From “1267 people playing!”
to “Choose your adventure”

The oldest capture we found, from August 17, 2000, is a Jagex Software page with RuneScape as its coming attraction. Above the Jagex logo sits a banner ad for mySimon, Compare prices on your favorite MUSIC, and a link line: This site is hosted for FREE on VirtualAve -- yours can be, too! Jagex's own menu lists Java Games, Java Music, a Meltdown Game and The Bottomless pit!

Then the RuneScape logo, grey stone letters with a sword through them. The paragraph under it promises Trade and communicate with other players and ends Choose good or evil the choice is entirely yours! One sentence says Your charactor will continue to evolve, typo included.

Scroll past the screenshots of bedrooms, sheep and a graveyard and there is a hand-drawn map captioned A map of the Runescape world. Varrock, Falador and Port Sarim are on it, and so is Al Karid, spelled without the h. At the very bottom of the page stands a bare number, 1720.

By May 2001 the game has its own homepage. The left menu starts with Play online now and Download now, then runs through a manual from Quick Guide to Credits. Jagex counts 2026 as RuneScape's 25th year and describes its beginnings as a Java-based browser game.[1]

The news column reads like a developer's diary. On 25 May: The 4th runescape server is now online!, which meant 3 game servers, and 1 web server. On 26 May prayers were changed to last 50% longer because players found them too weak. On 24 May, Due to popular request, female characters could have their armour modified to look more feminine.

A note about a weekend of server trouble blames a memory leak in the new magic system, apologises, and is signed - Andrew.

In January 2003 the homepage sits inside a stone frame on www2.runescape.com. A red oval says Play Game and seven boxes ring it: Manual, Hiscores, Customer Support, Newsletter, Members Info, Members Signup, News & Updates. In this replay their button pictures don't load, so the frames show only alt text. The count reads 3,932. The footer, three weeks into 2003, still says copyright 2001-2002 Jagex Ltd.

On March 29, 2004, the RS2 beta ended and the full RS2 game launched. Every player's stats were copied into both versions, and from then on Skills you gain in one game will not affect the other game in any way.[2] Two versions of RuneScape side by side: the idea comes back in 2013.

Our June 2004 capture shows 12,844 people playing and a news list with Warning - fake emails and New Bug Reporting System. By June 2005 the number is 80,622, and the tiles include the Library of Varrock, Stories and letters about RuneScape.

Our June 2006 capture opens on two carved buttons, Create a free account (New user) and Play RuneScape (Existing user). News moves onto a parchment scroll headed Recent News, with a Pest Control update and 11 new worlds online. The count says 65,130.

The left column runs a poll. In 2006 it asks What was the strongest reason you became a member?, and in February 2007 Which of the three combat styles do you favour? Both vote links say Members only. The February 2007 menu includes a Parents' Guide.

The menu also offers View the hiscores. In January 2006 Jagex had rebuilt those ranking tables so you could compare your hiscores with someone else, side by side.[3] In May 2007 RuneScape passed one million members, the paying subscribers, a separate figure from the people online.[4]

By June 2009 runescape.com opens on a landing page: painted warriors on both sides, a small wordmark, Welcome to RuneScape and a yellow Play Now. There is no count on it. At the very top, Do Not Display this Page Again offers regulars a way to skip it in future, and Continue to Full Site for News and Game Help > leads past it. A Flash promotion filled the middle; it no longer plays, so that space is black, and a loose scene panel sits lower down the full page.

In June 2010 a panel on the left turns the landing page into a sales list: Free to play, World's most popular free MMO*, Join a global community of millions, Instant access, no installation, Play anywhere via your browser, Over 15,000 hours of gameplay. The browser tab reads Play The No.1 Free Online Multiplayer Game.

Jagex had a record to point to. In August 2008 it announced that Guinness World Records listed RuneScape as the most popular free MMORPG in the world for the second year in a row.[5]

The capture of December 1, 2011 shows the website Jagex launched on November 22.[7] A week earlier Jagex had promised a brand new logo and a darkly cool colour palette.[6] Here they are: a wordmark with a sword standing in the S, a winged demon against a full moon, Welcome to the World of RuneScape, and Play Now Free with Sign in with facebook under it.

The count is back, smaller, in the top bar: 42,516 players online. Next to it are a flag for choosing the language and a second Play Now.

Two changes happened off the homepage. The game manual moved into a community-editable wiki.[7] And the HiScores, the tables where players compared their levels, were to become a members-only feature.[6]

Side track: the HiScores, 2002–2013

Our 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2007 homepage captures all link to the HiScores, the tables that ranked players skill by skill. In December 2002 they were plain tables, one per skill, under a warning: You must have played recently and be a least level 30 to appear in a hiscore table. The top overall level was 1452. By January 2007 the tables sat on parchment with a Compare Users box, the side-by-side comparison added in 2006,[3] and the leaders had a total level of 2,277. In October 2009 the skill list ends in Summoning and the top total is 2,376.

In our January 2013 capture, after the 2011 redesign, the same page is headed Member Rankings. The top ten of its Prayer table all show level 99 and 200,000,000 XP.

Our June 2012 capture switches to daylight. Under the logo a banner says The World's Greatest Adventure, and two press quotes flank it: RuneScape is the king of the browser. from Massively.com and a leading light in the genre from MMORPG.com.

A Facebook button sits under Play Free Now. Further down, under Welcome to RuneScape, a four-point list starts with Totally free to play and Browser based - play on any PC any time! and ends with Join one of the world's largest online communities.

That month Jagex added a counter to RuneScape.com as the game approached its 200 millionth account.[8] It counted accounts ever created, which is a different thing from people, and our June 16 still doesn't show it.

The June 2013 homepage keeps the daylight scene and puts 54015 players now online under Play Free Now. The line above it reads Award Winning Free to Play Browser based MMO Strategy Adventure Game. Even the page title has a find: in the captured title its dashes read –, a garbled character.

Four months earlier, Jagex had asked players whether to bring back an old version of the game. It had recovered a full backup from August 2007. Jagex said a change to its backup systems that October left no later complete version that would work for the restoration.[9]

The poll needed 50,000 votes, and Jagex said players passed that within hours. Old School opened on February 22, 2013 for subscribing members who voted, running the game of August 10, 2007.[10] That is the RuneScape of the February 2007 homepage above, six months on.

On July 22, 2013 the main game became RuneScape 3. For the first login to the Battle of Lumbridge, Jagex recommended the Java client rather than the HTML5 Beta.[11]

June 2014 brings the panorama that every one of our captures through 2022 keeps: a castle, a dragon, and the wordmark wrapped in a gold loop. The live count is gone. In its place, near the bottom: Over 220 million accounts and growing. The big headline lower down is the biggest claim yet, The greatest online role playing game ever made *, and the asterisk leads to the foot of the page: *based on RuneScape recognised by Guinness World Records as the most popular free MMORPG.

One tile still says Online Browser based game, Play anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Another has a broken apostrophe in world’s largest free MMORPG game communities. The footer gives an address at St. John's Innovation Centre in Cambridge and counts the copyright from 1999.

In our 2015–2017 captures that headline is Join the world's largest free MMORPG game*, and the footer moves to 220 Science Park, Cambridge. Off the homepage, Old School became permanently free to play in February 2015,[12] and in July 2017 Jagex announced Old School for phones.[13]

From 2018 the archive's copy of the homepage is runescape.com/splash, and our captures show the headline changing again: The world's most popular free to play MMORPG*. The footnote under it is the same Guinness line as in 2014. Greatest, largest, most popular: three headlines in five years of captures, all pointing to the same Guinness category.

The 2018 tiles tell a newer story. One says Play RuneScape on Windows, Mac or Linux, promises upcoming iOS and Android support! and links to Download RuneScape Client. Another one is for people who left: Taken a break? Your account is exactly as you left it.

Our 2020 capture has two buttons where 2019 had one Play Now: Create Account and Download. 2021 and 2022 keep that pair; the lower button now reads Download Now, and the 2022 footer adds PEGI badges.

In 2023 the address is play.runescape.com and the parchment is back, this time as a map: Welcome to the World of RuneScape and two games, each with its own logo. RuneScape is A classic adventure, reborn. Old School is Gielinor, like it used to be, under the stone-letter logo of the 2003–2007 homepages with an Old School ribbon. Under both: Haven't played in a while? Get back in the game.

The small print is a year behind. A June 2023 capture says Copyright 2022 Jagex Ltd., next to a PEGI 16 badge and In-game Purchases (Includes Random Items).

In January 2024 Jagex announced that its official forums would turn read-only on January 25 and be removed on March 28. Most players, it said, already talked on Discord, Reddit and Twitter.[14] The 2024 and 2025 captures keep the two-game layout, and the 2025 one has recolored buttons.

The live homepage on October 16, 2026 says Choose your adventure and offers three cards. Old School: Gielinor, like it used to be. RuneScape: The classic adventure reborn, 25 years in the making. Dragonwilds: A survival based adventure, marked Out now. Jagex announced Dragonwilds in March 2025 as an open-world survival game.[15]

Players still vote. In November 2025 nearly 125,000 of them voted on the future of Treasure Hunter, a daily activity mechanic, and in January 2026 Jagex reported that it had been removed completely.[16]

In 2001 this page told you how many people were playing at that moment: 1,267. In 2026 it doesn't count anyone. It asks which RuneScape you want, and one of the answers grew from a backup of August 2007.

2001 · 1267 people playing2001 · Then2026 · Choose your adventure2026 · Live

◀◀