Back in the fall of 2002, while most students at Mizzou were busy studying, socializing, or figuring out how to microwave ramen without setting off the dorm fire alarm, future Laclede’s LAN founders Dickie and Dudsmack were itching to make some new friends. With their usual frag-crew still back in Saint Louis, they figured the best way to meet people was through the time-honored tradition of digital combat. No small talk, no awkward icebreakers—just pure, unfiltered fragging.
In late October, they launched a student club called The MIZZOU LAN Project and hastily cobbled together a website using Microsoft FrontPage 2000, hosted on IIS 6.0.
The first event kicked off in November, followed by a second (and final) in December. Both were held in a recently vacated office space on the top floor of Memorial Union. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was perfect: enough room for a dozen CRTs, a tangle of Ethernet cables, and the kind of camaraderie only forged through late-night headshots and shared patch files.
This was LAN in its rawest form:
- ❌ No internet
- ❌ No LCDs
- ❌ No Steam or digital storefronts
- ✅ Just 10baseT hubs that cost less than a pizza
- ✅ Games installed from physical disks (CDs and 3.5" floppies)
- ✅ Patches passed around like sacred scrolls over the local network
It was loud. It was scrappy. It was perfect. And it sparked an itch we couldn’t ignore—one we finally scratched again in 2004, with the first official Laclede’s LAN event.