Starting Old School RuneScape in 2025
I started playing RuneScape in 2006 when I was nine years old. From the time I was in the fourth grade until I was fourteen, I played this game with my friends every chance I got. Back in those days, my family only had one computer with a small square monitor and the time I had to play the game was limited to a half hour every few days. On weekends, my friends and I would get together and play on a single computer for hours. Every now and then, we would go to the library and pay $1 for an hour of time on a computer. There we could play together which wasn’t possible at our homes. I truly loved that game and the character I created completed every free quest and leveled many of the free to train skills into the sixties. Eventually, my interests changed and I traded my account login information for my character to a friend. I don’t really remember what I traded, but it seemed like a good deal at the time.
To be honest, I sort of forgot about the game completely. That is, until the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. For a few weeks, I got back into the game, now renamed Old School RuneScape and created an Iron Man character. Once I was able to get back to work, I stopped playing again and forgot all about the experience. When the idea came to me a week ago to start playing, I couldn’t remember my login and the email I assumed I had set up the new account in 2020 didn’t work. So, I decided that I would start over, this time for the final time.
This whole idea came to me because of a suggested video on YouTube. It was just a collection of Old School RuneScape soundtracks. I put it on and just listening to the music brought me back. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and in this case, it reconnected me with a part of myself that I didn’t realize I had lost. The sense of childhood wonder that originally made me want to create worlds of my own and tell stories. I am a writer, primarily of fantasy fiction, and the adventure I felt playing RuneScape all those years ago subconsciously had a huge impact on me. That is what I want to explore, connect with, and try to reawaken so more of that innate creativity and wonder will make its way into my work.
Recapturing the Magic I’ve Lost With Time
So, why did I decide to play a game that is more than twenty years old? It’s no secret that there are many people like me who have returned to a game they used to love from a long time ago. When I logged in this morning, there were more than 100k people playing. There are a lot of new games from huge studios that struggle to maintain that number of active players, so it was impressive to see such a large player count on some random Thursday in the middle of March. I heard someone say that people don’t stop playing RuneScape, but that they only take extended breaks. Perhaps that is true, but there was something deeper that is driving my motivations. To answer the question, and as I alluded to above, my goal is to recapture the magic I’ve lost with time.
There is a sense of wonder, of pure creativity that exists when we are young. We draw pictures that are not good because we fear no judgment. We play with toys and our imaginary friends, not because these hours of hard work will pay off in the future, but because we are completely immersed in the moment. At play, we did things that amused and entertained us in the moment. Once we were finished, we simply moved on to the next thing. As a writer and an artist, I find myself battling fear. Fear that I am not good enough, that my ideas don’t bring value. Criticism is inevitable and I often get in my own way because I am afraid of facing it.
When I was young, I used to build castles with Lego and make the figures fight each other in epic battles. I would run around in the yard with a stick, pretending that I was Aragorn or some other hero battling monsters and going on adventures. I would create maps of fantasy worlds, designing castles, towns, and dungeons. I would draw dragons and heroes. I was free to create without fear or restraint. Of course, these were the creations of a child and adolescent who saw the world through a small limited lens. There are advantages to creating as an adult with life experience and greater learning or understanding. But I want nothing more than to bridge the gap between these two pieces. To take the logical, educated, thoughtful adult, and merge him with the adventurous, creative, and imaginative boy who wanted nothing more than to pick up a sword and follow Frodo to the fires of Mount Doom.
I enjoy creating and writing, but at times it feels like work. Perhaps that is because it seems so important for me to get things right. But I don’t think that is the point. We learn through trial and error, but we tend not to enjoy the error making part. We want to get things right the first time. At least, I do. When I was a boy, I learned the value of doing a job right the first time and this built up a distaste for redoing work. But sometimes that is necessary and even a part of the developmental process. Younger me didn’t have a problem starting over and trying again. This too is a quality I desire to regain.
Will playing RuneScape again after all this time help with this? Perhaps not completely, but I think that the power that comes from nostalgia will help me remember some of those qualities and bring a bit more life into my creativity. If anything, it will give me an insight into my past because I will be looking at it through a newer lens. But a game like Old School RuneScape is massive and isn’t designed to be completed. I don’t even know if it can be completed by a casual gamer like myself even if I played it all day for the next ten years. But I do have a goal in mind.
Finishing All Free To Play Quests
Originally, it took me years to complete all the free to play quests in the game. To be fair, I started when I was nine, and my critical thinking, reasoning, and information retention skills were not fully developed. It was also before I knew about YouTube and even thought about searching for guides on the internet. It was just me, figuring things out, just doing what I thought was interesting. What changed that was the RuneScape: The Official Handbook which was published in 2007 by Scholastic. I loved the book fair and I remember ordering this handbook. Unfortunately, it isn’t one of the books that I held onto over the years. The guide was designed to help users understand how to master the free-version of the game and provided helpful tips on quests, combat, and basic skills. This guide was instrumental for ten year old me and my original RuneScape journey. I eventually finished all the free to play quests when I was twelve and shortly after, I stopped playing the game, instead getting more into Xbox and Halo.
Now that I am embarking on another RuneScape journey, I want to complete all the free to play quests. I was never a player that went heavy on membership, though I did get it from time to time. I am also not the type of gamer that will sit for hundreds of hours to grind out skills and try to complete everything. I see myself putting in perhaps 100 hours into RuneScape over the next year in hopes to complete these quests, level up my character to a respectable level, and to recapture the original journey I went through more than ten years ago.
I think that is a reasonable amount of time and effort that I would be willing to put into this game and remember the experience that I look back on so fondly. Regardless, I think it will be an interesting experience to do all of these quests again and to remind myself of the grind of leveling a skill. What I think is interesting about RuneScape is how tedious some of that leveling is. But I used to do it for hours and the thought of leveling my mining skill would drive hours of play doing the same thing over and over again for really small rewards. There is something about that game loop and how it’s not exactly fun or engaging work, but it has a way of compelling me to play anyway. Taking that and applying it to my creative work would help me get through the monumental challenges of writing a book or spending hundreds of hours on a painting. It will be interesting to play the game with this in mind.
Freedom to Imagine and Create
My hope is that by taking on this challenge, I will find ways to give myself the freedom to imagine and create things as authentically as possible. RuneScape allowed me when I was younger to create a character and pursue my own interests. The world, the community of friends, and the large variety of quests or skills to level provided me with endless opportunities to exist in that world in ways that many other games have not. It just felt like me in a fantasy world and while I don’t write adventures and stories about me, I am the first audience and if I am satisfying the creative drive within myself, that is all I can truly hope for.
Once I finish the free to play quests, I will create another post about my experience and detail out how this experiment went. I just want to become a better writer and artist. This may not be a common approach to self-improvement, but I don’t see why it couldn’t work.
Thank you for reading this article. If you too are an author, an artist, or a creative individual, I hope you were able to learn something that inspires you to go out and work on your own project. To follow my work, join my newsletter, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or read other posts from my blog.
Best of luck in all your creative endeavors. Go and be great!
