There were quite a lot of people who knew me from my previous games I'd done for other websites, and I had a website up saying 'coming soon' for several months beforehand. Mod Nexus: How did news of RuneScape spread?Īndrew: It was purely word of mouth. That rapidly increased to 100, 200 over the course of about the first week. I think on the first day we had about 30 simultaneous players which wasn't bad for one game world which was quite small at the time. Mod Nexus: How long did it take to get to the point where lots of people were playing and you thought that 'we could make a go of this'?Īndrew: It hit the critical mass with enough people playing to make it work on the first day, which was a massive relief. That was it in terms of launch quests, there might have been one or two others. Demon Slayer was, Cook’s Assistant of course, and Sheep Shearer. Shield of Arrav was definitely a launch quest. Mod Nexus: Which quests were there to start with?Īndrew: There were four or five. There were no skills so there was no actual meat to the game so you'd do all the quests, which would have probably taken you about 20 minutes, and then there was nothing to do so we added all the skills in a matter of a few weeks. There was a real rush to add content and up to that point we'd been focusing on the quests and making the game work, being able to walk around, talk and do things. Things like the Mining skill and the Smithing skill were all written in a matter of days in rapid succession and I just wanted to launch it. By the time we launched, we were both working full time and in the December of 2000, just before we launched, I went back to Nottingham for Christmas and I was in the same room as Paul and development sped up considerably. Paul was working from Nottingham and I was in Cambridge so we weren't in the same room and we were communicating entirely over ICQ. RuneScape Classic was actually about the third attempt at making an MMOG I just kept starting again until I got it right. Mod Nexus: Was it just you at the time or was Paul involved as well?Īndrew: It was Paul as well the figure we talked about was two years in the making when we launched it because we were including all the previous failed attempts. So it wasn't that long, but I was building on a lot of previous multiplayer games so it's always easier to write something, even if you're doing it from scratch, when you know exactly what it is you've got to do before you start. So I started it properly in August 2000 and I launched the beta (whatever you want to call it) in January 2001. Including the pre-cursors like DeviousMUD and things like that it took years, although I didn't really start RuneScape Classic itself until I'd finished university and had some time. Mod Nexus: How long did it take to write RuneScape Classic?Īndrew: It depends how you measure it really.
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