Quest Complete: 25 Years Building RuneScape, with Pints of Knowledge
It's a game of swords and dragons. It's a virtual world of magic and adventure. It's a vast international community of players. And it just turned 25 years old.
We're teaming up with Pints of Knowledge to bring engineers a night digging into one of the longest-running live software systems in the world — built, patched, and kept running for 25 years straight, with millions of players never letting it go offline.
Back when RuneScape started, nobody had a playbook for building and maintaining a system people would still be using together, decades later. No blueprint for versioning a live world, no precedent for the kind of technical debt (and technical decisions) that outlive entire careers.
→ The engineering origin story - how a bedroom project became a 25-year-old live production system
→ The architecture decisions that aged well - and the ones the team would rewrite with hindsight
→ Live-ops at scale - what it actually takes to keep a persistent world running, patched, and playable for decades
→ 22 years on the inside - lessons from designing, programming, testing, and supporting the same system for two decades
Our speaker is Ash Bridges, known to RuneScapers as "Mod Ash" - Senior Product Manager at Jagex, and one of the people who's actually built the thing. Ash has been part of RuneScape for over 22 of its 25 years - designing, programming, composing music for it, testing it, supporting its players, and moderating its community, first as a volunteer and later as staff.
This one's for engineers who want the real story behind keeping software alive far longer than anyone expects it to survive.
Spots are limited - register now.
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