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07.14.07 - Doog

The story of what is known today as Whempys LAN Parties starts about 1996, during the class of 2000's freshman year at DeSales in Columbus, Ohio. Basically, I met Justin Reed (TheOverseer) during Slupski's 6th period world history and found out he was into computers as much as I was.

Our first official lan party was at Jon Ambrose's (DragonKP), it consisted of Jon, Justin, Brewer (Brewg0d), and myself. Our assets were a d-link 5 port hubby, our computers, Whempy's IBM that mysteriously got into Justins car for brew, and a rr connection. Wasnt even enough room for my computer, so I set my computer up on Jon's bed. It was pretty fun beating up on the internet boys a bit in CS with our lan communications, Justin got the gaming nick name "farmer" cause he always bought that damn shotgun. I admit, it was a really, really rough setup, but it was really fun.

News of our lan party spread throughout DeSales, our friends, and their friends. We grew slowly, but surely through the end of senior year. Eventually, we gained a core group of normal attendees, which made the bigger parties possible. The german exchange student swore we were camping in TFC. Kowalski flew the super sheep to the Delta Quadrant before realizing he has to steer it, only to come about 1 foot away from beating Justin at worms. People who made every effort to attend these early parties is who I really credit with the success with the lan party, Justin and me were simply keeping the pace. When we got to Whempys Fireplace Shoppe, and later on the Warehouse that we use now we were having sizable parties, 10-15 people normally. Me and Justin were learning a lot as we went, the advantages of switches over hubs, the best way to set up the network, we sure did come a long way even then. Hell I remember when we were asking people on IRC the day of the first "shop" party how to uplink hubs. Then there was the "dirty dozen"....

The Dirty Dozen, as Mark Kelley(Tyrant) called them, were a bunch of new faces showing up at the same party, it effectively doubled our numbers and was really the test to see if we knew what we were doing, or if we were wasting our time. Fortunately, it was a fairly successful party, we picked up a few more regulars and some much needed lessons on orgainization. If there ever was a "test of might" for 2 guys throwing a lan party, this would be it. This is the party which changed everything.

The 2001-2002 era of Whempys has some extremely fond memories for me. I was busy with my racetrack and it was a very relaxing to show up and hang out with everyone. Since I didn't really go to college or anything, this was really my only time being around people in this setting, and it was great. I believe it was August of 2001, but I remember the first time Gunslinger came to broadcast the lan matches on Gamecast... that was awesome. I also remember when we tried to copy Red Alert 2 (Sorry Westwood, I know I am the cause of your sellout!) and when I put the burned disc in Nate's computer it said "Warning, Millitary software detected" We both looked at each other with a worried look, and clicked “Install.” The compuer said something to the effect of “Enter encryption key, you have 30 seconds to comply”…Then Nate promptly freaked out and shut off his computer!

We had another huge influx of people showing up every month. It was probably a consistant 70. As a result of this, Justin, Brewer, and I needed to get some help running things. We got some of the veteran attendees to help, namely Woody, Kelley and Davis, as well as getting Gary(Eboe) on board. Woody ran the tournaments, Kelley handled troubleshooting for the attendees (a huge benefit to coming to lan parties), Davis helped out with the tournaments and looked over the free food provided by Whempy. Eboe was doing sponsorships and doing a really good job getting us prizes.

We caught someone’s attention, because Whempys was featured in the Columbus Dispatch connect section. Shawn Sines (lrdapoc) did a story on the LAN parties. After this, the LAN grew again. 100+ computer parties became the norm, topping out at 115 max.

The parties continued like this for 2 years, to keep up, we added 4 more administrators, namely Travis(Hyperactive), Mike(Oxey), Emil(Retarp), and Shawn. During this time, we also made major upgrades to the network infrastructure and made the whole process easier. Also, we bought a projector to display the matches (we had been barrowing one before) which also gave us a unique sort of atomosphere.

Speaking of the atomosphere, I have been to LAN parties from the 250+ range to the 3 guys in a basement range, and I have never seen the atmosphere of Whempys quite matched. First of all, we established long ago that amplified speakers were OK (a big deal apparently) and that explosions, bullet reports, death screams and the occasional “Oh $hit” out of a players mouth were all a part of the “Whempys Experience” that and the fact we randomize our tournaments and its more for fun than competition, makes us unique. Being unique is what keeps people coming back.

Sometime after this, we were contacted by Dave The Loli-Pop King who at the time worked for Tom’s hardware. He became a regular attendee and we got some pretty high profile publicity with AMD, and in fact Dave Makin himself showed up to one of our parties. This kept the numbers up, however some of the older veterans did not like the direction the party was going, prize oriented and what not. So while we kept the numbers up, we also lost some of the older attendees.

After doing this for 5 years, you get a little burned out. That, combined with the facts that we lost a great deal of the early lan goers and that Justin had other more important responsibilities, led to the event of the reins being passed to Brenden(Omega) and virtually all the admins were replaced. The current staff is comprised of a few long time veterans of the event, such as Omega, and the two Pats. It also has people who came in in the middle and became hooked, such as Ethan(Lycwolf) and Damon(DarkCat)… and of course we picked up some new guys, like Chris_F, Bill(Thorne) and Clay(Osufan). Recently Woody has come back as the Competition Director and so far has done a pretty good job so far getting intrest back.

It has been discussed amongst the Admins for quite some time now that we are a bit disappointed in the numbers that show, but what I keep reminding them is that its quality over quantity, and that growing too big too fast is a very bad thing. If you look at what this party has been through and you compare it to others that have LONG since died out or have been forgotten about completely… I am pretty proud to call myself a founder of this organization, and I will never forget the great friendships I have made because of it. This party was started as a group of friends from high school, and as long as the party is based off friendship and fun first and foremost, I don’t see an end for quite some time.

Sometime in 2002 - Justin

Our LAN party group officially started in the winter of 1999. Doog, BrewG0D, and the0verseer all hauled their computers over to DragonKP's house to network some Counterstrike. The party was limited to DragonKP's room, where we were so cramped that doog actually had to set up his computer up on a bed. At this party there were no tournaments or even a lot of competition, just 4 friends who liked to game. Back at this time none of us were very network savvy, so there were occasional times when the network was down and we couldn't even figure out how to share his cable modem connection. The next 3 parties were held at The0verseer's house because he already had a network setup throughout his house, even though these parties were largely confined to his basement. As our parties expanded, we needed more room to hold them, so we began to hold them at Whempys Corporation (formerly on High Street). During this time of expansion other participants wanted to get more involved by holding the parties at their houses. This was very unsuccessful because of the limited room available inside of houses. At the end of 2000, Whempys Corporation began renting a decent sized warehouse in Columbus, right next to Worthington in Ohio. Because of all the floor space, this quickly became ideal location to hold LAN parties. Since we have been at Whempys Warehouse, we have started acquiring sponsorships and greatly upgrading all of our network equipment to become 100% switchable at 10/100mbps.