Ever since its launch in 2001, the proto-MMORPG Runescape has been a cornerstone of a lot of formative gaming moments. Sadly, that all ends this August as the servers are finally going offline.

Runescape was developed by Jagex in the early 2000s and is likely familiar to people who read magazines like Next-Generation or, well, Game Informer back in the day. The online PC game introduced a generation to what might be possible with online interaction in the future and shaped a lot of what the modern game industry takes for granted.

It is not like the game has been continuously supported for the last two decades, though. Jagex stopped supporting the game years ago, which has lead to the title running wild with bugs, bots, and cheaters. The developers feel this has gone too far and become game-breaking and need to put the game out of its misery.

"We've not fully supported RuneScape Classic for years, so why are we suddenly seeing it as a problem now?" Jagex wrote in a blog post. "The truth is that bots and lack of community safety tools are serious problems, however, we also feel that we can no longer offer long term service reliability due to the growing risk of unrecoverable game breaking bugs. The number of bugs is getting worse, and we're gradually seeing the game breaking. It's important to highlight that these are bugs which we can't fix due to the unsupported nature of the game."

The servers will shut down on 12:00 AM PT August 6.

Our Take

It's a shame, but I was a little surprised it was still running. Seventeen years is a pretty good run.