CherryPopper

I've been attending Gaming LAN's of all sizes from the small garage based Gaming LAN's of a few mates to the large events of 100+ gamers going at it all night ever since I discovered multiplayer PC gaming. Like most guys & gals my age we started with doom and some null modem cables for some fearsome 1 on 1 action. As networking became cheaper & easier to setup more games started to support it. While quake was fun, the game that kicked it all off for me and really got me hooked was Half-Life. Many many many hours of my uni life were spent playing deathmatch on the bounce map, 2Fort in Team Fortress Classic and in the early beta's of a HL mod called Counter-Strike. Of course the net back then in Australia was shit with just having dial up and the lack of local game servers the only way to get your MP fix was at a Gaming LAN of some sort.

I've lugged my gaming rig all over the place; from tin sheds in the middle of a paddock during winter with no heater and in-between CS rounds you would defrost your hands on the top of your CRT to the other side of Melbourne just to attend a new event Gaming LAN called Shafted. It was always about the fun in the competitive gaming that kept me coming back, prizes mean nothing compared to bragging rights amongst your peers. Being able to belittle them face to face and just have a good time, even when you were getting your ass kicked.

So from those humble beginnings you can start to see why I decided to get involved in running Gaming LAN events in Geelong. With a small group of gamers we decided to run our first event "Network Meltdown". We had a website in no time and word got around pretty quickly about the event. Since we were all Deakin Uni students we hit the uni up for a free venue which they gave us in the cafe part of the Waterfront campus. I was the only one with a job so I coughed up the cash needed for a 500m box of cat5e and power boards/leads. The network gear we begged, steeled & borrowed. So within 3 months we had our first event with 120 people and at our second event had close to 200!!!

I have no idea to this day how we pulled it off, we barely had enough knowledge to run a small network let alone one of that size. We were going all night hand crimping the network cables and some how they all worked, though in early ML events when they were used they didn't even come close to working.

After our first 4 successful Network Meltdown events the Ausgamers network was starting to form and we were invited to join. But due to a number of issues including the Network Meltdown admins fighting it fell though and so did the Network Meltdown Gaming LAN. After a year of no big gaming LAN's running in Geelong I decided to give it another go since I had all the gear just sitting there.

So began MonsterLAN. I approached two local smaller LAN's, AlphaLAN & PoVLAN to see if they would be interested in helping me out in running a larger event in Geelong. They agreed and so began MonsterLAN with our first event being held on 1st March 2003. Not many of the original admins remained for many reasons but Luke (Jolt Master) stuck around with me for the long haul. The current crew have made it a lot easier to run MonsterLAN and it would not have become the success it has without their dedication to the gaming scene.

And as they say... the rest is history