I want this house. I want to live there, I want to game there. I want to be able to invite my friends over and tell them “I live here. Pretty epic, isn’t it?”
Let’s back up a bit.
LAN parties are pretty awesome, aren’t they? You get to gain bragging rights through victory, show off your gaming rigs, and generally just have a blast with some good friends. What’s not so awesome is how much of a hassle it can be to get things set up. Everybody has to haul their computers to one place, LAN cables are necessary for anyone who doesn’t have wireless, there’s space concerns, and after everything’s said and done, there’s a chance your connection won’t support everyone’s system.
Kenton Varda, a Google software engineer, feels your pain. He feels it so acutely that he designed an entire house around the idea of hassle-free LAN games. Now, at first glance, the house doesn’t really look like much…until you look a bit closer.
Twelve fold-out PC stations-consisting of a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor are split between two rooms. Each individual station is connected to a gaming rig housed in the house’s server room- yes, Varda’s house has a server room. These twelve computers are, in turn, all connected to a central server which hosts master disks of all the most commonly played titles for the purpose of synchronizing updates.
No word on what sort of hardware the systems are running- Varda said he tried to balance performance and price, and that’s all he’d say about them- but there’s a good chance they’re pretty beefy. After all, this guy designed the house for gaming. It’d be a crying shame if the systems he bought weren’t useful for it.
The house also features two large TVs connected myriad game consoles, security cameras and motion detectors to deter break-ins, and custom software that lets Varda send pictures and updates to his email and stream live video of their gaming. Oh, his dad helped too- Richard Varda designed the living areas of the house.
In the future, Varda said he’s hoping to add an audio system that incorporates the whole house, solar panels and a DDR system.
Jealous yet?
COMMENTS