Event: TMC-LAN 3 - LAN Party Event Date: 12/11/2004 Written By: Warhawk Date Written: 1/29/2026

The announcement for this event was posted on the tmc-lan website on November 11th, 2004 and stated:

TMC LAN 1 and 2 were both huge successes and massive quantities of fun were had by all. Each successive party has been bigger and better than the one before. If you haven't already checked out TMC LAN, now's your chance because TMC LAN 3 is scheduled for December 11th! Tell your friends, because this is going to be the biggest TMC LAN yet, as we are planning for 50 people!

I cant find any records of how many people we had, but at this point we were hitting a stride and each event was getting bigger and better than the last.

Another interesting thing that happened leading up to this LAN was that we were approached by a market research com pany called The UE Group. I don't have the text of their inital pitch but they wanted to do research on LAN parties and get feedback from people that attended them.

Here was my reply:

-----Original Message-----

From: Warhawk[REDACTED]
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 3:53 PM
To: "Tony [REDACTED]"
Subject: Re: LAN Party Research

Hi Tony,
I am the leader of The Mowers Clan, and your offer is very interesting to us. Our Clan is actually very experienced with not only attending LAN parties, but with running them as well. We generally like to lend a helping hand to any bay area LAN that needs it (and most do, because good LAN staffers are hard to come by).

Given this expeience I can safely say that we are uniquely qualified to shed light on what exactly it is that makes a great LAN party.

I can definately get 16 people to sign up for something like this, especially if each participant is given $100 (we know of a few non-Mowers clan members that may be interested as well). If you can give me an exact date and time foryour focus group, I could begin scheduling.

I am interested to know more about your company if you could tell me a little bit more about it. Are you looking to start up a large LAN party in the bay area? If so, I can say there is definately a market for such a venture.

Looking forward to hearing from you again,

- [REDACTED]

This was the reply:

From:tony[REDACTED]
To:warhawk[REDACTED]
Sent: Wed, Dec 8, 2004 at 7:49 PM

Thanks for getting back to me. Sounds great. The research is actually being done for a HW manufacturer that is interested in catering to folks like you. However, you guys are kind of a new and alien thing to the PC makers. This focus group is about understanding what you guys like/need from your hardware and how PCs could be made to suit you better.

The date will be this year. There will be two sessions, each with 8 people. I'll get back to you with a likely date. However, its kind of critical that the people that are scheduled not only say they want to come but that they actually will so keep that in mind. If you want, we could do the recruiting based on the contact info you give us.

I'll get back to you with some more info and we'll go from there.

We ended up setting up the focus group session at TMC-LAN 3. It took place in the living room of the house that was connected to the warehouse space. It turned out the focus group was being condcuted on behalf of Dell. They asked us a bunch of questions, and they also had us do an excercise with blocks that represented various PC parts. I believe this was meant to get feedback on more optimal ways to lay out PCs, taking into account heat dissipation and such. It was a fun session and I think everyone enjoyed being a part of it.

In 2005 I was contacted again by the same group about another focus group around networking gear. Based on some additional saved emails, apparently I got together some people for that as well, but I honestly have no memory of it.

The bottom line is, the LAN party scene had gotten big enough that it had gotten the attention of big companies that wanted to learn how to make products that would appeal to the community. This would be one of many focus groups that the members of TMC would take part in. Others included Nvidia, and EA.

Other new things at this event were, some improvements to the "tunnel of doom" where we normally setup a projector for playing console games. The walls got painted, and some free craigslist couches were added to the area.