One Of The Longest-Running MMORPGs Hasn’t Lost Its Old-School Feel

For video games, a 25-year lifespan is an almost impossibly long time. With so many new games coming out every week, a title staying in the conversation and attracting new players for even a few years is a massive achievement, and remaining relevant for a quarter-century is almost unheard of. Only a handful of massively multiplayer online RPGs have been able to maintain their popularity for nearly that long, and one game that just turned 25 years old did so by embracing its roots even as it continually changed.

When RuneScape launched on January 4, 2001, it was a browser game run by two brothers operating out of their parents’ house. By the end of 2001, developer Jagex was officially formed, and not long after that, paid subscriptions were introduced. Over the next few years, RuneScape’s engine was rewritten twice, and a new graphical style was implemented.

Compared to modern MMOs, RuneScape has a decidedly old-school feel, often to the point of seeming directionless. While games like Final Fantasy XIV are focused on ongoing storylines, RuneScape is about the story you tell yourself. After learning the basics, players are set free to do essentially whatever they want, whether that’s pursuing mastery of its 20-plus skill trees, hunting down high-level monsters, or helping (or fighting) their fellow players as they see fit.

Since RuneScape’s launch, Jagex has grown from a bedroom startup to a large developer that continues to expand its core MMO. But for all that’s changed, RuneScape feels remarkably similar to the game that first launched out of its creators’ home, a feat that’s taken a lot of intentional work from Jagex. Despite its outmoded freeform exploration, RuneScape has remained committed to player autonomy, and has never strayed from its old-school roots.

Today, RuneScape is a game split in two. The game now called RuneScape began the first time its developers rewrote the original engine, originally dubbing the new release RuneScape 2. But rather than replace the original game, Jagex kept it running under the name RuneScape Classic, while the update eventually inherited the RuneScape name. Eventually, though, maintaining RuneScape Classic became more trouble than it was worth, as it became less compatible with the modern development tools Jagex had adopted.

But a few years before RuneScape Classic shut down, Jagex saw the desire for players to keep some form of the game’s original vision around. In 2013, the company launched a poll asking players whether they would be interested in a version of the game based on older code, which preserved RuneScape as it was in August 2007. Players overwhelmingly voted yes, and Old School RuneScape was born. Still running alongside modern RuneScape, Old School RuneScape continues to evolve with new skills and other updates just as the newer version does, with an eye toward maintaining the hard-to-articulate vibe of a bygone era.

In some ways, both versions of RuneScape are exercises in nostalgia, not for their own sake, but for what’s been left behind by modern MMORPGs. Over the years, RuneScape added microtransactions that gave advantages to paying customers, but in 2025, Jagex launched a vote to let players decide whether they wanted them removed. Just as the company expected, a vast majority of players voted to cut them out of the game. Like the inception of Old School RuneScape, the vote showed not only Jagex’s willingness to listen to players, but fans' desire to maintain what still separates the franchise from everything else out there. That collective passion may very well still be there another 25 years from now.