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QUOTE (Paul)
Hi! I thought I’d recount some memories of the launch day of RuneScape. Things are getting a little hazy, it feels like a long time ago. Then again, that was 4th January 2001. So that would be over eight years now!
The game was very small when we launched it. The four corners of the world were Lumbridge swamp, the wizards tower, the jolly boar inn and “ghost town”. Ghost town was a small deserted ruined town with a couple of ghosts in it. – it later got revamped and became Edgeville. Even that small area was much sparser on features than it is today and Draynor village didn’t exist at all. Oh and there were no banks! There were six quests on launch, Cooks Assistant, Demon Slayer, Restless Ghost, Romeo and Juliet, Shield of Arrav and sheep shearer.
We’d have liked to have launched with much more, but we’d kept pushing back the launch and there still continued to be loads of things that we wanted to put in. It felt like we were never going to launch.
So we’d spent a very hectic November December putting in the features we felt were vital for launch, for example seeing as we had a game called RuneScape we felt that we should make sure some of the magic skill was playable on launch.
We then delayed a lot of the other things we wanted to do until after launch.
With rather a small launch, we decided we would have to call it a beta for it to be considered as an acceptable game. There were clearly lots of incomplete things, including a number of skills on the skill interface that couldn’t be advanced at all. There was a fenced off area which said “coming soon – Draynor manor” and another fenced off area to the east of Varrock which said “coming soon – player owned houses”
The RuneScape launch was never going to be a high publicity affair, after all Andrew and myself were two guys writing a game from our bedrooms with very little money. Still Jagex had a small following, there was a handful of people who played the smaller games we had on Jagex.com and a slightly larger number of people who played the Jagex branded “Castle Games Domain” on a now defunct games news site called Games Domain. Some of those people would occasionally come to the RuneScape site and check if RuneScape was released yet. Castle Games Domain I think tended to peak at around 250 simultaneous players.
A handful of people had already played the game on a closed test server, mostly some real life friends and 3 or 4 people Andrew knew well from Castle Games Domain.
Characters got regularly wiped during the closed testing, and the final character wipe happened about an hour before the public beta release. I remember a little cluster of about five of us waiting in Lumbridge Courtyard to see if people would come in once the server was opened.
I remember the anticipation of waiting to see if many people would stick around to explore much of the world we’d built. After a few minutes, one or two players started to trickle in and we had our first players.
Things built up quicker about half an hour later when someone went into various lobbies in castle games domain and told people that RuneScape was open. Most the original RuneScape players came from there including a games domain clan called the sabres who all had names ending in sabre.
It was fun seeing people running around what we’d created. Lots of people were generally fairly confused though, there was no tutorial, and plenty of people saying “So what are we meant to do?”. I tried to give pointers to as many people as I could. Lots of people seemed to randomly click to trade with me, which seemed odd. Quite a few people died at the dark wizards south of Varrock, but mostly people seemed to be having fun. I remember a guy wandering around trying to form a clan and 1 or 2 people getting to distant corners of the world like barbarian village.
We passed 30 simultaneous players at peak time on the first day. I’m not sure how many accounts were created, probably a few hundred. We were quite happy with our 30 peak for the first day, that was fairly similar to the average number of players on a text based mud that I used to play. Still we had bigger ambitions for the future. Could we pass the number of players that castle games domain had?
Obviously we’ve gone along way past those early ambitions, but at the time, our small start was very exciting.
The game was very small when we launched it. The four corners of the world were Lumbridge swamp, the wizards tower, the jolly boar inn and “ghost town”. Ghost town was a small deserted ruined town with a couple of ghosts in it. – it later got revamped and became Edgeville. Even that small area was much sparser on features than it is today and Draynor village didn’t exist at all. Oh and there were no banks! There were six quests on launch, Cooks Assistant, Demon Slayer, Restless Ghost, Romeo and Juliet, Shield of Arrav and sheep shearer.
We’d have liked to have launched with much more, but we’d kept pushing back the launch and there still continued to be loads of things that we wanted to put in. It felt like we were never going to launch.
So we’d spent a very hectic November December putting in the features we felt were vital for launch, for example seeing as we had a game called RuneScape we felt that we should make sure some of the magic skill was playable on launch.
We then delayed a lot of the other things we wanted to do until after launch.
With rather a small launch, we decided we would have to call it a beta for it to be considered as an acceptable game. There were clearly lots of incomplete things, including a number of skills on the skill interface that couldn’t be advanced at all. There was a fenced off area which said “coming soon – Draynor manor” and another fenced off area to the east of Varrock which said “coming soon – player owned houses”
The RuneScape launch was never going to be a high publicity affair, after all Andrew and myself were two guys writing a game from our bedrooms with very little money. Still Jagex had a small following, there was a handful of people who played the smaller games we had on Jagex.com and a slightly larger number of people who played the Jagex branded “Castle Games Domain” on a now defunct games news site called Games Domain. Some of those people would occasionally come to the RuneScape site and check if RuneScape was released yet. Castle Games Domain I think tended to peak at around 250 simultaneous players.
A handful of people had already played the game on a closed test server, mostly some real life friends and 3 or 4 people Andrew knew well from Castle Games Domain.
Characters got regularly wiped during the closed testing, and the final character wipe happened about an hour before the public beta release. I remember a little cluster of about five of us waiting in Lumbridge Courtyard to see if people would come in once the server was opened.
I remember the anticipation of waiting to see if many people would stick around to explore much of the world we’d built. After a few minutes, one or two players started to trickle in and we had our first players.
Things built up quicker about half an hour later when someone went into various lobbies in castle games domain and told people that RuneScape was open. Most the original RuneScape players came from there including a games domain clan called the sabres who all had names ending in sabre.
It was fun seeing people running around what we’d created. Lots of people were generally fairly confused though, there was no tutorial, and plenty of people saying “So what are we meant to do?”. I tried to give pointers to as many people as I could. Lots of people seemed to randomly click to trade with me, which seemed odd. Quite a few people died at the dark wizards south of Varrock, but mostly people seemed to be having fun. I remember a guy wandering around trying to form a clan and 1 or 2 people getting to distant corners of the world like barbarian village.
We passed 30 simultaneous players at peak time on the first day. I’m not sure how many accounts were created, probably a few hundred. We were quite happy with our 30 peak for the first day, that was fairly similar to the average number of players on a text based mud that I used to play. Still we had bigger ambitions for the future. Could we pass the number of players that castle games domain had?
Obviously we’ve gone along way past those early ambitions, but at the time, our small start was very exciting.
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