Welcome to the gaming side of The Hive Network, simply put it is the foundation block of our company. Here you will see how deep the rabbit hole goes. The Hive Network has been a stepping block for West Virginia gamers for over 11 years as of January 1st, 2012. We were formerly known as West Virginia Gamers LAN (WVGL). We set out in 1999 as a very small local group of gamers that would play games such as Quake 3, Counter-strike, Unreal Tournament and more all hours of the night on our ATI Rage and 3dfx voodoo custom built boxes.

So for the next year a few of us would hook up and setup a small LAN on the weekends and game. I was always looking and waiting for someone to host a proper LAN party in WV; but it never happened. A few neighboring states would host one or two that year but nothing big. Then a long time gaming and technology friend of mine hosted his first LAN party at Truman State University. Needless to say, it was a huge success and Nathan encouraged me to host my own events and hooked me up with a few big name sponsor contacts to help get it all started.

I met Nathan (also known as “Mangler”) on a gaming community program called Mplayer way back in the day. Nathan and I would discuss technology and play Aliens vs. Predator (AVP) for hours upon hours. Nathan moved on to bigger and better things and created legitreviews.com; a review site for just about anything IT related. He now receives more than 500,000 visitors each month.

So, in 2000, I took Nathan’s advice and started WVGL. “West Virginia Gamers Lan” was West Virginia’s first LAN party community. Then in July 2001 we hosted WV’s first ever LAN party, LAN-FEST #1, and it was hosted right here in Fairmont, WV. 2002 gave birth to LanX out of Parkersburg, WV and LAN-Mine out of Martinsburg, WV. WVGL helped aid both LAN groups by hosting game or voice servers for their community. We also helped to get the word out to the WV gaming community. We also aided them in getting and keeping sponsors for their own events and community.

For the next few years all three of the WV LAN communities grew. Click here to view WVGL Events. LAN parties were the next big thing in the pc gaming community. More and more communities of gamers were hosting and attending events from all over. As the newer games came out pushing 3D graphics, technology was always getting faster and better. Computer hardware companies started to take notice as it was the perfect advertisement and they would sponsor a lot of the events. For the next two years PC gaming was at its highest. Then in 2004 Blizzard released World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), and if that was not enough families were introduced to the new outrageous gas prices from $1.88 to $4:30 per gallon. Just like that it was all over for the majority of LAN hosts.

At this point WVGL was used as a technology and gaming news website and for the next year we continued to post news and help the community with hosting needs. As time went on less and less news was being posted as a result of real life, work and school. However, we continued to support WV hosting and computer needs. It was lucky for us that gaming had made its mark, and showed us all just how much we enjoy technology and all the awesome things it’s capable of. In 2006, we renamed WVGL to The Hive Network and applied for a business license. Later the gaming side of things became a sub-division named HIVE GAMING.

Eleven years later we’re still together, going strong, and our love and knowledge of technology has only increased! We build and run our own hardware and to top it off we co-locate it in the state of the art datacenter located at 350 E Cermak, Chicago, Illinois, the world’s largest datacenter, with premium networks consisting of private 100Mbps and 1000Mbps Dark Fiber connections.

Come see why professional gamers and mountaineers have been hosting with us for years.