So true. My first thought was this as well. I'm about the same age as you and played RS at much the same time. Personally the experience was greatest due to the huge black market community. Hell, I even first learned to code in order to bot RS. Learned a lot of the exact same lessons (Trading and bartering, getting scammed, talking to people to get help moving forward) but in real life and with real money.

I still haven't gotten over suddenly getting banned from PayPal for selling virtual goods when I was 14. The ~$1000 USD I had made, pretty much all the money to my name, was held hostage for 6 months!

I'd try it again, the popularity has gone way up - last I checked, it is at >100k concurrent players on line.

It's definitely lost some of the nostalgia, but it makes up for it with a load of new content.

I have empathy for your nostalgia. I played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and was part of a pretty cool community.

This game had such a profound impact on my life. When we were in elementary school, everybody in my town seemed to play and a lot of friendships I still have today were formed there. Private servers (moparscape.org) were the reason I got into programming, and I've been working as a software engineer for 4 years now. I didn't study it in school either, was strictly taught on runescape forums. I still check in from time to time, and can still navigate that world blindfolded.

Your comment is vely insightful. I first played runescape in 2001 I think (and then I came back later), and I had never thought about it the way you describe it. I too learned a lot of life skills: scamming, bartering, arbitrage, and quite a few social interaction skills despite being online. My best friend had some weird pubescent (text-based) sexual things with weirdos claiming to also be 13, or whatever we were at the time. It was a precursor to AIM for my small group of friends. Scripting/botting that game taught me a lot of basic skills in computers.

I wonder what today's version is. Maybe Fortnite?

Old school RuneScape was also written by a single guy: Andrew Gower. Him and his brothers moderated it. He's since sold it and done very well. Does anyone remember BlueRose?

FunOrb was another great site by Jagex; Arcanists in particular was a lot of fun. Sadly, they shut FunOrb down recently. Those games are probably lost to history.