About Us

Our Mission

To build community events where people can network, develop meaningful friendships, and create lifelong memories. To create a place where volunteers grow concrete career skills and put them to the test in real-world situations. To use our unique experience and talents to raise money from untapped sources, so that we don’t divert donations away from other charities. And to celebrate our shared love of gaming, technology, and the friends we’ve met pursuing it.

Our Motivation

Laclede’s LAN started with a group of high school friends that liked to sit around and dream of putting together a LAN party with over 50 people – instead of going to college classes.

Over time, the small fifteen-person events swelled into twenty, and then thirty, until they eventually grew larger than the dream itself. The staff grew too, as gamers grew interested in what Laclede’s LAN was trying to do and offered to join. It wasn’t long before Laclede’s LAN became the largest LAN in the Saint Louis area, offering the best tournaments, the best prizes, and the strongest sense of community and fun.

After a several-year break, Laclede’s LAN started 2014 with a new focus. Several of the staff had gone on to start careers in technical fields, and wanted to help others find their future jobs. Laclede’s LAN is now a non-profit organization that focuses on supporting STEM education throughout the Saint Louis area. For more information about our history check out the blog post History of Laclede's LAN

Laclede’s LAN is a community. Staff members may change, new games will come out, and computers will be rebuilt and replaced. But at its heart, Laclede’s LAN will always be the same: a group of people who love games enough to sacrifice an entire weekend, lug a fifty pound computer hundreds of miles, and subsist for days on caffeine and sugar alone.

Laclede’s LAN is our tribute to everything that PC gaming can be, and our way of giving back to the city that helped us find it.

A PC Gaming Tradition

Everyone knows that gaming with friends is better than gaming alone. The laughs are louder, the competition more invigorating, and the victories so much sweeter. A LAN party is the act of gaming with friends taken to its zenith; we take entire days out of our schedules just to see how much fun we can possibly have in one sitting, and how many of our friends we can cram into a basement or a convention hall. And at LL, we put considerable effort into getting it right. We want to have a knowledgeable, friendly staff. We want to have tournaments that people love to compete in, and prizes worth fighting for. We want to have just enough of a sense of humor and adventure to try new things, but enough professionalism and attention to detail to do it better than anyone else. We want to adjust and improve with each change, and we need your help!

LL isn’t just for competitive gamers or tournament players either; every attendee gets entered to win awesome prizes from our prize stash, all donated by our sponsors. Gamer cases, video cards, gaming mice, keyboards, and sometimes even full PCs or gaming chairs can be found on our prize table!

Never been to a BYOC LAN Party?

Check out the LAN Party survival guide.

Our Team

Here are some of the people that make up Laclede’s LAN’s core team. All Laclede’s LAN agents, staff members, and volunteers are unpaid.