JfL or Just for Laughs started way back in the mid-2000’s. We were playing Team Fortress Classic and early Counter-Strike 1.4! We later developed into playing CS 1.6, and even later CS:Source. Competing in then Enemy Down Leagues.
We weren’t all that great, and as our name suggests, mostly a bunch of friends and mates who just enjoyed playing, and wanted to see how well we could do in a competitive environment.
Through various LAN parties and gathers of JfL Members, the founders, nEo, Milhouse, and Delphi decided to see if we could pull off running our own LAN party for the JfL Members. With the groups combined experience of networking PC’s and building dedicated servers, we hosted our first JfL-LAN with 8 JfL Members in attendance. Mostly went off without a hitch, and a ridiculous weekend of gaming and socialising happened. Once we had eventually recovered from this, we decided this was achievable more regularly. So we duly held JfL-LAN’s 2, 3, and 4 in fairly quick succession with a peak of 14 people attending.
Then came the dizzying heights of our 5th LAN attempt. We had started building a bit of a community up and knew we could expand our LAN’s to accommodate more people, if we could source the venue. We found one place. A place some of the JfL members had been before, Ye Olde Jug & Glass. A small pub in a little town called Edwinstowe in Nottinghamshire. With several months of prep work for the event, including a day trip some of us took to thoroughly scout out the place and make sure we could definitely do what we wanted. We setup a booking system on our website for a maximum of 30 people! That’s right. We were confident we could happily double our attendance.
This was all going well, and on schedule, until we received communication from the pub owner saying that due to local circumstances, he had to close up the pub with immediate effect; about 3 weeks before we were due to have our LAN. JfL-LAN 5 never happened. Refunds were issues, and JfL then became more of a social gaming community.
Most of us still talk and play games together. The recent pandemic of COVID-19 has lead to more people playing games again while people have been out of work for various reasons, and has given me a good reason to reboot the ol’ community site.
JfL still lives on in many games as clans, guilds, squadrons, Discord channels, etc.
Our website is mostly a new aggregator that is pulling all the latest PC and tech news from a variety of sources around the internet into 1 convenient place. Suggestions always welcome via our Contact Page, or our Discord Server.
A couple of our founders, nEo and Delphi can sometimes be found streaming their more recent activities over on Twitch, and if you wanted to drop us a follow, we would really appreciate it and we look forward to chatting to you all!