We voyage into the world of RuneScape to find out just how a seven-year-old browser game has managed to become one of the world’s biggest and most successful MMOGs.

With almost no marketing whatsoever during the seven years since its launch, it’s unsurprising that fantasy MMOG RuneScape hasn’t really garnered many column inches in the specialist press. Yet despite this unassuming approach to promotion, the game has somehow become one of the world’s largest MMOGs, with five million individual users logging in on a fortnightly basis.

The fortunes of the game’s developer, Jagex, have been similarly astronomic: once a two-man operation, the company is now one of the largest independent development houses in the UK, with a team of some 400 people working out of its offices in Cambridge and London. The company’s founders, brothers Paul and Andrew Gower, now make appearances in the Sunday Times Rich List.

Jagex is big business, that much is clear – an assessment reinforced by the company’s recent employment of Geoff Iddison as CEO. The former European head of PayPal, Iddison had been at parent company eBay for some four years prior to that, seeing it grow from a modest operation to the internet behemoth it is today.

“I’ve been in the internet space for a long time – some say too long,” says Iddison, reclining on a couch in Jagex’s games room in a manner that manages to be both assertive and somewhat louche. Graying, tanned and snappily dressed, Iddison is every bit the image of business success.

“I think I can recognize a good business model, and this is one. I’m always looking for new opportunities – and I thought the timing was right for me to dive into a new business sector.”

Across from Iddison sits Jagex founder Andrew Gower, who, despite his seniority in the company, has elected to remain hands-on with product development as a lead designer. Nervous, energetic, self-deprecating – every bit the image of triumphant geekdom – he couldn’t be more dissimilar to Iddison. He is the bedroom coder made good – very, very good. And it all comes down to RuneScape, a game he coded during his time as a computer science student at Cambridge University.

Coming to RuneScape today for the first time, you might well wonder just how on Earth it has happened. At first glance, it’s obvious that this MMOG isn’t much of a looker, with boxy visuals, animations that jerk awkwardly between frames, and a cramped interface cluttered with unintelligible iconography. It takes place in yet another fantasy world which, upon cursory investigation, does little to immediately rise above the generic. The opening section of RuneQuest isn’t the best advertisement for what follows, either: a laborious tutelage in the game’s various but not immediately interesting forms of interaction.

The figures don’t lie, however – there is something about RuneScape to love and to laud: you can play it anywhere, on nearly any machine. There’s no hefty download necessary, no installation – it plays straight out of your web browser, regardless of where you are in the world. It’s a persistent game, like any other MMOG – you just log in to the website, watch a loading bar rapidly advance across the screen and, in seconds, you are transported to the fully 3D world. And, of course, it’s free.

For the price of typing in a web address you have access to hundreds of hours of gameplay, and a land as vast as that you’d expect from any other MMOG. The game may not be pretty, but with such easy access and absurdly low specifications, RuneScape has become hugely popular among a young and largely American audience, ranging from the ages of 13 to 19, thanks to word-of-mouth alone. Its regular five million users can play it near-instantly on any computer, be it in a classroom at school while the teacher isn’t looking or on an ageing laptop handed down from older siblings – and, importantly, they can chat to each other all the while through the game’s messaging facilities.

It is the notion of access through a web browser that has become the defining feature of RuneScape’s success, and the strategy of Jagex as a whole.

moscallout“What I loved about MUDs was the fact that you could play them anywhere. I used to play them in my college room and then go down for lectures”/moscallout“When I went to university and first experienced a college internet connection, what I was really taken with were these text-based MUDs,” recalls Gower, referring to Multi User Dungeons – an early and largely text-based form of the MMOG. “What I loved about them was the fact that you could play them anywhere. I used to play them in my college room and then go down for lectures. I’d often have a gap between lectures that was too small to go back to my room, but you could use the machines in the lab to carry on playing the same game where you left off. You couldn’t install any software on these machines, and you couldn’t use the same machine each time, so a MUD was about the only thing you could play and not have your saved game leave you behind. I really wanted to make one of my own.”

RuneScape has always retained that focus on access, even as Gower’s ambitions for the project spiraled from text-based MUD to a fully 3D MMOG – a feat achieved through Java. While initial assessment of the game’s appearance leave it as a poor cousin to other MMOGs, a 3D world as large as RuneScape’s is a staggering achievement given its restriction to a browser. And it keeps getting larger. Scrolling across the gigantic world map during our presentation, Gower says that the game has grown organically: “We just kept adding bits and adding bits. When you do that for seven years, it gets quite big.”

New content is added every two weeks: new areas, skills, quests and achievements – all for free. There is, however, a subscription option which gives players access to yet more content for five dollars a month. It is a popular choice – RuneScape coming second only to World Of WarCraft in US subscription figures according to a recent report by NPD – a revenue stream that Iddison says outstrips that of advertising. Yet such a payment scheme was not the plan from the start.

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