46
LAN (local area network) games
(programming.dev)
Most multiplayer PC games before 2010ish.
Can you name them from your memory please?
Warcraft 2/3, Starcraft, Halo 1, Command and Conquer 1/2/3. Red Alert 1/2. Battlefield 1942, 1943, 2, Vietnam, 2142. Joint Ops. Doom 1,2, Quake 1/2,3, Unreal Tournament 1/2004. Farcry 1/2, Crysis 1, Burnout, Half-Life 1/2, Couterstrike 1.6/Source/GO. TeamFortress 1/2. Worms Armageddon. Soldat 1/2. Armegetron. Any Source Mods. Minecraft. Age of Empires 1/2/3. Age of Mythology. Neverwinter Nights. GTA 2. OpenTTD, Factorio, Terraria, ARMA 1/2/3. Left 4 Dead 1/2. Killing Floor 1. Call of Duty 1/2/4. Viscera Cleanup Detail, Magicka 1. etc etc
Worth mentioning that some of these earlier titles were built for IPX networking, which is no longer supported by modern operated systems. I get the impression OP is asking for games with LAN gaming supporting to get recommendations, so I feel it's important to make sure they or others checking lists like this one understand they may need to go through some hoops to get some of these titles to work with a modern machine.
Holy shit, I had forgotten about SOLDAT. My friends and I used to play that on the library computers in middle school.
IIRC it had a portable version that you could boot from a flash drive. Or at least the installation happened on your local user account, so it didn’t require admin rights from the school IT team.
Also, the old Dungeon Siege games. IIRC, 1 and 2 both had LAN multiplayer, where each person took control of a different character. It was basically the groundwork for the gameplay that Dragon Age Origins built upon.
Bless you mentioning some greats. It brings back memories.
Co-Optimus is a great resource for this.
Here's their database with a filter showing all PC games that support LAN play:
This list is the way to go. My last Lan party was about 17 years back but there is one golden rule, which is still more important than anything else: pick a game no one has played or one that everybody is familiar with! The biggest fun killers are unbalanced teams and matches. Despite that, we liked the first flat out game which now should be wreckfest and strangely enough a soccer mod for CS:S back then.
Skill issue.
Thank you so much!
Factorio doesn't give a fuck and will let you play with up to 254 other people on the same server. Most survival crafting games have LAN, as a matter of fact. Somehow this is the only genre that will hold developers accountable on a regular basis and make them hurt for not having LAN and player-controlled servers. Not all of them will, but most will offer LAN.
All of Larian's recent RPG efforts have LAN and direct IP connections: Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2, and Baldur's Gate 3.
Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the entire Borderlands series (outside of the GOTY edition of Borderlands 1) support LAN, surprisingly, if you want to get your loot game on.
Is Recharge RC the same as the upcoming Unreal engine racing game Recharge? If they don't have the same lineage, they've at least got similar inspirations.
Warside is an upcoming turn-based strategy game inspired by (or ripping off wholesale?) Advance Wars, and it's got LAN in its features list.
Streets of Rogue is an all-timer in the co-op roguelike department, and it too supports LAN.
A game that I download and install on a regular basis in the freeware realm is Armagetron. It's the light cycles from Tron but in an open source LAN game. It doesn't exactly have a ton of depth, but it's good fun for about an hour every couple of years.
I imagine Minecraft played a large part in popularizing the concept of a player hosted server for survival games. It's possible that the reason this genre in specific has so many titles where you can do this is because players coming from or otherwise largely influenced by Minecraft see this as a requirement if not just the standard, so devs wanting to appeal to these players may also see it as a standard/requirement.
Sure, but first person shooters always had LAN until they didn't. Console games always had split screen until they didn't. Those audiences largely let those features fall off in a way survival audiences didn't.
I self host satisfactory. It's going swimmingly.
Age of Empires 2 is awesome.
Also try 0ad for the people who like age of empires games. It's free and open source.
Anything with a server software you can host can be played on LAN (okay probably not some things because they're being weird but in general this is true).
That means counter strike, Minecraft, supertuxkart, xonotic, enshrouded, pal world, etc
Planetary Annihilation, Warcraft 3 (at least pre-reforged if you can get a hold of an old copy), Unreal Tournament, Killing Floor, Battle for Middle Earth (1 & 2), OpenTTD, Simutrans, Settlers: Heritage of Kings, some of the older Wolfenstien games, Battle for Wesnoth, Warzone 2100, Teeworlds, Widelands
Lethal Company is another example.
Doom 2
Oh, I'll add on to this one that Rainbow Six 1 and 3 have been some of the best co-op games I've ever played, and both have LAN. The second game isn't readily available for sale anymore. Even that first game involved editing a lot of level config files in order to circumvent bugs, but it was a great time.
Stardew Valley!
Most unrelated thread of the month!
So I'm playing games like age of empires. But also open source alternatives like 0ad using lan. Works great!
I'm talking the old school age of empires and age of mythology games btw.
Next, there are also good need for speed games like need for speed 3 hot pursuit from 1998. Which works very well via lan.
Maybe red alert also works, or open source alternatives like OpenRA. And then we have games like Planetary annihilation, which also have lan feature.
Farcry 1 and 2 have Lan support.
Diablo and Diablo 2 (not Resurrected)
I think Diablo 2 even came with an extra disc specifically so you could give it to your friend to play via LAN. Then these fuckers removed the option in Resurrected even though they promised they wouldn't.
StarCraft and the old Warcraft games work via LAN as well.
Quake, Doom, Unreal (Tournament), Half Life
DosBox
Well I'm not sure exactly where this may fall, but I play a very wide library of games over LAN on my KVM. Emulators from the NES era all the way up to PS3 and nintendo switch. I also can play my whole steam library, all from a convenient launcher called EmulationStation (desktop edition)
The KVM is connected to my Linux PC over its own individual Ethernet wire to the living room TV. It works great and can do 4K and has zero latency problems (at least none that I can notice)
The older Tribes titles if you're into classic arena shooters. Tribes 2 had some maps and modes that were more Battlefield-esque too. The old Age of series were excellent LAN games as well (empires/mythology). These are PC titles and I'm not sure of your target platform.
Original Diablo or Diablo 2 (not sure about the latter though, haven't played it yet, lol)
Diablo II does support LAN and it’s one of my favorite games of all time.
The remaster, unfortunately, does not support LAN.
Stronghold, Stronghold: Crusader, Stronghold: legends and Stronghold 2 are all excellent for LAN games.
No clue if Stronghold 3 or Stronghold: Warlords support LAN.
Also I'd like to remark that Stronghold: Kingdoms is free-to-play pay-to-win trash, avoid it.
Minecraft bedrock works over lan, I enjoy playing with my brother. Not exactly pvp though...
So does Java Minecraft
I didn't see a way to set it up on Java without running a local server. Is there? I prefer Java, but it seemed like a lot of hours of work to get a server set up.
Yeah you play single player, pause, and hit "open to lan"
Then someone else can connect to lan by typing in the IP. I think it autodetects a lan connection that's already open, too, but it's been a bit since I've used it.
Oh yeah, I remember now. It wasn't registering the IP. But yeah there should be a way, I was just having technical issues with it.
You do need to forward the port in some routers.
Or connect via Ethernet cable and avoid the router, if possible.
But yeah, once any initial little hiccups are done, its actually very smooth, opening Minecraft takes longer.
Also that can turn on cheats in a world where cheats are disabled.
Escape, open to lan. autodetected by other Minecraft clients on the network and works modded without issues. You can enable cheats (or not) by default every time you open it again.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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