It's been about a year and a half since I last wrote a ''Childhood Classics'' post with the first and so far only one in the series being about Postal 2. Today I will present to you a game I used to no-life so hard I still remember one day when my grandma came to visit and my parents got pissed at me for sitting in front of the big white cased monitor from early in the morning. My apologies in advance for not being consistent with the forming of the post compared to the Postal 2 one.
So, uh, here it goes...
Let's start with the cliché ''as you've already guessed by reading the title and seeing the picture above, this post is about...'' RuneScape.
RuneScape is a free-to-play MMORPG developed and published by Jagex. It was first released in January 2001 and has been rewritten and updated a lot in the mean time. In 2013 Jagex released a version of RuneScape that players now call RuneScape 3 or RS3 for short. The release of RS3 was quite controvertial with a bunch of players being for it while a lot just wanted the "good old RuneScape" back. And so a pre-RS3 standalone version of the game (or the 2007 version) under the name of Old School RuneScape (OSRS) was born.
Now, I don't remember when exactly I made an account on RuneScape but I'd say it was somewhere in the mid 2000's (think around 2005-2006), so around the age of 8 or 9. Want to know what I named my account?
Yellow dog30
"Cool", right? 😅
Such an innocent and fitting username for an elementary school aged girl who really liked golden retrievers (is that how they're spelled?) and labradors. But it turns out I wasn't that innocent after all.
I dug up some information about my good old RS account and apparently I've been punished twice for bad behaviour during just one day way back in 2007. And of course I do not remember anything to do with that case.
Albeit I used to no-life it back then, I wasn't too hardcore when it came to grinding my levels and never hit ''pure'' (lvl 99) on any of my skills, not to speak of reaching combat level 126. Neither did I ask my parents for membership. I mean being a "memby" would've been cool but I had fun being a regular player too.
So which side do I stand on when it comes to RS3 vs OSRS? Definitely on the Old School side. OSRS is simple and nostalgic. I actually even no-lifed it a bit at work back when I was preg... and had a job (hey, those 24h shifts got boring at night!).
Anyway, let's get that OSRS game on for old times sake, shall we?
I don't remember the homepage being so dry-muddy colored. Yet again, I didn't ever spend much time on it anyway.
I see they have a download link in the navigation menu on the left, yet the main buttons don't indicate I have to download it. Okay, I pushed "Play Now" and it told me I have to download the launcher. Back in the 2000s the whole game could be played on the browser. I'm sure the game won't be too heavy though, so I'll give it a go.
Now that's a picture I remember - the sign up / sign in screen. A little bit of thinking later and I'm ready to play, right? Well, almost...
What? It wants me to authenticate myself? Right now? But my phone's charging on the other side of the room and I'm laaaazyyyy! Ugh, alright...
So I get my phone ready, open my Google Authenticator and notice I do not have RuneScape on the list of accounts. :)))
I can't be asked to deal with this today, so I'll do an actual gameplay post another time probably showing my account stats and maybe creating a new account to spread some of that Tutorial Island nostalgia that at one point had me creating new accounts almost every day for a week.
Until then, here are some good old music videos some creative RuneScapers had made over a decade ago:
Aqua - Barbie Girl
And my personal favorite:
Foo Fighters - Monkey Wrench
Foo Fighters is actually one of the closest bands to my heart (or most favorite band) throughout time. I originally discovered them thanks to my brother around the time I used to no-life RS (so yeah, mid to late 2000s). He had asked me to download a couple of their songs ("The Pretender" and "Monkey Wrench") along with other music from other artists as .mp3 files for him while he was out with his friends. So when I laid my ears upon the band, I never looked back. And the RS music video is just a gem!
Here's a bonus screenie for ol' RuneScapers:
Have you ever played RuneScape? Care to share a little about your experience?