In my neck of the woods, it was common for a group of friends to go to an internet cafe, and have a LAN party there. As in, we would sometimes get together and play stuff like Counter Strike for a couple of hours.

This was during the early 2000s, but the trend kinda fell off as broadband internet became more widely available.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-01-27, 09:56:

In my neck of the woods, it was common for a group of friends to go to an internet cafe, and have a LAN party there. As in, we would sometimes get together and play stuff like Counter Strike for a couple of hours.

This was during the early 2000s, but the trend kinda fell off as broadband internet became more widely available.

I can imagine. Actually, even in the 2000s and the internet era, just to put my local reality into perspective: In my town, there was initially only one 'internet cafè', then there were 2. For a long while. And just 3 or 4 computers inside...
Broadband internet? (xDSL) It didn't exist until 2010ish...

I was particuarly good at FPS games but I was also a hot head when gaming so my memory of LAN parties is being at the top of the leaderboard but everyone leaving the server for another game because they can't stand me lmao. Also making myself sick living off junk food.

Because everything was mechanical HDDs and people were driving their machines potentially some distance with them stacked in the boot of a carpool, there was always someone that showed up with a dead system. Some people I knew would remove the HDDs and transport them seperately.

I went to LAN parties from 1994 to 2005. We LAN’ed from Friday night till Sunday afternoon. Usually it was at a different house each weekend. So many good memories. Being with a bunch of people with the exact same interest, enjoying each other’s company and eating tons of junk food. It was awesome. We played everything from Doom to C&C…Warcraft…Starcraft…Counter-Strike. Really wish I could go to another LAN party and relive the experience. Sadly all my LANing mates have moved on in life and I don’t know anyone who’s into retro computing. My whole retro experience is lived through Vogons and YouTube 🤣.

zuldan wrote on 2026-01-27, 10:12:

I went to LAN parties from 1994 to 2005. We LAN’ed from Friday night till Sunday afternoon. Usually it was at a different house each weekend. So many good memories. Being with a bunch of people with the exact same interest, enjoying each other’s company and eating tons of junk food. It was awesome. We played everything from Doom to C&C…Warcraft…Starcraft…Counter-Strike. Really wish I could go to another LAN party and relive the experience. Sadly all my LANing mates have moved on in life and I don’t know anyone who’s into retro computing. My whole retro experience is lived through Vogons and YouTube 🤣.

oh wow!!! That sounds terrific!!! I totally hear you brother! Also on the aspect of missing retro people today... 🙁
How I would have wanted to experience that LAN party thing! you even made afterhours!

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-01-27, 10:10:

I was particuarly good at FPS games but I was also a hot head when gaming so my memory of LAN parties is being at the top of the leaderboard but everyone leaving the server for another game because they can't stand me lmao....

🤣!

Also, yeah junk food seems like a great friend first, but when the body starts to age, it becomes an enemy! Careful with that!

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-01-27, 10:10:

Because everything was mechanical HDDs and people were driving their machines potentially some distance with them stacked in the boot of a carpool, there was always someone that showed up with a dead system. Some people I knew would remove the HDDs and transport them seperately.

Oh I never thought about that! Wise choice to carry the drive separately. Or at least you guys could have placed things like yoga mats - or at least towels between each computer, just to dampen vibrations...

Ah LAN parties... I was never any good at the games (well, apart from playing Worms World Party competitively) but I loved the atmosphere. Here in NL they were definitely still a thing in the early 00's - even though by then pretty much everyone had broadband internet at home, bandwidths were still low and network gaming unreliable enough to make physically coming together for gaming and media sharing a thing. There was always that one guy boasting about his server with 12TB of pr0n... MMORPGs and the move to casual gaming was what killed the LAN party as a broader cultural thing, probably in the late 00's. Actually there are still some being organized - the only reason I no longer attend is that they have a no minors policy and I have children that need looking after and would want to come along 😉

dionb wrote on 2026-01-27, 11:30:

Ah LAN parties... I was never any good at the games (well, apart from playing Worms World Party competitively) but I loved the atmosphere. Here in NL they were definitely still a thing in the early 00's - even though by then pretty much everyone had broadband internet at home, bandwidths were still low and network gaming unreliable enough to make physically coming together for gaming and media sharing a thing. There was always that one guy boasting about his server with 12TB of pr0n... MMORPGs and the move to casual gaming was what killed the LAN party as a broader cultural thing, probably in the late 00's. Actually there are still some being organized - the only reason I no longer attend is that they have a no minors policy and I have children that need looking after and would want to come along 😉

I understand.
It would be great to reinstate them as a sub-culture, worldwide, like making LAN parties a thing again, heck even using retro hardware and retro games... all child-friendly (which is also friendly for our souls in the end).
Too bad I missed them back in the days.

Cars weren't a thing in my big city neighborhood so transporting huge chunky computers wasn't an option. We almost exclusively played at school instead, groups were allocated different time slots and nobody really cared that we used that time to play Quake 1 or Need for Speed 2. That's a good way to keep kids in school. 😁
Later when PC prices dropped I bought 2 used computers and we played UT and Q3A or Carmageddon every day with my 2 best friends, then women happened and my priorities shifted, I kinda grew out of playing multiplayer games.
My daughter is 10 now and very interested in playing co-op with her old man so I'm putting together a computer for her so we can play all my old classics that gave me so many happy memories back then. Can't wait!

Counter-Strike was like crack cocaine. The sound of the deagles, sniper, team work required, the reward system to get better weapons, the rock-paper-scissors way of winning (hostages / bomb / eliminate other team). The maps were also more like real places.. storage depot, nuclear facility, ship.. and made you feel like you were actually defending/attacking for a reason. Revolutionary compared to everything else.

I once played in a 50 person game of Medal of Honor of Omaha Beach... it was the most accurate simulation of running up the beach only to get gunned down, or conversely sitting on the machine guns and praying for no grenades. The mayhem after the breach. The people running up the beach eventually won every match.

'Savage: Battle for Newerth' was the game most returned to. A little known RTS-FPS hybrid. No one played an RTS again after experiencing real people (in their own FPS mode) as the soldiers/hero characters.

Mandrew wrote on 2026-01-27, 12:28:

Cars weren't a thing in my big city neighborhood so transporting huge chunky computers wasn't an option. We almost exclusively played at school instead, groups were allocated different time slots and nobody really cared that we used that time to play Quake 1 or Need for Speed 2. That's a good way to keep kids in school. 😁
Later when PC prices dropped I bought 2 used computers and we played UT and Q3A or Carmageddon every day with my 2 best friends, then women happened and my priorities shifted, I kinda grew out of playing multiplayer games.
My daughter is 10 now and very interested in playing co-op with her old man so I'm putting together a computer for her so we can play all my old classics that gave me so many happy memories back then. Can't wait!

MARVELLOUS!
The school idea is nice... imagine, my mid-school's 'IT lab' at that time had merely a 1MB RAM 80186 PC!!!! 🤣 (we're talking 91-93). Then high school, we had a fair IT lab, with some Ambra Sprinta 386 SX computers... but God forbid you even tried to put anything in them... games? ha! That room was bureaucracy made flesh (or made bricks actually, since it was a room... still, made flesh in the bureaucrats managing everything).
Sounds nice what you're doing... Then I wish the very best with your daughter!

MikeSG wrote on 2026-01-27, 12:58:

Counter-Strike was like crack cocaine. The sound of the deagles, sniper, team work required, the reward system to get better weapons, the rock-paper-scissors way of winning (hostages / bomb / eliminate other team). The maps were also more like real places.. storage depot, nuclear facility, ship.. and made you feel like you were actually defending/attacking for a reason. Revolutionary compared to everything else.

I once played in a 50 person game of Medal of Honor of Omaha Beach... it was the most accurate simulation of running up the beach only to get gunned down, or conversely sitting on the machine guns and praying for no grenades. The mayhem after the breach. The people running up the beach eventually won every match.

'Savage: Battle for Newerth' was the game most returned to. A little known RTS-FPS hybrid. No one played an RTS again after experiencing real people (in their own FPS mode) as the soldiers/hero characters.

Interesting! I never ever looked at Counter-Strike anything (tho I heard it a lot around)... by the way you describe it, it seems exactly the kind of FPS that I'd enjoy... (utterly loved DOOMs and Duke Nukem 3D, but I prefer more like post-nuke situations, abandoned cities, things like that, soldiers, robots, rather than monsters and demons things...)... where would you recommend I start with Counter-Strike? The first one? I wouldn't mind a DOXbox thing... (provided by a miracle I find some free time).

RTS? Don't even know what it means.. gotta look it up

zuldan wrote on 2026-01-27, 10:12:

I went to LAN parties from 1994 to 2005. We LAN’ed from Friday night till Sunday afternoon. Usually it was at a different house each weekend. So many good memories. Being with a bunch of people with the exact same interest, enjoying each other’s company and eating tons of junk food. It was awesome. We played everything from Doom to C&C…Warcraft…Starcraft…Counter-Strike. Really wish I could go to another LAN party and relive the experience. Sadly all my LANing mates have moved on in life and I don’t know anyone who’s into retro computing. My whole retro experience is lived through Vogons and YouTube 🤣.

Yup, pretty much the identical experience I had. We used every nook and cranny in the house, someone would even be setup in the toilet! The first hour or so was just setting everything up, running extension cables, LAN cables, massive CRT screens, speakers etc. No gamer headsets in those days. It first started off with 10Base2, running coax cable everywhere, making sure they were terminated at the ends, playing Warcraft2, Duke3D, Shadow Warrior and a few others I can't remember now. Eventually upgraded to Windows 95, now we could play Diablo, Starcraft, Need for Speed 2, then at some stage we upgraded to a 10/100mbps network, WOW!!! 😀 It carried on until around the Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament era when our lives started changing, getting married, having children, moving to other parts of the country/overseas etc. Those were the days.

Best thing about LAN parties?

Reply from 192.168.2.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64

A friend group i was in arranged a lot of small to large LAN's back in the day, from about 1998 to 2004 or so.
Most were 10-20 peeps but the peak was about 100 seats.
We managed to borrow a community house and involved a large local company that could loan us the network equipment (4 huge 100Mbit switches which were linked optically iirc) a shedload of TP cables and even 10Mbit wireless internet, this was when most had dial-up and only the ubergeeks had ISDN.
Well no wonder they loaned us the gear, most of the IT department were there happily fragging away =)
Our groups CS server was popular and many who used it showed up, including some of the top CS players in the world at that time.
I set up a local DirectConnect server to make linux ISO's easier to share *ahem*, that poor machine was at 100% load the entire LAN.

It all culminated with about 10 of us setting up a permanent LAN in a rented basement.
Complete with a bar obviously, plenty of partying happened.
One of the 3 rooms below.

I still occasionally see ticketed LAN Party events advertised from time to time. So they haven't completely gone away, just changed and become more commercialised.

In the early 2000s I briefly worked for a local company that did regular LAN Party events, kind of like a "gaming club". I never got involved in the gaming myself as I was there to cover the event for the company website, but everybody seemed to have a lot of fun. The big events were basically sleepovers attracting teens & young adults. When the gaming got too tiring, they'd pull up a sleeping bag until morning and then start again, whilst others played on through the night. It was quite mad to see.

Nowadays, 1 friend and I have a little LAN Party of our own each year, which coincidentally is tomorrow evening. 8 retro Gaming PC builds of varying specs, covering PC gaming from 1993 up to 2010. We start in the evening and go on through until around 3AM. Lots of alcohol is consumed at these events! 🤣

aries-mu wrote on 2026-01-27, 13:12:

Interesting! I never ever looked at Counter-Strike anything (tho I heard it a lot around)... by the way you describe it, it seems exactly the kind of FPS that I'd enjoy... (utterly loved DOOMs and Duke Nukem 3D, but I prefer more like post-nuke situations, abandoned cities, things like that, soldiers, robots, rather than monsters and demons things...)... where would you recommend I start with Counter-Strike? The first one? I wouldn't mind a DOXbox thing... (provided by a miracle I find some free time).

RTS? Don't even know what it means.. gotta look it up

I stopped playing Counter-Strike at version 1.4.. many people say they stopped at 1.6. Hostages were removed around then. The game still exists as 'Counter-Strike 2' but it's extremely elitist and the maps are not real places. It was originally a half-life 1 mod, so I'm not totally sure how you would install it except using original CDs.

RTS = Real Time Strategy, such as Starcraft, Warcraft, Total Annihilation.

There was a remake of the RTS-FPS hybrid named 'Savage Resurrection', but the servers are down since it was bought. Gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2WxjIA2DBQ
Still one of the best games ever in my opinion, but needs to be more than 6 players otherwise it's slow/boring.

aries-mu wrote on 2026-01-27, 09:49:

Guys, as a very early 90s computer user, and now nostalgic retrocomputing dude, I must admit something burns! I missed LAN parti […]
Show full quote

Guys, as a very early 90s computer user, and now nostalgic retrocomputing dude, I must admit something burns!
I missed LAN parties!
See, for those of you guys who are American and lived in those cities, perhaps it was common, among computer and video games enthusiasts, to meet for LAN parties at least once in a while, both in terms of population density and of standards of living.
In Italy, where I spent my childhood and adolescence, it was different. The average family was not as wealthy as the average American or UK or other similar countries family. Mine, particularly, had a very tight belt for various reasons. We had to CAREFULLY plan every expense. Even buying a NES game was a big deal... In addition to that, Southern Italy was always poorer than Central- and Northern-, and my town, being a very small city of Southern Italy, had very few people at all (and very very few computer enthusiasts). Even if I had the money to buy a nice PC and set it up with a LAN interface, I wouldn't have had any friends to bring it to (or to invite to bring theirs) and play a LAN party.
It would have been wonderful, the whole hardware setup thing... bringing your own hardware, setting everything up, connecting them together... seeing the room with several old goodies PCs...
So, I never actually lived the experience of a LAN party. I didn't even know LAN parties existed, up to until the 201xs.

But now, with my retrocomputing nostalgia kicking, when I see posts like on Instagram or such things with pictures of old days LAN parties, I can totally feel and imagine the feeling... and I must admit I 'miss' it, not missing in a way that I did that and I miss it now, but, worst, I miss never having experienced it. Indeed, it seems a pretty iconic milestone of the 90s computing and gaming.

What are your perspectives on this?

Thx.

I did not go to many LAN parties, but I did go and I suspect mostly 1999-2001.

It was a chance to compare rigs side-by-side rather than on paper or online.

The social perimeter of provided access to parts trading, hand-me-downs, discount hardware, pirated games, and general PC knowledge.

The economy was different. Pirated games were of course not measurable as money to publishers, but pirated games built ecosystems and followings - and players within the ecosystem “upgraded” from pirated copies to retail copies.

So, I think some companies did well out of it.

For people like you (and me) there were opportunities to try games/hardware without paying for it. You didn’t necessarily need a PC but it helped.

Personally, I preferred playing online from home. Moving a tower, CRT, and peripherals just wasn’t fun particularly when it’s cold, dark, and everyone is tired - plus petrol fees needed to be found. Having a car was more impactful than having a PC.

Mandrew wrote on 2026-01-27, 12:28:

Cars weren't a thing in my big city neighborhood so transporting huge chunky computers wasn't an option.

Beg to differ. Here I (ab)used an old ladder frame rucksack to transport my system by public transport. The system case went on the bottom, on top of that the CRT monitor with the screen facing my back. Duct tape the lot of it to the rucksack frame, put keyboard, mouse, headset and extension cords into the side pockets and some spare clothes and bedding on top. Oh, and a shopping bag with food & drink supplies.

Just a pain when more rural people organized the LAN party a long way away from the nearest station/bus stop.

orcish75 wrote on 2026-01-27, 13:20:

Yup, pretty much the identical experience I had. We used every nook and cranny in the house, someone would even be setup in the […]
Show full quote

zuldan wrote on 2026-01-27, 10:12:

I went to LAN parties from 1994 to 2005. We LAN’ed from Friday night till Sunday afternoon. Usually it was at a different house each weekend. So many good memories. Being with a bunch of people with the exact same interest, enjoying each other’s company and eating tons of junk food. It was awesome. We played everything from Doom to C&C…Warcraft…Starcraft…Counter-Strike. Really wish I could go to another LAN party and relive the experience. Sadly all my LANing mates have moved on in life and I don’t know anyone who’s into retro computing. My whole retro experience is lived through Vogons and YouTube 🤣.

Yup, pretty much the identical experience I had. We used every nook and cranny in the house, someone would even be setup in the toilet! The first hour or so was just setting everything up, running extension cables, LAN cables, massive CRT screens, speakers etc. No gamer headsets in those days. It first started off with 10Base2, running coax cable everywhere, making sure they were terminated at the ends, playing Warcraft2, Duke3D, Shadow Warrior and a few others I can't remember now. Eventually upgraded to Windows 95, now we could play Diablo, Starcraft, Need for Speed 2, then at some stage we upgraded to a 10/100mbps network, WOW!!! 😀 It carried on until around the Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament era when our lives started changing, getting married, having children, moving to other parts of the country/overseas etc. Those were the days.

Best thing about LAN parties?

Reply from 192.168.2.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64

Oh wow man! This!!! ↑

bofh.fromhell wrote on 2026-01-27, 22:04:

A friend group i was in arranged a lot of small to large LAN's back in the day, from about 1998 to 2004 or so. Most were 10-20 p […]
Show full quote

A friend group i was in arranged a lot of small to large LAN's back in the day, from about 1998 to 2004 or so.
Most were 10-20 peeps but the peak was about 100 seats.
We managed to borrow a community house and involved a large local company that could loan us the network equipment (4 huge 100Mbit switches which were linked optically iirc) a shedload of TP cables and even 10Mbit wireless internet, this was when most had dial-up and only the ubergeeks had ISDN.
Well no wonder they loaned us the gear, most of the IT department were there happily fragging away =)
Our groups CS server was popular and many who used it showed up, including some of the top CS players in the world at that time.
I set up a local DirectConnect server to make linux ISO's easier to share *ahem*, that poor machine was at 100% load the entire LAN.

It all culminated with about 10 of us setting up a permanent LAN in a rented basement.
Complete with a bar obviously, plenty of partying happened.
One of the 3 rooms below.

Wooooow!
Even to one like me who had never such experiences, it sounds LAN parties scaled to titan's level!
The Community house facility must have looked extremely impressive!
Oh I bet you did have fun! Even a photo memory.... Oh and the fan of course! 😁

PTherapist wrote on 2026-01-27, 23:50:

I still occasionally see ticketed LAN Party events advertised from time to time. So they haven't completely gone away, just changed and become more commercialised.

In the early 2000s I briefly worked for a local company that did regular LAN Party events, kind of like a "gaming club". I never got involved in the gaming myself as I was there to cover the event for the company website, but everybody seemed to have a lot of fun. The big events were basically sleepovers attracting teens & young adults. When the gaming got too tiring, they'd pull up a sleeping bag until morning and then start again, whilst others played on through the night. It was quite mad to see.

Nowadays, 1 friend and I have a little LAN Party of our own each year, which coincidentally is tomorrow evening. 8 retro Gaming PC builds of varying specs, covering PC gaming from 1993 up to 2010. We start in the evening and go on through until around 3AM. Lots of alcohol is consumed at these events! 🤣

Whoooooooooaaaaaaa! Very nice! And what a timing!!!! Well, you must be starting soon... give or take the timezone... HAVE FUN!!! (but hey... go slow with the alcohol!)

MikeSG wrote on 2026-01-28, 16:51:

I stopped playing Counter-Strike at version 1.4.. many people say they stopped at 1.6. Hostages were removed around then. The ga […]
Show full quote

aries-mu wrote on 2026-01-27, 13:12:

Interesting! I never ever looked at Counter-Strike anything (tho I heard it a lot around)... by the way you describe it, it seems exactly the kind of FPS that I'd enjoy... (utterly loved DOOMs and Duke Nukem 3D, but I prefer more like post-nuke situations, abandoned cities, things like that, soldiers, robots, rather than monsters and demons things...)... where would you recommend I start with Counter-Strike? The first one? I wouldn't mind a DOXbox thing... (provided by a miracle I find some free time).

RTS? Don't even know what it means.. gotta look it up

I stopped playing Counter-Strike at version 1.4.. many people say they stopped at 1.6. Hostages were removed around then. The game still exists as 'Counter-Strike 2' but it's extremely elitist and the maps are not real places. It was originally a half-life 1 mod, so I'm not totally sure how you would install it except using original CDs.

RTS = Real Time Strategy, such as Starcraft, Warcraft, Total Annihilation.

There was a remake of the RTS-FPS hybrid named 'Savage Resurrection', but the servers are down since it was bought. Gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2WxjIA2DBQ
Still one of the best games ever in my opinion, but needs to be more than 6 players otherwise it's slow/boring.

Oh too bad. Online gaming created a new 'thing' in human history: 'THE SERVER', and a new thing to almost mourn every once in a while, when they shut down. I mean who ever was saddened, for thousands of years of human history, by the shutting down of an online game's server? Nobody. Now we can.
Thanks for the info and for the video...
I hope and wish at least GameRanger will consider taking the game in its catalog so it'll have a playable server again!

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:28:

I did not go to many LAN parties, but I did go and I suspect mostly 1999-2001. […]
Show full quote

aries-mu wrote on 2026-01-27, 09:49:

Guys, as a very early 90s computer user, and now nostalgic retrocomputing dude, I must admit something burns! I missed LAN parti […]
Show full quote

Guys, as a very early 90s computer user, and now nostalgic retrocomputing dude, I must admit something burns!
I missed LAN parties!
See, for those of you guys who are American and lived in those cities, perhaps it was common, among computer and video games enthusiasts, to meet for LAN parties at least once in a while, both in terms of population density and of standards of living.
In Italy, where I spent my childhood and adolescence, it was different. The average family was not as wealthy as the average American or UK or other similar countries family. Mine, particularly, had a very tight belt for various reasons. We had to CAREFULLY plan every expense. Even buying a NES game was a big deal... In addition to that, Southern Italy was always poorer than Central- and Northern-, and my town, being a very small city of Southern Italy, had very few people at all (and very very few computer enthusiasts). Even if I had the money to buy a nice PC and set it up with a LAN interface, I wouldn't have had any friends to bring it to (or to invite to bring theirs) and play a LAN party.
It would have been wonderful, the whole hardware setup thing... bringing your own hardware, setting everything up, connecting them together... seeing the room with several old goodies PCs...
So, I never actually lived the experience of a LAN party. I didn't even know LAN parties existed, up to until the 201xs.

But now, with my retrocomputing nostalgia kicking, when I see posts like on Instagram or such things with pictures of old days LAN parties, I can totally feel and imagine the feeling... and I must admit I 'miss' it, not missing in a way that I did that and I miss it now, but, worst, I miss never having experienced it. Indeed, it seems a pretty iconic milestone of the 90s computing and gaming.

What are your perspectives on this?

Thx.

I did not go to many LAN parties, but I did go and I suspect mostly 1999-2001.

It was a chance to compare rigs side-by-side rather than on paper or online.

The social perimeter of provided access to parts trading, hand-me-downs, discount hardware, pirated games, and general PC knowledge.

The economy was different. Pirated games were of course not measurable as money to publishers, but pirated games built ecosystems and followings - and players within the ecosystem “upgraded” from pirated copies to retail copies.

So, I think some companies did well out of it.

For people like you (and me) there were opportunities to try games/hardware without paying for it. You didn’t necessarily need a PC but it helped.

Personally, I preferred playing online from home. Moving a tower, CRT, and peripherals just wasn’t fun particularly when it’s cold, dark, and everyone is tired - plus petrol fees needed to be found. Having a car was more impactful than having a PC.

I understand yeah.
Well, I'll miss this which I never experienced!
And not only from the point of view that I did not experience it... also from the other side of the thing: that that whole chunk of IT tech is gone. Thankfully there's retro enthusiasts!

dionb wrote on 2026-01-28, 19:52:

Mandrew wrote on 2026-01-27, 12:28:

Cars weren't a thing in my big city neighborhood so transporting huge chunky computers wasn't an option.

Beg to differ. Here I (ab)used an old ladder frame rucksack to transport my system by public transport. The system case went on the bottom, on top of that the CRT monitor with the screen facing my back. Duct tape the lot of it to the rucksack frame, put keyboard, mouse, headset and extension cords into the side pockets and some spare clothes and bedding on top. Oh, and a shopping bag with food & drink supplies.

Just a pain when more rural people organized the LAN party a long way away from the nearest station/bus stop.

oh my insane goodness!!!! you're a hero man!
And how could you even fit the case inside the rucksack!!!??