I was lucky enough in the early 2000's where I could use my love of video games and lan parties as part of my job. I was responsible for the Flash community at Macromedia, and we would set up 4 xboxes with split screen for 8 player Halo 2 and 3 tournaments in conference rooms (which has multiple plasma screens already set up).

I quickly realized that we could use this to make friends in the broader community, so we bought a bunch of LCD monitors and pelican cases, and began to take our setup on the road to Flash conferences. During the day we would hang out at the conference, learn new programing / visual techniques and generally see super cool Flash stuff, and at night we would invite everyone over to our hotel room and then play Halo all night. We made so many friends and close contacts in the community through this, and it really help us meet a lot of people, and build strong, personal relationships.

I remember we were on a 6 week bus tour in North America doing events for Adobe AIR, and making a detour to NYC for the Halo 3 launch at at Best Buy. We then played on the bus all night long.

Here is a clip of me walking to the launch, so happy and singing about it being my Halo birthday (whatever that means!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVQKgui28O8

So many good times.