Socially marginalized kids were partying too. The only difference was, we weren’t invited to the “cool” parties. These days, there’s definitely a lot less partying overall.

as a socially marginalized kid in those days, I ended up banding together with other sm kids and we had our own parties.

If playing D&D is partying, I was partying nearly every Friday night. Went to one party party in my time in high school. Did not care for it.

We called em LAN parties

I partied when i was young, never DnD'd nor LAN'd. Now in my thirties I DnD and LAN, party not so much :)

There's a lot of overlap at the LAN parties that I go to lol.

Me and my nerd friends had LAN parties in somebody's garage etc. I really miss those sometimes.

When its snacks and BS while everyone gets hooked up and gets files off the local share to install SC2 for the nth time. It would take hours to get set up. Then more hours of play. We'd go for 10 to 12 hours sometimes, just to get things working.

This was one reason why my crowd loved the Xbox for lan parties. Just make sure everyone bringing an Xbox had whatever game, only needed one box/TV per four friends, and the autoconfig networking meant all you needed is a switch to get a few of them taking on LAN easily. Plug everything in and you're good to go with a crowd.

If by SC2 you mean Star Craft 2, that's a bit too recent for me. We used to play Quake 2, Red Alert, Diablo 2.

Ironically, these are still the best games for a LAN party. I set up a fleet of old cheap computers running Linux, loaded with all these offline and now open-source games. We had a blast and ended up playing mostly Quake 3 until about 4-5am.

We couldn't play any modern games, because every single person at the party would have had to have a Steam account or some license to the game, and have to log into it on my computers, then sign out when they were done... what a bunch of garbage. Nobody had their Steam passwords on hand.

With Quake3, you could sit down on any free machine and jump into a game instantly. I was also really surprised because some computers had the "official" Quake 3 purchased from Steam on Windows (friends who brought their own computers), some had the open source Quake 3 engine running on Linux, and some had official Linux clients... and they all worked together flawlessly.

Red Alert was a favorite. Unreal Tournament: GOTYE was another. Also AOE2. I still play AOE2 with friends occasionally.

Did the "cool" parties really exist?

Like, a movie party looks impossibly cool due to scripting and choreography.

Well, not all of us.

I was the 'coming-of-age-in-the-late 90s' teen and went to exactly 1 party. And it wasn't even the backup party, it was the cool kids' party. Outside of that I hung out with close friends and that was enough, I wasn't interested in parties.

I never went to parties like this. I wasn't socially marginalized, I just wasn't one of the popular kids. Popularity at my school was closely tied with wealth and family status. A relatively tiny group of people lived this sort of life.

Popularity is also so subjective.

I look back at high school and see several popular groups. Did one rise above the others? Not in an obvious way.

Like you said: some were from wealthier families, some were the athletes and their groupies (no surprise). But I went to parties of all shapes and sizes - some in those groups I just mentioned and some in other groups. Didn’t really matter that there was a premier group of socialites.

We just had our own parties for our social group. Not as many pretty girls and alcohol stolen from parents but still a good time.

Then when the popular kids were bored occasionally they'd end up at our shindigs

Were any of the popular girls physically unattractive? I doubt it. Popular boys can be popular without good looks, but it usually requires lots of money or great humour (class clown) or skill in a popular sport like American football or basketball. Look at a few "visually appealing" Instagram accounts. That will show you what basic popularity looks like, extended from high school.

> the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having

What do you mean exactly by the distinction between "socially marginalized" and "socially active"?

There was a social hierarchy where some kids were considered "popular" and others "unpopular", though really the distinction was more accurately between the beautiful/attractive kids and the average/unattractive kids, and certainly the unattractive kids did not get invited to the parties of the attractive kids, but the unattractive kids had plenty of parties among themselves, to which the attractive kids were usually not invited either.

Perhaps there were some kids who were truly marginalized, with no friends at all, but unattractiveness by itself did not necessarily marginalize you socially.

I never went to parties in high school, but based on my experience going to parties in college and as an adult, I imagine your individual experience at the parties would be very different depending on your social groups, social skills, and so on.

Although even as a non-participant, witnessing a party first-hand would be more informative than the filtered version you get from Hollywood.