So true. My first thought was this as well. I'm about the same age as you and played RS at much the same time. Personally the experience was greatest due to the huge black market community. Hell, I even first learned to code in order to bot RS. Learned a lot of the exact same lessons (Trading and bartering, getting scammed, talking to people to get help moving forward) but in real life and with real money.

I still haven't gotten over suddenly getting banned from PayPal for selling virtual goods when I was 14. The ~$1000 USD I had made, pretty much all the money to my name, was held hostage for 6 months!

My first language was a Pascal-like DSL, learned for the sole purpose of mining ores while I was at school.

I think I should credit my salary to Jagex.

Thats too funny. And honestly, the fact that the game translates to the real world directly like that just blows my mind. I met a guy at a hackthon during uni who ran Sals realm of runescape. He told me that the selling the website basically payed his (canadian) tuition in full

My Runescape money making adventures paid for most of my life, even to this day.

Kaitnieks SCAR right? I was pretty involved in the cheating scene for RuneScape since around 2001, which I credit with getting me in to tech.

Ditto. AutoRune and later SCAR, Sleepwalker, et al were huge inspirations to teenage me. I spent a lot of time bugging Dylock and Kaitnieks for Delphi help over IRC.

When I had some downtime a year or so ago, it was really interesting to revisit the reverse-engineered clients (a la RuneBot, PowerBot, etc) and taking a look at how that was done then and now. Actually made me somewhat working with Java again.

Very cool to see other folks who found themselves on a similar path thanks to that community!

That's the one! Wow. I credit that early exposure for the same.

I'd try it again, the popularity has gone way up - last I checked, it is at >100k concurrent players on line.

It's definitely lost some of the nostalgia, but it makes up for it with a load of new content.

I have empathy for your nostalgia. I played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and was part of a pretty cool community.

Man, those were the times! I'm still crossing for fingers that we'll eventually see a W:ET remake with better graphics but the same game dynamics (and, most importantly, physics). Or that ET Legacy [1] or the inofficial ET2 [2] will pick up steam.

[1] https://www.etlegacy.com/ [2] https://www.crossfire.nu/journals/156955/et2-remake-new-upda...

The remake looks promising! I like ET Legacy and even contributed a tiny bit, but I think it would need a remake for my friends to play, for example...

Honestly, I'm not holding my breath when it comes to ET2. Chances are they won't get the game physics right in ET2. But ET without trickjumping is simply not ET.

Yeah the physics aren't even close judging by the videos. But the maker seems like he's aware.

This game had such a profound impact on my life. When we were in elementary school, everybody in my town seemed to play and a lot of friendships I still have today were formed there. Private servers (moparscape.org) were the reason I got into programming, and I've been working as a software engineer for 4 years now. I didn't study it in school either, was strictly taught on runescape forums. I still check in from time to time, and can still navigate that world blindfolded.

Your comment is vely insightful. I first played runescape in 2001 I think (and then I came back later), and I had never thought about it the way you describe it. I too learned a lot of life skills: scamming, bartering, arbitrage, and quite a few social interaction skills despite being online. My best friend had some weird pubescent (text-based) sexual things with weirdos claiming to also be 13, or whatever we were at the time. It was a precursor to AIM for my small group of friends. Scripting/botting that game taught me a lot of basic skills in computers.

I wonder what today's version is. Maybe Fortnite?

Maybe. Although I think it really takes a multiplayer open world (possibly an RPG?) to even get close. I wonder if people who use to play WOW back in the hayday of its popularity feel this sort of nostalgia too

Also, hahahaha, nothing better than walking about and seeing the text “selling GF 10k” wave around in raindbow text

Old school RuneScape was also written by a single guy: Andrew Gower. Him and his brothers moderated it. He's since sold it and done very well. Does anyone remember BlueRose?

Oh my goodness, yes. I had no idea he was the original creator.

FunOrb was another great site by Jagex; Arcanists in particular was a lot of fun. Sadly, they shut FunOrb down recently. Those games are probably lost to history.