Lanwar

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Lanwar

Date	Quarterly
Location	Louisville, KY
First occurence	Lanwar 1 - April 24, 1998
Last occurence	Lanwar 40 - January 19-20, 2008

Lanwar Inc. hosts professional gaming conventions across America. Its unofficial slogan "Keeping the Party in Lanparty" signifies what its events try to accomplish. The events started as LAN parties located in Louisville, Kentucky. From 2006 to 2007, it expanded and subcontracted as the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) coordinator for the World Series of Video Games. The World Series of Video Games utilizes Lanwar to help coordinate, support and implement BYOC LANs across the United States for their events. (As a note for this article, "Lanwar Inc." refers to the company, and "Lanwar" refers to the Louisville event.)

[edit] Lanwar LAN Events

Lanwar Inc. has been running LAN parties since 1998. It started as a joint effort between multiple United Parcel Service (UPS) IT workers (John Maggio, Brian Minrath, Gary Collins and Troy Schwartz) who wanted to create a large LAN event to play games, amongst other social activities.

The location of the Lanwar events has consistently been the Student Activities Center at the University of Louisville. This site was selected mainly due to its large amount of floor space and available power.

While the events started off as pure LAN gaming events, several other genres of gaming have been tried over the years, including arcade, board and card games. In 2002, the director of Lanwar Inc. (Troy Schwartz) and his staff decided to create an even larger event which would rival LANs in other countries (such as DreamHack). Thus MillionManLan was born as an annual event (which took the place of the summer quarterly Lanwar event).

[edit] MillionManLan

The MillionManLan is an event held in Louisville, Kentucky, once every year. It is currently on its sixth year. Because Lanwar Inc. is located in Louisville, the event coordinators needed a hall which would adequately allow for expansion and addition of more gamers and an overall larger event. Thus the space chosen was the Kentucky Exposition Center, with over 330,000 square feet of available space. Because of this, MillionManLan is able to provide one of the largest venues for BYOC LAN gaming in the United States.

[edit] Lanwar Extracurriculars

Lanwar has separated itself from the typical LAN party by placing an emphasis on other fun activities in addition to competitive gaming. Duct Tape Wars, Tank Wars, Egg Drops, Speed Tests, Case Mod Contests, Texas Hold 'em Poker, Rock Paper Scissors, Jousting tournaments, Tug of War contests, and a host of smaller "For Fun Only" computer tournaments have all been a large part of the event's atmosphere. At most Lanwar events, there are as many gamers who participate in these types of events as those who participate in serious competitive gaming tournaments. This focus provides an event that appeals to multiple types of gamers. Schwartz, Troy. Lanwar Event Stats 2006-2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-17.

[edit] Coverage

Being one of the largest LAN parties in the country, Lanwar and MML have both been covered by many sources in the gaming community. ¹ ² ³.

Since its inception in 1998, Lanwar has hosted over 35 large-scale events for the national gaming community. Lanwar holds multiple events each year, seating over 15,000 gamers since 2001. USA Today, CBS, NBC, FOX, Slashdot, Tom's Hardware Guide and others have all featured Lanwar events.