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.
This one’s for the engineers in the Dex community - not signed up to Dex yet? You can join here → [link]
About Dex
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