“A Jagex employee found the 2007 server in their desk drawer, and we had to boot it up and see if it works.”
That’s Kieren Charles, creative director of Old School RuneScape, explaining the origin of what has since become one of the most remarkable growth stories in the history of online gaming. What began as a curiosity — someone at Jagex discovering a decade-old server backup — is now, 13 years later, setting subscriber records and drawing the largest concurrent player counts in the entire RuneScape franchise’s 25-year history.
From a Desk Drawer to a Million Subscribers
Old School RuneScape launched in 2013 as an officially supported restoration of the 2007 version of RuneScape — itself a game that had already been running for six years. The premise was that enough players felt nostalgic for that older era to warrant keeping it alive, and Jagex validated that intuition by putting it to a community vote.
The player base responded overwhelmingly. Today, Charles estimates the game has upwards of one million active subscribers for Old School alone — a figure that surpasses the player counts from any version of RuneScape in its 2007 peak years. OSRS is now older than RuneScape was when Old School first launched, and it’s not slowing down.
“The game’s bigger now than it was in 2007.”
— Kieren Charles, creative director, Old School RuneScape
In August 2025, OSRS hit an all-time player count record, eclipsing every era and every version of the game. Combined with RuneScape 3, the franchise reached 263,094 concurrent players in December 2024 — another all-time record. OSRS memberships rose more than 30% across 2025.
New Content That Feels Like It Was Always There
Charles, who grew up playing RuneScape in his school library as a teenager, is precise about what keeps Old School feeling like itself despite adding new content. The best compliment he receives, he says, is when players say new additions feel like they “could have come out in ’06 or ’07.”
The game recently expanded with Varlamore in 2024 — a full-scale expansion that introduced new regions, quests, and mechanics — while still being shaped entirely by the community vote system that’s been central to OSRS since its beginning. Every significant addition to the game goes to a player vote before it gets implemented.
Community control: Any proposed content addition that doesn’t clear Jagex’s internal quality bar — or fails a player vote — doesn’t make it into the game. This has been the system since OSRS launched in 2013.
Charles believes this model represents the best of both worlds when set against fan-managed private servers for discontinued MMOs. Official support means Jagex can fund proper development; community gating means the game can’t drift too far from what players actually want.
A Live Event, a Record, and What Comes Next
In June 2026, Jagex held Deadman All Stars — the biggest Old School RuneScape PvP tournament to date, and the first held outside the UK. The scale of the event reflects how the Old School player base has internationalised since the game’s 2013 launch as what was essentially a nostalgic service for British millennials who’d grown up with the original.
For Jagex — which was acquired by CVC Capital Partners for approximately $1.13 billion in early 2024 — the OSRS numbers are a strong signal that the investment is performing. The studio generated £151 million in revenue in 2024, with adjusted EBITDA rising to £78 million.
The story of Old School RuneScape is, at its core, the story of a game that should probably have ended in 2007, kept alive by a community too stubborn to let it go — and given the resources to grow properly once it found its second wind. Thirteen years in, the desk drawer server has become the dominant version of one of gaming’s longest-running online worlds.
