The year is 2007. You sit down at your family’s Windows XP machine, and open up Runescape. The fans and hard drive scream as the trusty portal to the old lands of Gielinor opens once more. A vibrant land of myth and danger lies before you.

Runescape came at the perfect time in my life. I remember a warm afternoon on the school bus in 2006 hearing my upperclassman Eli talking about the game. He told tales of the adventures he went on and his legendary dragon weapon. I remember being excited about it, knowing nothing other than what Eli had said. He highly recommended the membership, so I begged my mom for membership too and started playing on her laptop.

At this time, Runescape was actually pretty technologically impressive. We had browser games in this era, and MMOs as well, but notably few browser-based MMOs. Considering the wealth of content in the game, it really was quite the accomplishment. Of course, I’d later revisit the game as an adult and do the most challenging stuff and get my dragon gear just like Eli before me, but as a little kid back then I really had no idea how to play Runescape and never found out until I was in my late 20s. Maybe that sounds unpleasant, but it wasn’t? Runescape felt like this interesting kind of directionless experience that I’d never seen in a game before until that point, wherein you could just go off and do whatever you wanted to. There’s no final boss of Runescape (okay now there is, but this was 2006, okay?)

You are saying now…?

Yeah, Old School Runescape actually rocks in 2025. The bulk of what I was in love with playing it all those years ago is still there, but there have been a great many quality-of-life changes. On top of these changes, they’ve also added a great wealth of new content as well. Usually, at this point in a nostalgia piece, you’d see me bemoaning some of these changes, but: I actually love them! The thing that’s changed most about Runescape is some nebulous thing that’s much harder to define.

The world is simply different now. (The real world, I mean.)

The kind of people playing, the conversations, and just the general vibes back then were super different because people simply played games differently 20 years ago. Everything was a lot more casual and simple. I don’t think I can chalk the entirety of this up to me being young either; I touch on this elsewhere on my site, but I think the way people engage with video games is just vastly different now than it was 20 years ago. In general, I feel like games are taken a lot more seriously now, and people will put in legwork to learn and master the game, to play efficiently. In opposition to those current views, my millennial peers and I would log in to Runescape in the 2000s and just kind of… piss around.

Runescape was my first online multiplayer game, and I can still invoke that feeling of sonder I felt all those years ago, knowing that every player avatar was a real person also playing the game. Perhaps that seems rudimentary, but remember I was a child! I engaged with this aspect of the game more than the developers intended, I think. I’d always be meeting people and getting up to hijinks somewhere and somehow. Going on the solo quests with friends at the time was enriching just for the novelty of online play. We all ate it up.

Now when I log in, those names are all red. They’ve not logged in for some 15 odd years, likely. I’ve spent a lot of my life being one of those red names too.

So you said Hijinks?

Yeah, Runescape in the 2000s was kind of a wild west situation. The wilderness was extremely dangerous, and scams were everywhere; very little was done to combat this. As such, lots of crazy things could happen. In the wilderness where PVP was possible, people would carry out tons of scams, or simply roam the wastes searching for victims to slay.

The wilderness was seriously dangerous in the 2000s.

I don’t think this was a bad thing, though. Other people were a huge part of the appeal of Runescape for me back in the day; those early interactions online with my peers shaped and changed my understanding of the world in some fundamental ways (I mean the real world, by the way). The game is better than ever now, but the type of people playing it are different. The way everyone acts is different, and the way people play games now is different.

It’s the same game it was all those years ago, really, but it’ll never be the same as it was then.

It’s something my other millennial readers will understand, but there is some magic to Gielinor and the memories we made there in years distant. Runescape was somehow more than just a video game; it was some other thing, wherein we could see the darkness and the light of the human soul. Now, it plays much like any other game, but maybe if you seek it out, you can still get a glimpse of how it was in those days of yore...

Maybe there are some old stories left in me yet; tales that may be told in The Jolly Boar in days to come. Until then, we’ll meet when our paths cross again in the land of memories, Gielinor.