We got to take over the upstairs floor of a furniture store. Large LAN party for the size of the town, which wasn't large - we packed 30 people in there. Since it was a very open space, we could only get power from the outer walls. That meant a long extension cable. Well, it was used while coiled on the spool, and the old building let us run 15 computers from the one plug, and somehow the coil of extension cable fused together. Whoops.

We're very fortunate that didn't start a fire. But the cable itself was irreparable. We did a better job the following meet distributing our power tap use.

I can't remember anything bad like that happening here, but our LANs are much smaller (3, maybe 4 computers rigged together).
We did have some mishap when someone accidentally flipped the power switch on the power splitter-box-thingy which connected to the host PC (which happened to be mine) and the router. Both clients kept running as I had them on other power outlets, but the game was obviously over 😁

Tetrium wrote:

I can't remember anything bad like that happening here, but our LANs are much smaller (3, maybe 4 computers rigged together).
We did have some mishap when someone accidentally flipped the power switch on the power splitter-box-thingy which connected to the host PC (which happened to be mine) and the router. Both clients kept running as I had them on other power outlets, but the game was obviously over 😁

cable management in non official lan parties were always a hassle... then again the transportation to and from the lan parties were usually the biggest problem..... computer: 20 kg if you were lucky and another big 17 inch CRT monitor and your down for a real work out. not to mention games, keyboard, mouse and the other stuff you took along.... god bless the invention of flat screens 😲
anyway good memories aside, this is usually 1 of the problems with lan parties I joined. Its either some sort of bad cable management or someone having a poorly electricity in their house (15 years ago that was still possible in the Netherlands).
Worse I had was with 10-15 people orso in the early 00's where we either had a Athlon XP or Duron and a few PIII and PIV, now imagine atleast 10 having a K7 system and power supplies hitting the 500-600W each.... We did setup just fine and got the whole network going without any problems we even devided the power over 2 rooms (which somehow we were lucky enough the other room was on another group), so we setup the network etc and started out the first game few games which were not heavy games. then we got hungry and started throwing pizza's in the oven, and this is were the problems started. next up were a few shooter/racing and RTS (oh yes we felt the heat in Juli + 10 athlons/durons in the living room), when we all entered the first game and most computers started consuming abit more energy all went poof, well only about 8 people went poof including the lights in the living room and the kitchen. The end result was that we had to call someone their dad to come and fix the electricty (most of us were only around 14-15), luckily enough only a few fuses were blown and nothing serious happened. To bad about the bloody pizza though 🤣

This photo seemed relevant

Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with that picture. That's what sort of inspired this post.