Old School RuneScape is breaking subscriber records 13 years in — and it started with a server found in a desk drawer

Old School RuneScape is having the best run in its history. Last August the game hit an all-time player count record, surpassing every previous era and version of RuneScape, and creative director Kieren Charles estimates there are now upwards of one million active subscribers on Old School alone. The milestone came as Jagex held its first live event outside the UK — Deadman All Stars, an OSRS PvP tournament — and the game itself is now older than RuneScape was when Old School launched back in 2013.

The origin story is more accidental than most players probably realize. Jagex wanted to restore the 2006 version of the game, but no copy existed. A Jagex employee found a 2007 server backup in their desk drawer, booted it up to see if it still worked, and that became the foundation for Old School RuneScape when it launched in 2013. Charles, who joined the OSRS team a few years after it started, calls the choice of that specific snapshot "kind of arbitrary, but based on what players deemed the sort of golden age." He came to the job as a genuine fan — he was playing RuneScape at 14 in a school library and, as he puts it, was simply "the one who never quit."

Old School is widely considered the first officially supported classic server for a major MMO. Fan-run preservation servers existed before it, but WoW Classic and similar efforts came later, following Jagex's lead. Charles argues the model gives OSRS the best of both worlds: the authenticity and community trust of a fan-driven project, plus the development resources and player scale that no unofficial server can match. New content — including full expansions like 2024's Varlamore — still gets added regularly, but every proposed addition goes to a community vote first. If it doesn't clear a 70% approval threshold, it gets cut. Charles says the team has reached a point where they won't bring something to a vote unless they're already confident players will back it, because getting a feature rejected "really does suck in the moment." Still, he'd rather see a proposal voted down than sink six months to a year of development into something players end up hating.

The approach isn't one Charles would recommend to every MMO developer — the democratic model demands a level of community trust and internal discipline that's hard to build. But for OSRS, it's clearly working. One of the compliments Charles says he values most is when players tell him new content feels like it could have shipped in 2006 or 2007. With subscriber counts at record highs and the game's first international live event in the books, that balance between nostalgia and active development looks more sustainable than ever.