I had a friend with multiple PCs, so all we'd need to do is show up. He worked at a computer store or something (I think Circuit City), so he had discounts or something. We'd bring the pizza and whatnot and he'd provide the computers.

That was less cool when I got older, so we instead brought consoles to each other's houses. I remember having Halo LAN parties where we'd connect two systems in different rooms and do red vs blue battles. Between the rooms, we'd have a table with pizza where we'd talk between matches and sometimes redo the teams. It was super fun despite having a pretty big skill gap.

At one of my jobs, we'd play OG Starcraft on our office LAN as well. We'd all be in the same room, but not about to see each other's computers, so it worked out pretty well.

That just doesn't exist anymore, except maybe on the Switch, and I'm not sure if anyone actually does anything like that these days (I'm not old with kids).