I played Unreal Tournament 99 in a garage in rural Washington

There's nothing like driving 2 hours to the hills outside of Centralia to play UT99 for 6 or 7 hours and then sleeping in someone's RV. 

Earlier this month I went to the same place for a weekend "Friend Fair" that my friends will host once in a while that sees about 50-60 camp out on their property. This one was a bit smaller with about 20 or so people and 12 people all playing at once. UT99 is old enough that it'll play on anything, and it's free thanks to OldUnreal. 

I never played UT99 seriously, by the time I got into PC gaming UT2k4 was out and the main thing lan parties focused on, that was until COD2 came out and other bullshit. Now that's 20 years in the rearview mirror and people don't get together to play games anymore...until NOW that is.

I really like that a few people have carried the torch of UT99 and 2K4. I ported a skin from Fortnite to UT2K4 using the incredibly old Milkshape3D. 

UT99's maps are all pretty clausterphobic and hard to navigate, a non-trivial amount of time in the game is spent trying to figure out where the objective is or where other players are and then blasting them when you do find them. Capture The Flag and Assault modes are difficult due to how hard it is to find your way around these maps. but get easier with multiple playthroughs.

Assault mode is pretty novel, each map has "objectives" like "Open a door" then "Blow up this thing" and the other team has to defend. They are pretty short and take about 5 minutes, but get creative. One map takes place in an underwater base that you have to swim to. Another takes place on a moving train that you have to make your way to the front of. It felt kind of creative. 

The weapons all do different things, and also have an alt-fire which does something different, so the player has access to a lot of projectiles and explosives. Nothing feels overpowered except for maybe the instant-kill if you get a headshot sniper rifle which I got surprisingly good at. 

Anyway LAN parties. Much more romantic and memorable than logging onto a discord chat and then waiting in a queue IMO. You play until everyone decides to take a break and play begins and ends and starts again naturally. People share snacks and drinks. Used to be that you had to spend a lot of money on a fast computer to run the latest stuff and now everything runs at max settings on garbage ewaste laptops. It's fantastic. Really feels like living in a post scarcity society.  

Anyway highly encourage the reader to go to OldUnreal and get UT99 or UT2k4 and play a little bit with friends.