I'd have to agree they used to be the coolest thing in town back in 1996-97, but I had already stopped going there before the millennium was out.

Looking back it was a brilliant idea, but the time was right, the technology was right, and people's attitudes were still sufficiently right.

Today, however, it's become an abominable antisocial event with a herd of self-absorbed nobodies drooling over their stupid cellphones, typing stupid things to other stupid people that may or may not even be present at the table, and avoiding eye contact like they were going to be charged for it.

The internet cafes I saw were in less developed countries. It was a very common thing there. That was a few years ago, and I wonder if they are still doing good business nowadays.

I remember the days of the cibercafé, or ciber for short, as it was called in my neck of the woods. From the cheap & nasty ones with the crappiest refurb PCs imaginable, to the fancy 'gamer' ones that looked like a rave crossed with a LAN party. I wasn't really fond of the whole idea of going to a public place and use a public computer to access the Internet, so the very few times I frequented them was out of sheer necessity (except for a brief time when I used to play CS with a couple of friends at one of these places - when my friends got PCs and we started having our own LAN parties it was way more fun IMO). My family went through some hard financial times in the early 2000s, we had to move in with my grandmother and we couldn't afford (nor were allowed) to have a residential Internet connection. I had "information cravings", I kept a notepad where I'd write everything I'd like to look up online, and when I managed to scrounge up enough change I went to my nearest ciber and went through the list, mass downloading everything I could to packet-written CD-RW (and later to a USB flash stick) for later checking at home. Since I was also experimenting with Linux at the time, I also downloaded as many guides, manuals, software and dependencies as I could during these brief times of connectivity. Getting my information fix was really difficult, I certainly don't miss those days. Things have changed so much since then it's baffling.

As years passed and home broadband became mainstream these places started to die out, and in today's world when the average person can have the Internet in their pocket they've become almost extinct. Amazingly there's one close to where I live, sort of. A nearby tobacco shop installed three refurb Dell desktops and I occasionally see people checking their Facebook or printing documents in there. Nowadays I'd handle 'public' computers like those much like I'd handle a used condom lying near a park bench. With more and more people having their own personal devices I believe providing a WiFi hotspot (and maybe some electricity for battery charging) would be a much better plan.

As a teenager I remember thinking that being a ciber owner would be the best job ever - sitting on your ass all day browsing the web, and making a living off it. Most of them also made money on the side by "burning custom CDs", typing documents, digitizing pictures, stuff like that.

Internet cafe's were basically killed by speed improvements in mobile broadband and the proliferation of Wifi connections everywhere. Mobile broadband used to be painfully slow and now even McDonald's and Burger King have Wifi so why would you have to search out a place just to use their internet connection?

Never used one. Think closest equivalent would be using the stations we setup in Iraq and Afghanistan for morale purposes. Iraq one didn't have Wifi but the Afghanistan one did.

Over here, the cybercafe culture bloomed when the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike and Team Fortress were the craze. As well as Warcraft III. I used to see kids and adolescents playing them whenever I pass by these cybercafes. Usually a group of friends will enter to have a LAN party with these games.

The times of ICQ, and Yahoo Messenger also propelled the popularity of these centres.

When I was doing my graduate studies, cybercafes were the only place with internet access for the general residents at that time.

Some cybercafes installed less intensive games, yet fun ones - like the Bomberman multiplayer games which were quite fun. (Couldn't remember what that game was that I played about 2 decades ago after one of my friends birthday party.)

There are still some cybercafes running now but not sure what is running in there. And some centers get raided once in a while because of running online betting or gambling games in them.

I dated a chick that worked at an internet cafe in ZA. She beat me & my friends in StarCraft anytime. More of a 2nd & 3rd world thing in the late 90s / early 00s I think.

There are still a couple of "cafes" hereabouts, though I'm not sure how much the "cafe" part really applies – they're open late and you can pay for usage of a computer for a set amount of time, but each station is pretty isolated and I don't think they serve food. I'm not sure how so many of them stay in business; I can only imagine there are lots of people engaging in shady business dealings who don't want things traced back to any machine that can be connected to them.

I understand they're still huge in Korea and parts of China, though I may be mistaken.

Never went to an internet café but our local shopping centre used to have a row of about 20 PCs next to the café/fast food outlets though I never used them. Never saw any PC users interacting so I doubt any LAN gaming went on. All gone now, replaced in a way by so-called free wifi where you have to faff about getting passwords. Now that my employer allows connection over wifi I might be bothered to try.

I went to one back in the mid '90s. They had a Forte VFX-1 VR setup and I was able to try Mechwarrior 2 and Flight Unlimited. That's it though.

Come to think of it, the neighborhood is on the verge of getting an "e-Sports bar" – I guess that qualifies. Something akin to the Mana Bar – which apparently just closed for good. Oops.

We called them game rooms. I used to go to one every time before school, when I was the 2nd shift (starting from 13:30). I would go to one local game room very close to my grade school at 11:50 when they prepare to open it from 12:00. I would clean the desks with the cleaning solution and a cloth and every time the worker would give me 1h free 😁
Warcraft, Counter Strike, Red Alert, I used to play a lot of games there. Even WOW when it first came out.

Interesting to hear this turned out to be a small town, third world kind of a deal. It makes sense, though. I've been to places where they're still using dial up, so there's definitely an appeal to being able to access the internet at higher speeds (never walked into a café that didn't offer something better than 56k).

Cybers used to be VERY popular here. Some of them didn't even offer internet back on 2000-2002 (yea, getting broadband around here was that bad), so the term "LAN house" was coined and is still used today. I remember discovering great games like Half-Life, Counter Strike, Day of Defeat and the Call of Duty series on them.

One of the great aspects was the fact that on almost every one had at least 1/3 of the machines rented with people playing competitive games, so local matches happened all day long. Most of them had a dedicated server for hosting CS, with rankings, prizes and everything. Some of them also promoted tournaments, mainly CS and Battlefield.

I've even worked part-time fixing stuff/as a clerk on a couple. Funny thing: Almost none of them served coffee, as they focused on billing you on a hourly location basis. Great times 😀

ADSL more or less killed cyber cafes here. As soon as that appeared, people were able to play CS/DoD/Diablo 2 from home, against more people, and around the clock. Voice chat over TeamSpeak/Ventrilo if you were cool enough.

They hung around for a short while after that, as a facility for tourists/backpackers to use Hotmail and Skype, but even that's now been supplanted by free WiFi in restaurants and hotels/hostels.

Malik wrote:

Over here, the cybercafe culture bloomed when the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike and Team Fortress were the craze. As well as Warcraft III. I used to see kids and adolescents playing them whenever I pass by these cybercafes. Usually a group of friends will enter to have a LAN party with these games.

In Malaysia too?

Here in Indonesia, internet cafés have transformed into multiplayer gaming centers -populated with pimpled teens playing FPS. Counter-Strike is still popular, believe it or not.

Several years ago somebody opened a LAN party gaming center thing (not sure what they called it) in an upscale town in the area. They were promoting it as a place to play LAN games, not really for internet. Everybody in that town certainly had good internet already. I don't think it stayed open very long.

The closest I ever came to a cyber cafe was in college back in the late 90s. One of the labs in the Computer Science building had just received a donation (reportedly from Intel) for a bunch of new Dell Optiplex computers with Pentium-2s in them. I think they were P2-400, maybe 450MHz. Top of the line x86 CPUs, and unlike most computers in the building they weren't starving for RAM.

Those computers were overpowered for doing school assignments. So naturally, it didn't take long for students to figure out what they were really good for. There were always several people in there playing LAN games on them. They knew they needed to be quiet, so they'd be frantically communicating in hushed tones and hand signals.
That was where I discovered Age of Empires. I also saw people playing some multiplayer FPS but to this day I don't know what it was. The internet speed was unreal, probably 10-100x faster than my dialup back then.

Universities typically had T1/T3 lines straight into the backbone back then.

I live in the heart of the Silicon Valley, in downtown SJ, and this area is becoming very trendy, lately with new plazas opening up. Now, there is a gaming/internet cafe of sorts which is doing very well. They have all the latest games, including a few rooms for console gaming, and they sell lots of varieties of energy drinks. Yeah, it sounds like the perfect recipe for obesity and diabetes. The monthly fee is something in upwards of $75 unless you invest in several months or even a year at once. I thought this sounded ridiculously expensive, but when you consider the fact that you don't have to buy your own computer (which many people pay off on a monthly financing plan) and don't have to have your own broadband internet connection at home (which typically costs you around $80 or more, here) then you're saving quite a bit.

I suppose you just have to have the sort of lifestyle where you can look up information on your phone at home, and run to the local cafe to play games. Makes sense for a lot of people in the area who work too much to be with their kids, too. Send little johnny to the cafe all day Saturday and Sunday so they can accomplish whatever.