Old School RuneScape

RuneScape is a Java-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) operated by British developer Jagex Ltd. With over fifteen million active free accounts and more than three million paid member accounts, RuneScape has achieved second place of the most played MMORPG games in the world, and the most popular free MMORPG in the world for two years in a row.

RuneScape offers both free and subscription content and is able to be played from any computer which is able to be connected to the internet, and to be able to run in any ordinary web browser without straining on/or expending system resources. Since its release, the game has been praised for its free-playing abilities and its availability on a web browser. Each month, the website has around 10 million unique visitors, and 6 million unique players access their accounts to play the game.

Yahoo! recorded "RuneScape" as the fifth most popular overall search term for the year of 2008 - this makes it the only video game in the top ten, despite other big-name games being released in that year. For the same year, it was the number one most popular search term for Canada specifically.

History and development
DeviousMUD, the forerunner to RuneScape, was created in 1998 by Andrew, Paul, and Ian Gower. The game used isometric graphics. The original version was scrapped, and never publicly released. In 1999, Gower completely rewrote DeviousMUD, albeit with no improvements to the graphics or several other aspects of the game. This version was released as a public beta for approximately one week before it was again withdrawn.

As Cambridge University undergraduates, the Gower brothers worked on a complete rewrite of the game. The isometric view was replaced by a mixture of both 3D and 2D sprites. The game, renamed RuneScape (created using a word combiner and randomizer program that Andrew had), was released to the general public as a beta version and for testing on 4 January 2001 and was originally operated from their parents' house in Nottingham. In December 2001, the Gower brothers and Constant Tedder formed Jagex to take over the business aspects of running RuneScape. By that time, there were over one million registered accounts.

On 27 February 2002, a membership service was created, which allowed players to choose to pay a monthly fee to access a variety of additional features including new areas, quests, and items. This service significantly changed the focus of the game.

As RuneScape became more popular, Jagex began planning major changes. Although only a graphical update was initially planned, the developers opted instead to rewrite the game engine completely, introducing a version that consisted entirely of three-dimensional graphics, with other significant improvements. While in development, this version was known as RuneScape 2. A beta version of the new engine was made available to paying members on 1 December 2003. At that time, the game had 660,000 free players and 58,000 members. The finished version was launched on 29 March 2004. Upon release, RuneScape 2 was renamed RuneScape, and the older version of the game was kept online as RuneScape Classic. On 2 February, 2006, Jagex banned more than 5000 Classic accounts due to cheating. On 2 August, 2006, RuneScape Classic was closed to new accounts and restricted to paying members who had played Classic at least once in the prior six months.

On 16 May 2006, Jagex upgraded RuneScape's game engine, primarily as a back-end upgrade rather than a visible graphical boost. In particular, the amount of memory required to run RuneScape was significantly reduced, allowing the game to be expanded and improved without increasing the loading time for most players. As of March 2007, RuneScape had more than 9 million players. The engine was upgraded once again on 26 June 2007, to allow Jagex to add more complex content to RuneScape in the future.

On 5 July 2007, an article was released in which Andrew Gower told an interviewer he saw a release of RuneScape onto seventh-generation gaming consoles (such as the Wii, the Xbox 360, and the Playstation 3) as "tempting"; however, he states that there are currently no such plans to do so.

Old School RuneScape
Old School RuneScape is Jagex's official term for a previous version of the Runescape game that was introduced from a backup of the Runescape source code as it had been on 10 August 2007.

This version of the game was announced in a news post on 13 February 2013, which was followed by the opening of a poll to determine community interest on 15 February 2013. The poll, which ended 1 March 2013, decided, among other things, whether an additional membership fee would be charged for access to the game.

The poll ended at 00:00 UTC on Friday 1 March 2013. The final tally of votes was 449,351. Though 500,000 votes are needed to allow no additional membership fee, Jagex stated that the first six months of Old School RuneScape will not have any additional charge. Jagex will review this again in September; if the community is still growing and active by then, then it will remain free.

Despite it having originally been stated that servers would take one to two months to be opened following a successful poll, on 22 February 2013 as part of an Early Access scheme, Jagex opened over 50 Old School RuneScape servers and gave a month of free Old School RuneScape membership credit to it to all of those who had voted in the poll. The game quickly saw player counts equalling those of the main version of the game, which has since been labeled "eoc scape" by the community in order to distinguish it.

Old School RuneScape works similarly to RuneScape Classic in that it can be played with the same account that one plays the main version of the game; yet stats, items and quests are separate and non-transferable. All players regardless of achievements in other versions of the game begin Old School RuneScape on tutorial island with a blank character. As a result, an economy and money supply has had to emerge from nothing since release.