The first network game of any import took place at the university (ECU) in 1997. Spidge and (whatever Shannon's nickname was) spent many hours at the labs at odds with some other students playing CivNet, WarCraft II, Quake and Diablo.
A few months later they began slaughtering me (Domgrief) in CivNet and WarCraft 2 as well. Somehow by stroke of luck I managed to win a couple of War2 games, though.
As time progressed, others were drawn to this habit, including Stikbeast who spent a few very crucial hours (we were doing a 8-week group assignment in 40 hours straight) discovering the joys of Requiem. As a sidenote, we scored 17% in that assignment, but not because of Stikbeast.
About 7 months later DocFisher was introduced to the wonder of University and quickly discovered how fast Quake 2 was on the university computers. He may also have spent some time networking with Garbs or Daz, but I'm really not sure about this.
DocFisher then decided to begin ECU Gamenet, which was basically a forum so that the students of ECU could meet together and play some network games.
This went on for a while, both I and Stikbeast joining after Gamenet had been going for some while, and then Unreal became popular. It became so popular, in fact, that it caused a few network accounts at the university to get revoked, and security cameras installed in the labs. Now the only use of Unreal at the university is for computer hardware testing purposes (lucky SysOps).
Around the same time, Frog (a university student) conspired with Stikbeast, me, and another student (Adam) to get our computers together at his place for a few network games. This actually went quite well, except one computer wouldn't network until about an hour before we left (at which point it didn't do much good because he was blunt as a spoon (i.e. slightly drunk)).
Later on another network party was organised, but this had a pretty small turn-up as most of the people invited couldn't make it, couldn't afford a network card, or didn't want to come. In the end, me, Stikbeast, Wombat and my brother turned up for a few games.
Early in January DocFisher hosted another lan party, this time involving considerably more people (8). Spidge, DocFisher, Garbs, Daz, Domgrief, and Stikbeast turned up and spent most of the night merrily annihilating each other. The other two invited turned up, but unfortunately we only had 6 network cables.
It was at the end of this highly successful (except for the lack of cables) event that it was decided that another would be held in a few weeks time. It was at this point that the lan party became what it is now, which is hopefully a regular event.