25 years ago today, the beta version of the fantastic MMORPG RuneScape was launched, which has become one of the most popular MMO games of the 21st century.
At the beginning of the 20th century, video games had a sudden jump in graphic quality. We had e.g. games like the first Mafia or Max Payne that looked “like reality”. However, just as today the most graphically advanced games are not the most popular games on the market, so it was in 2001, when it appeared on the market RuneScape and attracted tens of millions of players.
RuneScape was a fantasy MMORPG made in the Java programming language, a it was played through a web browser. The game was free to play, unlike many other MMO titles of the time. Over time, the game gained subscription and then microtransactions, and its approach is practical laid the foundations for the freemium / F2P format games that are still used in the gaming industry today.
RuneScape offered players free exploration of its world of Gielinor. Unlike similar games, here the players determined their own goals, and they didn’t even have to decide on the character class they wanted to play, but could combine different skills. You could trade with other players within the game, chat and participate in mini-games.
Unlike similar games, here the players determined their own goals, and they didn’t even have to decide on the character class they wanted to play.
Although graphically lagging behind other MMO games, RuneScape was popular and kept alive despite numerous scandals involving in-game cheating, critical bugs, and the like. The game continued to develop and in 2004 the more technically advanced RuneScape 2 was launched, while the original was renamed to RuneScape Classic. Since then, RuneScape has gone through many iterations and still exists today (it’s available on Steam), while the Classic version is still a separate thing.
In 2012, the franchise set a Guinness record for the biggest free MMORPG title. It attracted more than 300 million players and brought the creators more than a billion dollars in revenue.
Today, RuneScape is one of the oldest surviving MMO titles, and in 2025, the franchise began to expand to other genres, and we got the survival title RuneScape: Dragonwilds.