| Event:LGLAN Sunnyvale (FraXure?) - LAN Party Event Date: 11/03/02 Written By: Warhawk Date Written: 11/15/02 |
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The weekend of November 3rd marked the date of the first LAN hosted by the LGLAN group. The party (now, apparently called FraXure) was a lot of fun and there were many familiar faces there. The party was hosted in a 1000sq foot where house facility in Sunnyvale. It's not the biggest place in the world, but it is big enough to comfortably host a LAN of around 30. There is also very little overhead for the group as it was acquired for free through family connections. As a result the LAN price was set at a very reasonable $10.
While the facility wasn't the most comfortable place I've ever been, it was set up nicely and had a good atmosphere. There were around 20 to 25 people there most of the time. It had the feel of a garage LAN at a friend's house rather than a massive LAN party. There were no tournaments, sponsorships, or food, just a bunch of guys hanging out and doing what they love. To keep the party atmosphere going, there was some good music being played for most of the time and a TV set running Winamp visualizations.
The network ran smoothly with no noticeable problems. The internet connection was a bit slow (only a DSL line) but it was better than nothing. According to the LAN organizers, they are planning on getting a T1 soon. There were some power problems with one breaker that was tripped. This resulted in about half a dozen unhappy gamers. The breaker was reset and the gamers were up and running for another hour and a half or so until it was tripped again. Resulting in about half a dozen unhappy gamers, as well as a few others that were standing around pointing and chuckling, because no one had switched circuits since the last time it was tripped. Once one or two of them were put on a different circuit the problem was solved.
One of my favorite parts of the party took place when Jen, WasTED, JABonline and I all went to get food. We stopped at Carls Jr and ordered, only to find out that WasTED is a vegitarian. We stopped at Taco Bell and let WasTED get out to go get his own food. Unfortunately the doors were locked and only the drivetrough was still in business. Our conversation with him went as followed:
Warhawk: Ok, get back in the
car we will use the drivethrough.
WasTED: No, they will screw up my order, I know they will.
Jen: Dude, just get in the car it will be fine.
WasTED: No dude, they will mess it up, i just know it. I have to make
sure its without meat.
Warhawk: Dude, dont worry, I'll tell them not to make it with meat.
WasTED: No, it's cool, I'll just walk through.
Warhawk: Dude, just get in the car
Jen: Ya, hurry up and get in the car, it's cold out here.
WasTED: I'm going to walk through
All of us in unison: DUDE! get in the car!!
WasTED: I'm walking though.
Jen: Get in the freakin car!
WasTED: No!
Despite our efforts to convince
him, he insisted on walkig through the drive though. Luckily I had my
camera on hand (see pics below).
As far as the party went, I
thought this was a very good, the atmosphere was friendly and laid back.
The people that regularly attend these parties are very cool and fun to
hang out with. I definitely enjoyed it and plan on attending future parties
hosted by this group.
ADDENDUM - 01/19/2026 By Warhawk
Note, "Jen" later changed his handle to "Dima" and "JABonline" later changed his handle to "The Deionizer".
Here is some additional backround on this LAN.
The SV Frag / LG LAN Merger
After I joined the SV Frag crew officially we had many meetings and talked about a lot of things we wanted to do going forward. Even though we weren’t much more than kids at the time, our meetings were surprisingly business like. Exar did an impressive job at running meetings, especially in person; he kept to an agenda and clarified action items before concluding the meetings.
Exar was particularly ambitious and hatched many a master plan. Most of these plans had extremely lofty goals usually involving building a nationwide network of co-operating LANs, gaming clans and other such organizations. It all sounded fantastic on paper, but getting the equipment, money and manpower to accomplish such lofty goals was no easy feat. To try and bring these plans to fruition we were attempting to form partnerships with lanparty.com, the HomeLAN Federation (who Gamekiller was actively involved with) and other local LAN groups. Nothing was quite coming together as we had hoped and we were struggling to find pieces to the puzzle we were trying to put together.
Meanwhile, there was a small LAN party community in Los Gatos called LG LAN. They had hosted a number of small LAN events in Los Gatos and had a pretty active online forum community. I always meant to, but for some reason or another never attended an LG LAN. I became aware of their organization because their community would attend the aforementioned Octane LAN events, and their core group of organizers were starting to get involved in trying to support the Octane LAN events.
The LG LAN group was headed up by a guy named Tom Harrison. Turns out Tom Harrison is the son of Joel Harrison, one of the founders of hard drive manufacturer Quantum Corporation. If that sounds familiar it’s because Quantum had a #2 market share on hard drives at one point, and if you were buying hard drives in the late 90’s early 2000’s the chances are high that you owned a Quantum product.
Tom always had a bit of an entourage following him around. His entourage of friends always seemed eager to please him and were always attentive to what Tom said and what he wanted to do. As it turned out, Tom came from money... a lot of it. How much money he came from did not fully occur to me until I was invited to a LAN at his house (or rather, his father Joel’s house) in Los Gatos. As I was attempting to find the house I turned down a street that transitioned from average suburban homes into a neighborhood of significantly above average homes. “Wow, these are some big houses” I thought. I was gawking at these houses and simultaneously trying to study my mapquest print-out (this was before google maps).
As I turned onto the next street, the houses I saw were jaw droppingly enormous. So much so that the houses on the last street that I was marveling at mere minutes ago, seemed like tarpaper shacks in comparison to what I was seeing now. Tom's father’s house was at the end of the block and had a huge sweeping brick driveway in front. I stopped my car and walked up to the massive wooden doors. I felt a bit like C-3PO knocking on the gates to Jabbas palace. Or like that scene in Young Frankenstein where he says “what knockers!”. What I’m trying to say is, those doors were huge and so was the house. That particular LAN was held in his garage; a garage which was easily bigger than some places I’ve lived. Also, there was a sailboat parked outside of it.
Tom was always very business minded and was always looking for proverbial pies to put his fingers into. He could often be seen and overheard talking with his circle of friends about programs they should write, startups they should form or other such ventures they wanted to embark on. As far as I could gather Tom was the business and bankroll guy, while the guys in his entourage / inner circle were the guys doing the actual development.
Here’s the part where the story connects back to SV Frag. We got in contact with Tom about the possibility of forming a partnership. Tom and Exar had a number of meetings 1 on 1 and then we started having meetings with both LG LAN and SV Frag staff.
It looked like both groups had similar goals, and there was talk of creating some kind of software portal that would aid in the administration of a LAN event. We also talked about using our extensive LAN hardware to loan out and help build LAN scenes who would then use the software we were planning to develop. It felt like part of the group was interested in software development and making money, and the rest were more concerned with throwing regular LAN events, growing the community and having fun (I fell into the latter group). Both sets of interests, while seemingly divergent, actually nicely complemented each other.
To start with building the local LAN scene, Tom’s family (or someone closely associated with Tom, I can’t quite recall) had recently rented a 1000 sq foot light industrial warehouse space in Sunnyvale. The plan was to start throwing regular LAN events there, which to me was exactly what I wanted to be involved with doing.
It was all coming together quite nicely. We had several meetings with Tom and crew and decided that we would form an official partnership and treat it as a company. Positions were assigned, with Tom as the CEO. Interestingly enough, they volunteered me as the VP of Marketing. To be honest I was both flattered and more than a bit surprised by this appointment as I did not consider myself a marketing person in any way. I was just happy to be a part of the group, so I agreed. Little did I know, some years later I would graduate college with a degree in Marketing. Apparently they all saw the marketer in me before I did.
The next step was picking the name of our new company. Turns out picking a name for newly formed organizations is one of the hardest things on the planet to do. It had to be something that didn’t sound cliched or corny, something that wasn't already taken, and something that denoted technology. We went back and forth on this for weeks, as we all felt it was important that whatever name we ended up with was a name that we all unanimously agreed upon. The unanimous part made it extra difficult as there were plenty of names that most of us liked, but because we ALL didn’t like it, it was crossed off the list. I remember getting random calls from a guy in the group that went something like:
“Hey Warhawk, what do you think of the name DevX”
“Well, it sounds a lot like Divx, the video codec thing” I replied.
“hmmm.. “ then I hear them yelling to someone in the room “he says it sounds a lot like Divx; the video codec” I then hear muffled agreement in the background “yeah, thats a good point, I’ll call you back if we think of anything else.”
Eventually we all decided on “Impluse9”, it wasn’t a great name, nor one that any of us were particularly in love with, but it was a name we could all at least agree that we didn’t hate.
The important part was we had finally decided on something; and with that out of the way we the merger was completed and now we could proceed to the real business at hand, or so we thought.
Exar made the following announcement:
Sun Oct 20 17:48:05 2002
Hello Guys! I just wanted to announce to all of you that SVFRAG has merged with LGLAN, expect only really kick butt things to emerge, and the first thing you'll notice is that we will be hosting parties a crap load more often :) If you have any questions about the merger please feel free to contact me. Frag on!
Not more than a few hours later Killjoy from the SV Frag Crew starts raising hell because he caught wind that Tom had decided to change the name of the group (the one we had spent so many weeks establishing a unanimous opinion on). This was news to Gamekiller and I, and we all jumped into a chat room to discuss what was going on.
As part of the merger Tom had formed a “board of directors” that was composed of 3 people from the LG LAN group and 2 from the SV Frag group with Tom as the leader. We had not yet had a chance to meld into a unified group, and everyone definitely still held loyalties to their original groups. The new board and Tom were supposed to have the authority to make decisions and hand them down to the rest of the group; which we were all fine with.
Obviously such a weak name like “Impluse9” would have to be changed eventually; however, Tom overriding the only thing we had all collectively agreed on as his first act in charge was unsettling. It felt like we were Lando Calrissian saying “but we had a deal!” and Tom was Darth Vader saying “I’m altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further.” Not exactly the best way to foster team cohesion. Meanwhile Exar was caught in the crossfire and desperately trying to keep everything intact.
After going back and forth in the chatroom about it, no one was able to come to any sort of understanding. Eventually things calmed down and we agreed to move forward, and then we all went to bed.
The next day, Exar and Tom had a side meeting about the whole thing, and then Exar made the following announcement:
Mon Oct 21 17:41:19 2002
Hello SVFRAG Crew, I stress the SVFRAG so much because that is what we are offical about 20 minutes ago, the merger did not work, however I want to thank the lglan crew for giving us one thing, the spirit of change, and with that in mind I am proposing that we do this, how many of you still want to form a company?
There were no real hard feelings after it was all said and done. Tom and group hosted one LAN at their warehouse space; they invited us, we attended and good times were had by all. In the end, the LAN space was short lived. As far as I am aware that was the one and only LAN event hosted at that space. Also, at the LAN it appeared they were going with the working name of "FraXure".
Tom and his crew would eventually give up lanning, and instead they started hosting parties called “SuperHappyDevHouse” which were/are basically LAN parties, but instead of everyone sitting around playing games, they sit around programming code, drinking beers and discussing theoretical projects, etc. Tom has built an impressive community out of it and it has become quite successful.
Whatever might have been, had we worked things out with Tom’s group is hard to say, and I suppose there’s no point in wondering. We were left back at essentially square 1, once again looking for venues to host another LAN. Unfortunately, without funds or any connections to people with warehouse spaces we had very few options. The group eventually went dormant as Exar went on to focus on finishing school and his Church projects. At this point I went on to focus on building TMC.
It would not be till years later that we would again resurrect the SV Frag group and host another large scale LAN event.
