10 to 15 gamers huddled at one end. My first thought was "where is everybody?" and my second thought was "it's frikin freezing in here." I located Bobby, the LAN manager, and introduced myself. Bobby was extremely nice and cool to talk to. He was very helpful and eager to answer any questions we had. Once we were signed in, and got our precious raffle tickets, we got to work setting up our stuff. To our dismay just about everyone seemed to be playing the antiquated game, CheatStrike.. err umm… I mean… CounterStrike. We were wondering how on earth this could be with new innovations in gaming such as Battlefield 1942, and the eye-candy extravaganza that is Unreal 2003. We soon found out that the vast majority of gamers there were running systems that couldn't handle any games that were less than 2 years old. I had no idea that Sacremento was such a quaint and backwards area, I suppose I should have been tipped off by the horse and buggy parked outside (just kidding).

Luckly there were enough technologically advanced people there to start a few decent games of Unreal 2003 and Battlefield 1942. Manticore and I played UT2k3 against some guys from another clan (called <cDv> I believe) and they were very good. Most of the time they pretty much wasted us (time to start practicing my ut2k3). While we weren't exactly kings of UT2k3 I think I can safely say that Manticore and I owned the BF 1942 server. While it would have been nice to have a few more players, I definately had a lot of fun.

The pricing of the LAN was somewhat steep, 17 dollars for a 24 hour LAN with no internet access, no free food, no central heating, and very few dedicated game servers. Despite these drawbacks the LAN was good overall, and there were an abundance of nice raffle prizes, which was good to see.

Throughout the LAN there were pauses in the action for prize raffles. There was a whole host of things being raffled, from Alienware hats, mouse pads, games, a mouse, a thumbdrive and of course the processor. I found the mouse pads especially interesting, let me take a moment to talk about them in excruciating detail.

The mousepads were from a company called litepads and came in standard, pro and elite models. Apparently, in order to have a "pro" mousepad you have to have a black plastic frame around the mousing area. If you want to be "elite" that requires the black plastic frame to be in a wavy pattern. Upon further inspection of the packaging I discovered that litepads are "The Ultimate in Mousepad Technology!" I never really knew there was much "technology" involved in creating mousepads, but I'm glad to know that the litepads company is the ultimate in it. I'm sure they have many highly paid mousepad scientists that work around the clock to keep the litepads company on the cutting edge of mousepad technology. I am looking forward to the bright and shining future of mousepad technology, a future that will no doubt be brought about by the good folks at litepads, the Ultimate in Mousepad Technology. Another thing I noticed about litepads is that they, according to the packaging, are "shred proof." This little nugget of marketing propaganda was a bit perplexing to all of us. "What does that mean?" we all said to no one in particular. We scratched our heads, and tried to imagine why anyone would every try to "shred" their mousepad in the first place.

Unfortunately I was not lucky enough to win one of these marvels of modern mousepad technology, but I was lucky enough to watch other people win them. As the prizes slowly vanished from the prize table, everyone eagerly anticipated the raffling of the Intel Processor. When the time came for the processor, Michael Baumbach (from Intel) and family arrived to personally hand out the processor. After extolling us on the virtues of Intel, Michael raffled the coveted prize. I came within one number of winning the prize myself, but alas, it was not to be. According to the murmurs of the rest of the party attendees, the winner of the prize did not even own a computer. It would be interesting to know if he builds one with his new processor, or if it is destined for ebay. When the fraffling was over, Manticore was able to come away with a game called Sacrrifice, and I was able to come away with a crumpled raffle ticket and shattered dreams.

For their first LAN, the LAN Surge event seemed to go very well. I had a lot of fun and this LAN seems to have a great deal of potential. I am definitely looking forward to attending future LAN Surge events.

ADDENDUM - 01/20/2026 By Warhawk

Bobby aka "Oskor" became a member of TMC on December 19th, 2003. Oskor would go on to host a total of 6  LAN Surge events before running into venue difficulties in 2004 when the community was officially shut down but they were great events while they lasted. 

Also present at this event was Kickass, who was active in the Sacramento LAN scene dating back to the LANtrocity days. We didn't know him at the time but by way of other sacramento TMC members he would later join TMM on September 29th, 2007. He attended many LAN events with TMC and became a full member on May 30th, 2008.