I used to be really into Old School Runescape. Of course, at the time it was just called Runescape. It was technically the second version of the game and the original had been renamed to Runescape Classic.
When I was in third grade I switched schools and met the person who ended up being my best friend through early high school. We did almost everything together because he lived right down the road from me. I’ve mentioned him before in my fishing post and my running post. I could write a book just about hanging out with him.
One of the things we did together was play video games. It was mostly just something we did at night when we were told we had to stay inside. We were so synced up with each other we could beat a new game in one night.
One day he told me about a computer game he was playing and told me I should play it with him. Later on when I was home I got online and found the site he had told me about and made an account. To make things better there was no application to download. It was all browser based.
I logged on and went through the tutorial. It was pretty cool but I retained almost none of it because I just wanted to get to where I could play with my friend.
I landed in the starting castle in Lumbridge and started wandering around. I killed some spiders and goblins then my friend sent me a private message asking where I was so he could find me.
I had no idea where I was because I had just started. I told him I was in an old broken down stone building surrounded by goblins and spiders. He kept asking the same thing and I realized I needed to click on his name to message him. I had been standing in a collapsed building telling everyone who walked by where I was.
We met up and he showed me how things worked and we did a couple of quests together. I had no idea how much the game would consume my life for the next few years.
I got really into quests because I enjoyed the puzzles and stories involved. It wasn’t long before I had completed all of the free ones and was yearning for a membership so I could finish all of them.
I eventually managed to get some money saved up to pay for a membership and was able to join my friend more often with the things he was doing. He had gotten a membership shortly after joining so he could go everywhere and do everything already.
He had done many of the quests already by using guides but he was stuck on a really difficult on called Monkey Madness. He told me I needed to get everything done up to it so we could work together on it.
I went through all the quests leading up to it and got my skills where they needed to be and we got together with two other guys one night to push through it. It was fun because quests aren’t really a co-op thing in Runescape. Questing together is just you doing a quest and other people happen to be doing the same quest next to you. Conversations with NPCs are separate and rewards are separate.
So we’d go through and whenever we reached a certain checkpoint we’d wait for everyone to catch up. If someone had a problem we’d switch computers to help them get through.
One particular part in Monkey Madness where we had to do this was a sliding box puzzle. I had no problem finishing it but nobody else could figure out how it worked so I had to solve theirs. They couldn’t solve a puzzle if it had the solution written on the front.
A quick side note, another thing that bugged me was the fact that they couldn’t pronounce “gnome” correctly. They would instead say “genome.”
Another thing he really enjoyed that I didn’t like as much was wilderness raids. I’d join him because it wasn’t the only thing we ever did during those sessions but I’d rather be killing NPCs than other players.
We had downloaded a special client that made it easier to switch servers quickly to try to catch people in the wilderness and kill them. I will admit the process of finding a good server was fun.
Sometimes we’d find a single person alone and get them. Sometimes it was a trap and we’d get killed. I don’t think we really made much profit on it because we always wore our best gear and didn’t always bank between kills.
One day when I got on I was told to suit up because we were going to war. I wasn’t in any guilds because they usually never appeal to me. Especially in a shared single player game like this one I didn’t have much need for people I didn’t know to be wandering around with me because we couldn’t do anything in game to help each other with quests.
But my friend was in it and I was another body to help out so I did. The whole thing made no sense because we could just rejoin if we died and keep fighting. And it ended up being just a bunch of people with no armor running around trying to collect dropped items while they got killed again because everyone still had a good weapon.
I never knew who won or how we even knew it was over. I may have just got bored and left. That’s probably how they decide the winner; whoever gets bored last wins.
My friend was also really into cat-fishing and scamming people. I used to share my password with him so he could help me level skills when I wasn’t on. As soon as I found out he was using my account to scam people I stopped letting him have my password and told him that was the reason.
When I moved to the final high school I went to, I cancelled my membership and told everyone I still played with that I wasn’t going to be playing anymore. I didn’t have internet where I was moving so there was no reason for me to pay for a membership for something I couldn’t use.
Writing this brought back waves of nostalgia of certain quests that were really fun to try figuring out. It really makes me want to find time to play again.
I tried playing a few years ago when the new version came out. I was hoping to get onto my old account but it had been deleted. I made a new one but it wasn’t the same starting in an area that used to be for members only. I did the introductory quest but it wasn’t the same so I logged off.
A Life, Ensnared 