Every afternoon when I got home from school I'd rush through the door, scattering my things on the floor, and pound down the stairs to the basement on a beeline towards the family computer. After five minutes of the dial-up modem doing its thing and another fifteen minutes to load into the game, I had a whole new world at my fingertips. Time was of the essence as every moment I spent in Gielinor was a moment that my mother couldn't spend on the phone talking to her sisters.
Due to the obscene loading times our prehistoric computer and early-internet dial-up provided, world-hopping wasn't an option. I was locked into whatever world I selected on the day. This meant that killing chickens and cows for their feathers and hides (big loot back in the day) had to be done on an entirely different playing session than when I went to trade them at the Varrock North Bank on World 2.
Progress was slow and inefficient in those days, even for a game where level 92 is only half the experience you need to get to level 99. Min-maxing wasn't a phrase that had even occurred to us and even getting a full set of Rune Plate Armor was a flippin' big deal. We'd almost never venture into the Wildy with gear for fear of losing weeks worth of work. But I'll be damned if those weren't some of the best days of gaming I ever had.
As we aged the game did too, and it became more about min-maxing experience gains, training up pures for PVP, and hoarding some actually good loot. The game entered, and then quickly passed, a golden age… With the introduction of a slew of updates that would take the game in new directions and tear the community asunder.
Luckily, eventually, the developers came around and gave us Old School Runescape (OSRS). A classic rewind of the golden era of the game that receives active development to take it in new "What If?" directions. Alas, my main remains locked into, and untouched, in the original game. And I've yet to return to the grind of OSRS, outside of logging on every now and then to smack a couple of giants with a scimitar.
Scroll on for a ripe selection of Runescape memes with an Old School flavor.
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