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A couple spends nearly $1,000,000 making their family’s Texas home ‘LAN party optimized’ and the result is pretty amazing

Online Niel November 21, 2024

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A modern — (Image credit: Kenton Varda and Jade Wang, Lanparty.house)

Some people dream of a life working the land, while others fantasize about running away to a commune. For others, the biggest thing on their mind is a LAN party house. Few realize this nostalgic dream, settling for the distance of modern online gaming. But then few are software engineer Kenton Varda and his wife, entrepreneur Jade Wang, who together built a house that embodies the dream (by TechSpot).

After first moving their family to Austin, Texas in 2019, in part to be closer to their respective teams at Cloudflare, the pair engaged in additional construction from 2021 to 2023. In some ways, the home is in measure a family project; in addition to Kenton and Jade’s contributions, the principal architect of the project was Richard Varda, Kenton’s father. The result is a family home”optimized for LAN parties,” complete with a total of 22 state-of-the-art gaming platforms, miles of managed cable, and even a hidden Dance Dance Revolution dance floor.

So what are they playing in this private LAN castle? According to the project official websiteprimarily cooperative games to ensure a fun encounter for all players, as not every regular participant is a hardcore gamer. Left 4 Dead 2 Mann vs. Mode Team Fortress 2’s Machine and even Overwatch — “back when it was good” — were regulars, but it seems the favorite for the past five years has been none other than Deep. Rock Galactic. Rock and stone, baby!

Okay, let’s talk about technology. All 22 gaming PCs boot from the same network drive, allowing each to be maintained using the same disk image. This means that not only is keeping all the machines up to date a problem, but new games only need to be installed once on the disc image for the entire fleet to play. Each machine gets its own copy-on-write overlay, so LAN party guests can make adjustments to their individual configuration without them being shared with the entire group.

As for what’s under the hood of the machines themselves, each has a Gigabyte Windforce RTX 4070 and two 16GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5600 RAM. Also, with a fairly respectable Intel Core i5 13600KF processor, it’s not the most modern of the fleet, although that’s intended to “stay just below the inflection point where peak price increases set in.”

As you can probably already guess, the whole project cost an astronomical amount of money. As if housing isn’t already a life-changing expense (which Varda and Wang didn’t disclose other than to say the Austin property cost a seven-figure sum), the hardware for all those PCs games—including cables, keyboards, monitors, and so on—cost an additional $75,000. Custom cabinets house the hardware everywhere, some of which have a foldable design, and this “costs a similar amount to the computers that power them.” While no total cost figure has been revealed, it’s safe to say it’s probably around a million dollars.

But they’ve clearly thought of everything, and not just from a LAN-optimized point of view, as it’s also a functional family home, complete with multiple “cat toilets”. Yes, indeed.

This isn’t Kenton’s only stab at LAN’s party house idea, with a property in Palo-Alto, Calif., serving as kind of a first draft from 2011. This previous home was also a collaboration with Richard Varda, the accomplished designer behind the new home, as well as The Kingdom Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as well as the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. While still impressive, at about 1,400 square feet it wasn’t the right family home, either, and Kenton sold that earlier build.

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A couple spends nearly $1,000,000 making their family’s Texas home ‘LAN party optimized’ and the result is pretty amazing

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A couple spends nearly $1,000,000 making their family’s Texas home ‘LAN party optimized’ and the result is pretty amazing

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