A piece of history

**S3lvah** · April 25, 2022

Thought some of you might appreciate this.

Very recently, a 2001 RS server (based on community-run project OpenRSC) was opened. Basically, it's vanilla RuneScape as it was in early May of 2001, 4 months after the game was first opened to the public. At this point, the game could still have taken a number of directions. Magic and Prayer were split into "Good" and "Evil" counterparts. Pray and Thieving could be leveled but not actually used yet. Soon after this point, Magic and Prayer were consolidated together and given proper content, and Crafting absorbed the planned Tailoring.

GoodMagic spells before the big Magic update on May 2001

Remarkably, there were big parts of town east of Varrock and Falador meant for player-owned houses. These were soon scrapped as the sheer number of players made the idea unviable (until much later in RS2, when instances made Construction and POHs possible).

East Varrock – "Coming soon -Player owned houses"

I started playing RS at the turn of 2001/2002 when the viral phenomenon arrived into our school, so it was a rather interesting experience to play the game as it existed even before I'd started, 21 years ago.

I meant to just log in and kill a few goblins in Lumbridge, but ended up spending several days, grinding out an addy baxe and completing all the quests. Here's a few screenies of the end of the brief journey.

Evading lvl 68 Ice Giants (capable of 3-hitting low levels) to mine some blurite