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.