Old School RuneScape just pulled off a live esports tournament for 4,000 people — and the game was never built for it

Deadman All Stars, a live PvP tournament for Old School RuneScape, drew 4,000 attendees in Chicago on June 20 and pulled over one million viewers on stream. The winning team, Dino Nuggets — made up of players Dino, B0aty, 61M, Sick Nerd, and MMORPG — took the trophy, with the Odablock Warriors finishing as runners-up.

The format works like a fighting game crew battle: each team sends out one player at a time, and the winner keeps fighting until they're out of health and healing items. Teams cycle through their roster until one side is fully eliminated. It's clean, dramatic, and it worked. Before the live event, all players started fresh accounts and had a 120-hour playtime window across nine days to level up and gear — then competed on a special private instance of the MMO running at the venue, not on the live servers. Players brought their own peripherals to keep muscle memory intact, and almost everyone ran the game in a tiny 640x480 window on large curved monitors — partly to minimize mouse travel between inventory and the play field, and partly because it looks exactly like how you'd have played RuneScape on a school computer in 2005.

Old School RuneScape launched in 2013 as a preserved version of the 2007-era game, and it has grown steadily into what many consider a genuine golden age — surpassing its original peak by most metrics. Jagex has experimented with competitive events for over a decade, but previous UK events topped out at around 50 people. The Deadman format itself was conceived by Solo Mission, a prominent OSRS content creator and official Jagex collaborator. Getting a 25-year-old MMO — one that was, in creative director Kieren Charles's words, "not built to have a LAN setup at all" — to function as a live esports spectacle required serious logistical work. Charles admitted the team was "doubting at times whether we actually can pull it off."

They pulled it off. The crowd energy was reportedly strong throughout, and the crew-battle format generated genuine hero moments — players surviving far longer than expected and pulling off upsets. Whether Jagex scales this further remains to be seen, but a million-viewer stream and a sold-out Chicago venue make a pretty strong argument for doing it again.