TMC - The Mowers Clan - Gaming Organization

Event: Silicon Valley Frag Fest LAN Party
Event Date: 8/9-10/02
Written By: Warhawk
Date Written: 8/20/02

The Silicon Valley Fragfest was the first in what will probably be a long line of regular LAN parties put on by local gamers, Exar, Gamekiller and Killjoy. I met with these three guys for lunch one day prior to the event and they are all really nice guys. They have a few good connections too as they were able to coax one of the programmers for the game Americas Army to attend the party for a bit. They also had two reporters from prominent tech websites (cnet and wired) present to cover the event for a book they are in the process of writing. In fact there was a lot of hype surrounding this party as rumors of such guest appearances and high profile sponsors circulated about the SVFrag website prior to the event.

The event itself was held at a local business called Nuvation, which apparently, is some sort of start up engineering company. As you know there are very little start ups left these days, due to the downturn in the economy, in fact they are about as rare as the multicolored moose that decorates their front entrance.

Manticore and I attended this event together and when arriving at the venue we were somewhat dismayed that that party was being held on the SECOND floor of the building, which meant hauling gear up the stairs. The layout of the office building was a bunch of cubes in the middle of the floor with conference rooms and small offices along the outer wall. The gamers were crammed into two conference rooms and another small area next to some cubes. This gave it that claustrophobic, cram-as-many-computers-as-you-can-into-the space-you-have, home LAN party type feel to it. Thankfully there was some AC in the building, which helped tremendously in cooling down the rooms that were over-packed with people and computers.

Unfortunately, the use of AC along with over 50 power hungry machines caused a little bit of power trouble. After a few blown circuits and some re-routing of power, everything was up and running again. According to Exar, LAN parties aren't official until the first circuit blows. So apparently, he was expecting this to happen and this was just his way of kicking off the "official" SV Frag! It's a good thing we became "official" so quick because now that we were all "official" we could proceed with the party. Unfortunately, again, there was also some network problems to deal with. After an hour or so, and a new patch cable or two, these problems were worked out as well. Once that was dealt with THEN we could get on with the "official" fragging, and so we did, at least until we were forced to stop, leave the room, and line up outside the door like cattle. At first no one knew what was going on, but it soon became apparent that we were going though the "official" check in process to ensure that we paid our required $15 entrance fee. After this was done THEN we could get on with the "official" fragging (for real this time).

The Americas Army programmer showed up, as promised, and an AAo server was started and a few people joined. Unfortunately (again), out of the 50 or so people that were there, I never saw more than 5 or 6 people in the AAo server, and never for more than a few rounds (usually the server would go down after the second round or so). Exar attempted to get a tournament going, by getting some teams together and drawing out a tournament ladder on the white board. That was the last anybody ever heard of it though. So after a few rounds of AAo, and a few server resets, people migrated back to other, more popular (and stable) games such as Warcraft 3, Unreal Tournament, various flavors of Quake, and some CS. There were 4 servers running various games that were donated by HomeLAN, which were running all night.

There was a Warcraft 3 tourney, which took a little while to get off the ground, but it finally got up and running. The prize was some chocolate covered coffee beans from one of the sponsors… I couldn't tell you who the sponsor was because, like many of the other sponsors the party may have had, there was really poor visibility on the sponsors.
Normally when LAN parties have cool sponsors, they make sure you know all about it. You practically go home with their company logo burned into your retnas from seeing it printed all over everything. There is also usually a table with donated goodies on it for people to take. There's also usually another table with all the ultra cool donated stuff on it that will be given away as tournament or door prizes. Usually these tables are in a prominent place so that everyone can drool over them and bow down and say "I'm not worthy!" Of course this is all a plot by the marketing people at the sponsoring companies, they want to control your mind, they want you to be reciting the company catch phrase in your sleep, they want you to go home wearing their company logo emblazoned on your t shirt and on anything else they can manage to emblazon. Lucky for us, the guys at SV Frag have managed to thwart this mind control scheme, in fact, they were so good at hiding the free stuff that I didn't even know there were cool CH flight sticks and other cool stuff that was given away the next day. Also, there was absolutely NOTHING emblazoned at the party. No Emblazonment = No Mind Control. It's a good thing too, because I forgot to bring my hat made of tin foil, which blocks the evil mind control rays.

The fact that the groups were all in different rooms made communication and organizing
games very difficult and was probably why a lot of things seemed disorganized.
For example:

Somone who wants to organize a game will run down the hall and peek in through the door and say "hey who wants to play (insert game name here)?"
Gamers: Ugghh?
Organizer: I said, "who wants to play (insert game name here)?"
::a few people raise thier hands::
::organizer runs back down the hall to start the server::
::organizer runs back::
Organizer: Ok the server is up everybody join (insert server name).
::organizer runs down the hall::
::5 minutes pass.. nothing happens::
::organizer runs back::
Organizer: "how come nobody is joining the server?"
Gamers: "What was it called again?"… "I cant get in, does anybody have the patch?"… "somethings wrong with my network cable"… "hey look! somebody has 40 gigs of porn on their computer!"
::organizer throws his hands up in disgust::

Another thing that bothered me about the LAN was the over inflated price. Now, I understand that it costs real money to rent a place and put one of these things on. I was just expecting more for my money. Seeing as how I paid 15 dollars and didn't get any free mind control gear and absolutely NO emblazonment, as well as no food at all, not even a bowl of potato chips, I came away feeling a bit ripped off. I have been to several LANs in the past that charged only 10 dollars or less that had food AND emblazonment provided.

To their credit, Exar and his crew did a tremendous job putting this LAN together and, I'm sure they learned a lot of ways to streamline for future LANs.

ADDENDUM - 01/21/2026 By Warhawk

The website lanparty dot com became the primary hub for the LAN party scene. It was an international listing of LANs that could be sorted by region. It was by far the best way for local LAN gamers to find out what was going on in their local area. Everything from large events to small garage LANs were listed there. While browsing lanparty dot com one day for local LAN events I found one that was going to happen a few miles from where I lived called Silicon Valley Fragfest (or SV Frag for short).

In the months leading up to the event I got to know the three guys that were planning the event. They went by the handles Exar, Gamekiller and Killjoy. They were all nice guys, and leading up to the event I communicated regularly with them. I was eager to be involved with an organized LAN event and wanted to help in any way that I could.

TMC was still a small group at the time so Manticore and I were the only ones from TMC representing at this event. The event took place on August 9th, 2002, which was about one month after I had attended my first Octane LAN party. The Octane event raised the bar tremendously for Organized LAN standards, so I may have gone into SVFrag with too high of expectations.

After attending Octane LAN and then SV Frag, it was clear that there was no comparison between the two events and I saw many areas of improvement that could be made to SV Frag.

At the time I would regularly write summaries of every LAN event I attended and put them up on the TMC website. I would come to find that I was virtually the only one writing any sort of coverage of these types of events, and a such this drove some of the local LAN community traffic the TMC site. It turned out to be one of the features that set TMC apart from the multitude of other gaming related clans and websites around.

I felt the need to be totally honest with my LAN write ups and point out everything that I thought was good or bad about the events. The resulting writeup of the SV Frag event was scathing to say the least; above is the writeup I wrote back in 2002 after attending the event.

As you can see, via my sharp wit and scathing sarcasm I ripped them a new one. To my surprise people besides my immediate friends were finding the reviews I was writing. In fact, my review came up as one of the top search results when searching for SV Frag.

Exar and Gamekiller saw the write up and contacted me. Me, being a typical dude never thought to take into account the feelings of the LAN organizers (most guys don’t possess feelings anyway, right?) and the hard work they put into making the event happen. I just wrote what I thought, pointed out problems I felt must be addressed and tried it make it funny. Also, in my defense my job at the time was to walk around my company, find problems and then write reports about them; so that may have been a factor in my writing mentality.

At first Exar and Gamekiller were pretty pissed at me for what I wrote, and I can’t really blame them. They wanted me to take it down, but I felt I had to say what I wanted to say and it had to be my honest opinion. I told them that aside from some obvious hyperbole, it was all a true account of what had happened. After their initial wave of rage toward me had passed they realized that all the issues I had pointed out were actually 100% valid points. Exar even admitted that all of the issues I had brought up had crossed his mind at some point, and even a few others I had missed. Apparently no one in the planning committee took the issues too seriously because most of the attendees told them only about how much they liked the LAN. It wasn’t until my review came up that they started to seriously think about fixing these issues.

To my surprise Exar actually invited me to a meeting with all of the planners of the event in order to give them feedback on how to make the next one better. He thought I should come in and give them a reality check and have an honest discussion about how to make improvements. The meeting went well and they invited me to join the staff for the next one. Unfortunately there were issues with the venue, so there was no next event until many many years later