The History of RuneScape
Somehow, despite PC gaming since the early 1990s, I managed to completely miss the 300-million-account phenomenon that is RuneScape. Maybe it is because my genres of choice have always been RPG and FPS, or maybe it is because I played original WoW to the point where you got your mount and then immediately realised it was my end-game and that I was terminally demotivated to do any more boar slaying, dropping the game stone cold and never playing another MMO seriously since. Whatever the reason, the free-to-play MMO developed by British developer Jagex, completely passed me by.
As such, I was almost perfectly placed to get the lowdown on not just how the venerable 22-year-old MMO has managed to attract more than 300 million gamers to its fold at one point or another over the past two decades, but also just what its incoming Necromancy skill expansion is set to deliver to both new and established RuneScape players alike.
BROTHERS IN BEDROOMS
For those gamers, like me, who missed the RuneScape phenomenon, the story began back in 2001, when brothers Andrew and Paul Gower created the first version of RuneScape in their bedroom in Cambridge while at university. The game was very rudimentary at first, evolving out of MUDs (multi-user dungeon games), and with some initial art drawn by the Gower brothers’ own mother.
But why create your own game? Timothy ‘Timbo’ Dolan, principle designer on RuneScape, explains the Gower brothers’ motivations, “It comes from these two brothers who loved playing multi-user dungeons; playing other people; just playing fantasy games that they played as young people, and they wanted to make their own. And they did. RuneScape just sort of spawned from there as this 2D fantasy roleplaying game.”
Due to its simple form and being powered by Java, could run in a web browser. That, in partnership with its free-to-play structure, meant that the game could be played on basically any computer, a at lunchtime on school or work computers. Frances Keatley, product manager on , explains this early momentum: “Because it was so accessible, because you could just load it up in your browser, and just jump straight into play, and there was no need to download any games or anything at the time, it was super-accessible. It was just the kind of the thing that was going around in school. You’d always see someone playing . I remember one of the people in my class always had a laptop, and there was always ready to play at a moment’s notice when it was there, whether the teacher was looking or not.”
