OSRS Gold's lead designer, Dave Osborne, alluded to this when I asked him about its continued success around its 20th anniversary. "There have no courses to pick from, no walled servers to create a barrier between players.
No content is blocked to a particular player type," he told me in an earlier interview. "Everyone playing RuneScape is able to participate in all aspects of its world. Everyone is aware of your accomplishment because they're likely trying to get it too."
When the first day you arrive at Lumbridge you will find that all the top players could be you one day. It's intoxicating. "More than the other video games that I've tried the avatar is my own - it's the culmination of everything I've done in RuneScape, and that's hugely beneficial to our players."
A lot of games fight to take over your life, but RuneScape is the one that is honest about it. The attraction isn't just the quests and the lore. When people talk about winning it's about getting all their stats at level 99. There's no way to think of getting all settlements available in Fallout 4 to be the end-all-be-all - it's about the story and the journey. In this case, the numbers are all that's needed. The numbers are all it needs to be.
RuneScape can be whatever you'd like it to be. It's fitted into my life in the same way that it was when I was sevenyears old, but in a totally different way. If you're one of those who was hooked in the 2000s, I would strongly suggest checking out Old School and be prepared for a variety of different emotions.
On the surface, RuneScape The First 20 years is the perfect Christmas present for the 2000s-era kid in your life. Filled with nostalgia, it's difficult to glance through the pages and not want to open Old School RuneScape. But as you go through, it's a very bittersweet story, as it was a lightning strike in a bottle, and is likely never to be seen again, and definitely not on the same scale.
We have plenty of wonderful indie success stories, perhaps more so, now when big studios have realised the value of these stories. However, the tale of RuneScape is one of experimentation and failure, something seldom afforded to developers now.The Gower brothers organically grew as a community in the span of time. They made mistakes and they made significant leaps forward due to their situation in the past allowed for it. It's a story that's similar to RuneScape could not be created today.
RuneScape was a passion project developed by three brothers within their parent's kitchen. They created it with the free gaming software that they got from gaming magazines with OSRS Buy Gold. The game was monetized, so they could be able to justify their work full-time, but with it being totally free to play.
