A week ago I attended the 10th annual Netbyte lan-party on sourthern Sealand, Denmark! Under the preperations for the lan party I raised the suggestion to have a competition in Team Fortress 2. This was turned down with the reason that "young gamers only want to play popular games".

At first this seemed true, as the most played games on the first day of the event were Call of Duty 4, Battlefield 2, Counter Strike, Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars and World of Warcraft.

During the second day of the event, however, we were a couple of people that started talking about back when we started to "lan". We all agreed that THE best game back then was Delta Force 2. This put us all in the sentimental mood, and soon hereafter we were playing it together. A few of the youngsters looked with interest on this old, pixelated game, and soon we were a couple of players on each team. We decided to follow up on this game with Rune: Halls of Valhalla. In the start only old gamers were playing, but it didn't take long until the server had 25 players, most of which were playing for the first time.... and they were LOVING it. This trend lasted through a couple of other abaondon-ware game, to our amazement.

So now we will soon start planning next years Netbyte, and I can already now say that it will most certainly have an Abandonware-afternoon!