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Some people dream of a life working on the farm, others of escaping to a commune. For others, the most crucial thing occupying their thought bubble is the LAN party house. Few achieve this nostalgic dream, content with the distance that newfangled online gaming provides. But few are software engineer Kenton Varda and his wife, entrepreneur Jade Wang, who built together a house that embodies a dream (By TechSpot).
After the family first moved to Austin, Texas in 2019, in part to be closer to their teams at Cloudflare, the couple began additional construction in 2021-2023. In some ways, the house is very much a family project; in addition to Kenton and Jade’s contributions, the lead architect on the project was Richard Varda, Kenton’s father. The result is a family home”Optimized for LAN parties”, including 22 high-end gaming sets, miles of managed cables, and even a hidden Dance Dance Revolution dance floor.
So what are they playing in this private LAN castle? By design official websiteprimarily cooperative games to ensure that all players have fun, as not every regular participant is an avid gamer. Left 4 Dead 2, Mann vs. mode Machine in Team Fortress 2 and even Overwatch – “when things were good” – were favorites, but clearly the dominant favorite for the last five years has been none other than Deep Rock Galaxy. Rock and stone, baby!
Okay, let’s talk technology. All 22 gaming PCs boot from the same network drive, so each can be maintained using the same disk image. This means that not only is it a breeze to keep all your machines up to date, but new games only need to be installed once on a disk image for your entire fleet to play. Each machine gets its own copy-on-write overlay, so LAN party guests can make changes to their individual configuration without having to share them with the entire group.
As for what’s under the hood of the machines themselves, each packs a Gigabyte Windforce RTX 4070 card and two 16GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5600 RAM. Considering the pretty decent Intel Core i5 13600KF processor, this isn’t a cutting-edge flotilla , although this was done deliberately to “stay just below the inflection point where the price spike for high-end products begins.”
As you can already guess, the entire project cost an astronomical amount of money. As if housing wasn’t already a life-changing expense (Varda and Wang didn’t divulge details other than that the Austin property costs a seven-figure sum), the hardware for all those gaming PCs – including cables, keyboards, monitors, and so on – cost an additional $75,000 dollars. The custom cabinets house all the equipment, some of which is quickly assembled, and that “costs a similar amount to the computers that power them.” While no total cost has been revealed, it’s safe to say it will likely be around $1 million.
However, they have clearly thought of everything, and not just from a LAN-optimized point of view, as it is also a functional family home, full of many “cat toilets”. Yes, really.
This isn’t Kenton’s only attack on the LAN party house idea, which the Palo-Alto, California property serves as a kind of first project from 2011. This earlier house was also created in collaboration with Richard Varda, the distinguished designer of the novel house, but also with the Kingdom Center in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, and the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. While still impressive, at approximately 1,400 square feet, it was not the right house for the family to call home, and Kenton has since sold this earlier version.
