Update November 22, 2024: Kenton Varda reached out over email to offer clarification. He explained that the LAN party house was not the result of renovation on an existing property, but a totally new construction.
He says, "We in fact built the house from scratch starting from an empty lot, and the '7-digit number' mentioned on the site was the cost of the whole project."
Original story November 20, 2024: Some people dream of a life working the land, while others fantasise about running away to a commune. For others, the big thing occupying their thought bubble is a LAN party house. Few achieve this nostalgic dream, making do with the distance of modern online play. But then few are software engineer Kenton Varda and his wife, the entrepreneur Jade Wang, who together have built a house that embodies the dream (via TechSpot).
After first moving their family to Austin, Texas in 2019 in part to be closer to their respective teams at Cloudflare, the pair embarked on additional construction from 2021 to 2023. In some ways, the house is very much a family project; besides both Kenton and Jade's contributions, the project's lead architect was Richard Varda, Kenton's father.
The result is a family home "optimized for LAN parties," complete with a total of 22 high-end gaming rigs, miles of managed cable, and even a hidden Dance Dance Revolution dancefloor.
So, what are they playing in this private LAN castle? According to the project's official website, primarily cooperative games to ensure a fun meet for all players, as not every regular attendee is a hardcore gamer.
Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2's Mann vs. Machine mode, and even Overwatch— "back when it was good" —used to be the go-to's, but apparently the reigning favourite for the last five years has been none other than Deep Rock Galactic. Rock and stone, baby!
Alright, let's talk tech. All 22 of the 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 of the machines up to date a doddle, but new games only need to be installed once to the disk image for the entire fleet to be able to play. Each machine gets their own copy-on-write overlay so LAN party guests can make adjustments to their individual set up without these being shared across the group.
As for what's under the hood of the machines themselves, each one features a Gigabyte Windforce RTX 4070 and two sticks of 16 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5600 RAM. With a fairly respectable Intel Core i5 13600KF CPU too, it's not the most bleeding edge flotilla, though that's purposefully so in order to "to stay just under the inflection point where high-end price gouging sets in."
As you may already suspect, the entire project cost an astronomical amount of money. As though housing isn't already a life-altering expense (the details of which Varda and Wang have not disclosed beyond saying the Austin property cost a seven-digit amount), the hardware for all of those gaming PCs—including cables, keyboards, monitors, and so on—cost an additional $75,000 on top. Custom cabinetry houses the hardware throughout, some of which features a swish fold away design, and this "cost a similar amount to the computers powering them." Though no total cost figure has been disclosed, it's safe to say it's likely in the region of a million dollars.
But they have clearly thought of everything, and not just from a LAN-optimised standpoint, either, as it's also a functional family home, replete with multiple "cat restrooms". Yes, really.
This isn't Kenton's only stab at the LAN party house idea, with a property in Palo-Alto, California serving as a sort of first draft back in 2011. This earlier house was also a collaboration with Richard Varda, the accomplished designer behind the new house but also The Kingdom Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as well as The Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Though still impressive, at about 1400 square feet it wasn't the right house for the family to also call home, and Kenton has since sold this earlier build.
