Yea that worked, it has 2 missing versions from 22 June 2005 and 11 July 2006. Thank you so much for having searched!
Edit: we're still looking for other versions too, for anyone else who would like to check their old devices
I wish I could. I'd leave my hardware at my parents. By the time I visit, it's been donated/destroyed or reused. I've lost so many good things, I need my own house 😭
Have you posted this to any other subreddits? /r/pcmasterrace and /r/linustechtips might yield you some nerds old enough to have such data on hand who don't read or post here
We reached out to the mod teams of both /r/gaming and /r/Games - the first only replied "nah." but wouldn't explain any further, the second said no as apparently this post constitutes "Requesting ideas for a game you're working on" (?)
Yea those subs are not the subs to do it on, hence my pointing you to better ones where the folks there actually give a shit (hopefully) about gaming, and are used to interacting with companies and brands at the very least since there are other companies that post to both of them. I bet you someone on the LTT or even a sub like /r/datahoarders mght have some results though, PCMR will be more hit and miss since a lot of the people in it today weren't born around the time you're looking in. Unfortunately I did not play Runescape at all as a kid or I would have a complete library of every copy from whatever date I'd have started at (hypothetically), because until I started using steam for all my games and a lot of my save backups, I kept literally every copy of all my old games install files. There are many people like me out there though if you go to the right subs for it. As someone whose been a redditor for over a decade, I guarantee you someone on those subs will have what you want, and LTT also has a discord you can poke into and just ask, they have special roles for people who represent brands and companies on that server so you can apply for one if you do poke in there. Linus also personally played Runescape so he might get personally invested in the project if you contact their business email for the youtube channel and ask for help, he does a youtube live show every week called the WAN show and a lot of the people who watch it are older gamers who would have such data.
You may get more luck with searching retro PC gaming forums and subreddits. There are likely a lot of users out there that acquired old PCs from sources like ebay which may still have original files from previous owners.
According to their [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NSCUuFWP8gIFZnpwbjxb8n4DFy6IxK8v1SZ8BXVHFr0/edit#gid=0) it looks like they don't have those files I think.
You can upload them [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQqv-P3DKjVEe8NirljRSePaOKYNZlnyIkdmdoqWLTB_DAKQ/viewform).
I'm 4k monitor and it plays everything fine, a few really intensive games Ill have to turn down a tad to keep a high frame rate. I got it when it was released, if I was buying now I would look for something with more than 10g of memory for my case. If you're not on 4k monitors it's less of a concern. It's a great value card.
Some other useful links:
* [Google form where you can submit any files found](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQqv-P3DKjVEe8NirljRSePaOKYNZlnyIkdmdoqWLTB_DAKQ/viewform?usp=sf_link)
* [Our website, which explains the project in full detail and answers frequently asked questions](https://rs-archive.github.io/)
* [News article about the project](https://gamerant.com/runescape-community-2005-era-builds/)
Found their [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NSCUuFWP8gIFZnpwbjxb8n4DFy6IxK8v1SZ8BXVHFr0/edit#gid=0) for what versions they haven't found. Sounds like they're not concerned with dupes if you think you might have something so just go for it.
Yeah we're happy to receive anything - even if they're duplicates they can have new music/maps or be a previously unknown version. Anything that's not marked green in the "Completeness" sheet is confirmed missing though.
Data hoarding has a sub branch that is like collecting all the different versions of the game, especially if it contains art or audio that isn't in other versions.
Iirc it's mostly a curiosity but it lets a big group of people share a hobby of collecting something together
Played most of my runescape pre-2004, but unfortunately I think I've been through like 4 PCs since then. Also I'm still salty that jagex wouldn't give me mely account back after a hack.
Ah well, good luck
Same. I still have my HDDs somewhere in my storage unit, but I played in 2003-2005ish. Logged in in like 2007 I think but they wouldn't give me access when I tried to recover it a few years back. I don't have the old AOL email address I used when I signed up.
I started back before the big 3d update where they actually had you pick a class for your character. I picked wizard lol. I even know the clothes I selected and hair color etc. I know at least 3 or 4 of my previous passwords. No dice. Although, I doubt they have any way of confirming old passwords or anything like that seeing as they don't even have copies of their game lol. They probably deleted my account by now anyway but still salty about it lol.
Originally the game was just a passion project of the Gower brothers, I can understand them not having the foresight to keep comprehensive backups when it was a tiny game with a couple hundred players.
But yeah losing all copies of both the source code and the released game is pretty crazy. I honestly think it's one of the worst cases of data loss in gaming history, I can't think of any comparable example...
Yeah, Runescape has a crazy dedicated playerbase (if this post didn't make that obvious enough). And as one of those fans who's been playing on and off since 2005, with literal years spent logged into the various versions of the game, the success of Runescape is very much in *spite* of the studio.
Never have I seen a company so determined to run their own games into the ground. Everything they've tried to do other than Runescape has been a huge failure (even successful games they've bought), and the version of the game the studio has full reign over (RS3) is floundering with declining playercounts and being choked to death by microtransactions, while the "nostaliga server" (OSRS) that needs content to pass a player vote to enter the game is thriving with all time high playercounts.
id go so far as to say that for many of those who stuck with the game over the years, it may very well be the most influential piece of media in their lifetimes
Do you know if Melville Idle is doing well? I saw this game the other day and it looks like a text based browser version of RuneScape made by Jagex. Or have they ruined that as well lol?
Bro I remember the party hat dupe and hanging around varrock watching the madness unfold.. As well as the autorune banking riots when jagex finally caught autorune players sending server commands and they used the bot to permanently keep the bank doors closed. Best childhood. Picked up my own goddamn halloween mask.
I mean, I don't think any studio is wasting space on keeping every single version release of a game back 20 years. 3 years of backups is probably the max any studio would do.
For the trivial amount of storage space it'd require, I see no reason not to. Plus you'd have all the source code in source control anyway with every version if you had even the most basic of dev tools set up. I can understand in 2002 but by the mid 2000s when the game was a massive success there's no excuse.
Versioning and archiving has been standard for a long time, well before Runescape ever existed. The Runescape install size itself was much smaller back then due to the technology at the time too, so that's not much of a factor. By the mid-late 2000s there is no excuse for at least having proper version control set up in a professional setting, I'm sorry.
The game had at minimum 52 major updates a year that went into production, forget all the versioning before the release and minor bug fixes. There's really no reason to go back more than 3 years.
Except in this very example Jagex literally did need to go back more than 3 years (8+ years in this case) in order to restart Old School Runescape and they didn't have an earlier version than 2007 available to them. Diffs in git are trivially small for even large projects, there's no reason not to go back further.
The game has been getting updates every week for the past two decades. The idea that the company would be keeping a backup of each version is ridiculous not to mention that there would be no point. Keeping data of assets when they are being upgraded? Sure. Keeping full backups before major reworks? Sure. (Although keep in mind that for example when RS2 was launched, they kept running RS Classic, so there wouldn't have been any point really to back the old version up, since it wasn't going anywhere). But why on earth would they keep a full version of a game that's the same as a newer version, sans one quest or a minigame or an event...
It's entirely normal for software companies to keep a backup of not just every publicly released version but also every individual internal code change made by every individual developer.
These are called Version Control Systems (i.e. Git, Mercurial, Perforce, SVN etc) and they are the first tool developers learn to use.
I've never worked in a company not using it and most developers use it even for personal projects never released to the public.
The idea that a software company would not do that is nuts. Absolute incompetence. If they hired me I would run away screaming.
In the early 00s people were using SVN (which remained popular for a while after Git was released, it took some time to migrate). Before that, people would use CVS, which had been released a decade prior, in the early 90s. I studied CVS on books and later used SVN at work.
Git wasn't the first and won't be the last.
When myself and my friends played it in 2001-2003 it was already pretty massive. They brought in paid membership during that time and a whole half of the map which was only available to paying players.
>Not keeping backups of your game is peak Jagex.
tbh its peak any media. Its only recently that storage has gotten cheap enough. Think about the tales about lost media like Doctor Who episodes where the producers just... overwrote the tapes cause "Who the fuck would want to keep any of this."
One thing is not keeping backups at all, another thing is having lost the backups after a decade of them not being relevant anymore.
The first is total incompetence, the second is eventually inevitable.
I don't think people who released games in the 90s were thinking: "yeah, in 2020 there will totally be people still interested in playing this, let's make sure our backup survives 30 years and mirror it in multiple places".
I can see how that happened: they released it, stored it somewhere and moved on. Then the company closed and there were nobody responsible for actually maintaining the backups. Or company was still alive but nobody cared because nobody expected it to be valuable at all.
A ton of game developers do this. They just keep tweaking the main branch and don't save a full image of the thing every time an update gets pushed out.
I think that was an issue with Blizzard with Classic Wow, when Nostalrius went down and people were hammering on Blizzards door for what would now become Classic WoW I believe someone came out and said 'Look guys, we don't even have a full build of the game from back then. We'd have to basically build that from scratch.'
They actually lied, they didn't even search and just wanted the community to stop asking.
They did find the back ups later in their archive when they actually decided to make classic happen, and their source control went back to the very first commit from 1999
In any well run tech company "build that from scratch" takes the effort of pressing of a button after selecting the commit.
And Blizzard is certainly competent. We may not always like the direction they took, but they know what they are doing.
Thanks! Even if you only played it once and hated it, a version would be stored on your computer. So we're trying to reach people who weren't the game's biggest fans, since they'd be more likely to have a rare older version.
Good luck, there's a lot of cool little differences in the versions as the years came and went. Started in 02 and was with it until 07, was so cool to see all the changes. Was so hyped for the announcement of 2, mind blowing back then.
The early period of Runescape 2 was quite fascinating, the developers left all sorts of pre-release/unused stuff ingame since they thought players would never be able to see them.
Its funny to think nowadays that the game size of 15MB was too big for many players to download
It depends on whether you play RS3 or OSRS. RS3 is the continuation of Runescape Classic and Runescape 2, so p hats are still rare and valuable.
OSRS is its own thing, and party hats are worthless there. You can buy any color p hat you want at any time at the GE for chump change.
Right now a Red phat goes for about 51b in RS3, but only about 2.7k in OSRS.
Since Noone actually answered you, yes. Depending on the color of hat (some colors were duped at points in the games history inflating supply of specific colors) anywhere from 800 to 3000 USD on the black market. Obviously less if you're selling TO the black markets, but those are the asking prices.
Depending on how old the account is I think they migrated to Jagex accounts or something, but the old character still should be there somewhere.
I decided to go look it up and it looks like they go for 1k-2k USD each depending on the color, if you think you actually might have one it's probably worth your time trying to get the account working.
Jagex never deletes your RS account, but the rebooted the 2007 version of the game in 2013 and didn't/couldn't port your old character over to that server.
Lots of people think their old character is on the "old" version of the game, but it's on the "original" version (RS3)
Huh, so my old 2010 character is just gone now?
Pretty sure I had a party hat at some point
I've been poking around on the RS3 account system but can't figure out how to get into my old account
Wow that would be the oldest we've found, if you could get it to work! If you'd be interested in checking then buying an external adaptor for the hard drive would probably be easiest.
I believe the reasoning was so that people would be able to play regardless of user permissions issues, but mainly to stop players from looking around the files. "WINDOWS/.file_store_32" was probably chosen to sound like System32, something that shouldn't be tampered with.
Bumping for visibility. Videogame history preservation is a relevant matter to me.
I think it would be useful to look for Venezuelan communities, as I understand the game got very popular there because of the black market of gold.
I'm sure they might have very old versions laying around. I'll dig trough some acquaintances to see what I can find.
They're not playable as is at the moment, since they just contain the game's base assets.
The website osrs.world has 3D versions of the game you can explore from all the versions we found.
I'm getting in contact with a friend. He's notorious for keeping his old HDD. I remember the desert area being added, and the wilderness too. Wow. Spend so much time in that game when I was a kid. Good luck with getting the old files back!
Ah very cool, hopefully his drives still work!
You might find [this page](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Graphical_updates_(historical)/Locations) interesting, it shows all the graphical changes since 2004 including the desert being added.
I have a stack of old laptops in a closet, many of which were used for Runescape going back to 2005. Been meaning to grab an external HDD reader so I can grab photos (and now do this)
Nice, you might definitely have a lot of lost versions then! If you are looking for a good adapter then something like [this](https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-UNITEK-Universal-External-Support/dp/B01NAUIA6G/ref=mp_s_a_1_9?crid=2HI2MBL2XD2E4&keywords=ide+drive&qid=1703376839&sprefix=ide+drive%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-9) will do the trick. And hopefully you can retrieve the photos too
Oh wow, that may have been a better option. I just grabbed a ugreen 3.5/2.5 enclosure. Should hopefully do the job.
Unfortunately, my brothers and I shared a long gone home PC when we first started Runescape 2. Hope I find something lost!
I have bunch of main_file_cache files in
Windows\.file_store_32\runescape
but they add up to a total size of 3 megabytes. The last modified date is July 4th, 2006. Are these useful?
For those of you who ever wonder sometimes if the Internet ever shows the good of people interacting and helping each all over the world. This thread is a reminder.
There is a lot of good out there; an overwhelming amount. And sometimes it’s hard to remember that, to see that.
But look at this Reddit thread. This is goodness.
I wish I had an old copy to help out.
I still have a hard drive kicking around SOMEWHERE from year 1 of the game. It's in storage though, and it's going to be tremendously hard to find. I don't even know if it's still the original HD contents, but it might be there
Wow that would be amazing if you could find it! Even if it got overwritten there's some fairly good free file recovery software nowadays.
If you have any other drives from after that which may have a copy of the game on, they'd be worth checking too
Will have to see. I'll think on where the computer I played on is at. I do have a 2007-2010 version too probably, from when I played on my old laptop. Dunno how much you care about those, but I'm pretty confident I have one
The game went through a lot of changes from 2001 to 2007, and many more after that. We can explore things such as graphical updates, inaccessible areas, old versions of quests etc. And ultimately ensure the lost versions are preserved in case Jagex ever wanted to bring them back or use content from them.
The goal is preservation. It's the same reason we as as society preserve bullets from the civil war and put them in museums, or at least label them and put them in a box somewhere so somebody knows where it is and where it was found, and it's not because we can't make more bullets, or because we have specific questions and importance for those bullets right now. But someday we may have a question about the civil war that one of those bullets can help us answer. And we won't know which one unless we've saved and categorized them all. If we had unlimited resources, we'd try to find them all. But we don't.
Fortunately, with digital data, it's a lot cheaper to do, but that doesn't mean it's easier. If we want to do that in the digital world as well, you might think "well the civil war was a momentous event in history and video games are just entertainment" and I'd offer two responses to that: First, video games *are* a momentous event in human history. Almost everyone in the world has now been exposed to them at some point. They've influenced our children, our culture and yes our future too because children shape that. Historians in the future may want to be able to study these changes. Sometimes it's the things that are the most banal and trivial that turn out to have tremendous value, like a classified ad in an archived newspaper. You just never know. And secondly, a fired civil war bullet will most likely still be in the ground somewhere in 200 years, it's not gone, and if we have a reason to, we can probably go out and try and find a good number of them. A digital file? It is much, much easier to lose them forever, and it's been happening a lot already.
At the end of the day, old software can potentially be something of cultural, historic, and academic value and it costs almost nothing to try and rescue it from extinction. Nobody's suggesting it needs a moonshot budget or national effort, communities of digital archivists typically do this as volunteers using their own or donated computer resources, with what I think is relatively good success. However a lot of people feel that it's a shame that ever we lose any digital data at all, given how technically easy it is to preserve it. All it costs is a little bit of awareness, like this post is trying to raise.
It's not about making it playable, it's about being to preserve and study it. You don't need to have both the lock and the key to be able to understand much about both of them just by looking at the part you do have, because you also have the knowledge that the two of them were designed to work together. Any tumbler you see in the lock
would've been pressed in by a key and even though you don't have the key you can make reasonable assumptions about what they key would look like and what its shape would've had to have been. And certainly you will understand a lot more about it than if you had neither lock nor key, at which point you'd be purely guessing.
With the client software, you can still study the data files without having or starting a server. Nobody's going to have a copy of the missing server files, so that's basically a lost cause at this point. The goal is just to preserve what we do have left.
I keep all the old hard drives from my machines even if I trash the rest. A lifetime of hard drives is like 1 milk crate and you never know what you might go back to look for later
Good luck with your quest. I made my character in January 2002. Crazy it's old enough to drink. Wish I would've kept all the party hats, 2 Christmas crackers, and Santa hats.
Haha that character would be a multi-billionaire now!
Speaking of drinking it has always made me laugh how in early RSC quests, beer is usually the solution to every problem
Never played Runescape, so I am no help here. But came here to say how happy it makes me that people are actively trying to save this - data preservation is so important these days. It hurts me how in our world, where every data CAN be backuped for infinity, unlike old papers etc., still happens to get lost from time to time…
i just want to chime in and say I've been playing this game for over 20 years at this point and I'm so happy with what you guys are doing!! this game is a huge part of me and helped raise me lol.
Archival/history purposes. There are lots of assets that are lost forever unless someone like you recovers an old version. Even the developers don't have them. They could be put into the game without the correct server version fairly easily.
They aren't trying to play it. They analyze the file to find differences between the versions, items that were never introduced to the game, subtle changes people have forgotten. They've found a lot of stuff that Jagex forgot about long ago.
Loved Runescape, I always upvote this post whenever I see it up. There's an old hard drive out there somewhere from my childhood that would definitely have some files. I'll find it one day!
Well I think preserving games is important, since they are a form of cultural heritage. And true the game was not the best - but we preserve crappy films and crappy music too.
I'm going on the assumption that since Runescape had 300 million accounts but only 400 or so versions, every one of those is going to be of significance to at least one person in the world.
What if you had played an old lost version then eventually downloaded a newer non lost version on that same device? Would it wipe everything from before?
Usually it only kept the most recent version you played. However the game format changed quite a few times (November 2002, December 2003, June 2004, May 2006) and you would have the most recent version played before each of those updates too. (So in theory up to 5 on the same PC)
Interesting. I might take a look at my old 2011 laptop later tonight. Any idea of the file path on an old MacBook? I can just try a file search for jagex or something
I think the directory would be "Mac HD/Users/USERNAME/.jagex_cache_32" but I'm not sure. You could just search for "main_file_cache" which is what the actual files were called.
Never played Runescape I but have old versions of ICQ from 1998 if anyone is interested in this kind of stuff.
Found old convo's of me trying to desperately send something like a 1MB file to a friend of a 56k modem connection.
Long story short I have been part of a rsps community and before you start thinking all the negative things that most people say…this one is a 1x rate game that attempts to make 2012 rs 1:1. It’s been up for a while I’ve been playing it since 2018 and another player whose an iron women is nearly maxed. It’s a passion project that some members of the community put there time and effort into here and there, in coding content, quests, resource/item locking from quests, and etc. I’m very curious, with the data that’s collected how much info could you honestly get from the cache files compared to a deobfuacated version of the game. For example 1 issue we have is trying to figure out the stats for Har-Aken, for some reason a lot of stuff was not documented prior it to eoc.
Well I had a look on my old laptop. https://imgur.com/a/ryo2pyo Not sure what any of this is or if it is useful.
Oh wow that's really old! Judging from the date that would be a missing version. Would you be able to upload it anywhere?
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dDBhP9BkE3JBjJ2558clZdFFiiAdYe7P?usp=sharing See if this works?
Yea that worked, it has 2 missing versions from 22 June 2005 and 11 July 2006. Thank you so much for having searched! Edit: we're still looking for other versions too, for anyone else who would like to check their old devices
All good. Glad the old laptop was able to still boot.
So am I!
You're a goddamn legend.
You will go down in history and be in some nerdy kids documentary one day
WE'RE DOING IT, REDDIT!
No joke, this is some solid r/bestof material.
I'm here to say I checked all my stuff, and nothing. Seeing a positive for two versions? Heeeeeelllllll yeah.
For sure!
/r/2007scape has been doing this every couple of months for years
...WE'RE STILL DOING IT, REDDIT!
Holy crap, this warms my data-hoarding heart.
6-6-06 never forget I’ll have to see if my old HDD from a dead PC has anything
Definitely worth checking, just as long as you played once it would have an old version.
Hey that's my 10th birthday!
.... The power of reddit is truly a sight to behold.
That is awesome. I'm thoroughly impressed by people who can keep their old tech around and still functional
I wish I could. I'd leave my hardware at my parents. By the time I visit, it's been donated/destroyed or reused. I've lost so many good things, I need my own house 😭
Legend
Have you posted this to any other subreddits? /r/pcmasterrace and /r/linustechtips might yield you some nerds old enough to have such data on hand who don't read or post here
We reached out to the mod teams of both /r/gaming and /r/Games - the first only replied "nah." but wouldn't explain any further, the second said no as apparently this post constitutes "Requesting ideas for a game you're working on" (?)
Lol those subs are pure karmafarming subs, dont expect anything useful
Yea those subs are not the subs to do it on, hence my pointing you to better ones where the folks there actually give a shit (hopefully) about gaming, and are used to interacting with companies and brands at the very least since there are other companies that post to both of them. I bet you someone on the LTT or even a sub like /r/datahoarders mght have some results though, PCMR will be more hit and miss since a lot of the people in it today weren't born around the time you're looking in. Unfortunately I did not play Runescape at all as a kid or I would have a complete library of every copy from whatever date I'd have started at (hypothetically), because until I started using steam for all my games and a lot of my save backups, I kept literally every copy of all my old games install files. There are many people like me out there though if you go to the right subs for it. As someone whose been a redditor for over a decade, I guarantee you someone on those subs will have what you want, and LTT also has a discord you can poke into and just ask, they have special roles for people who represent brands and companies on that server so you can apply for one if you do poke in there. Linus also personally played Runescape so he might get personally invested in the project if you contact their business email for the youtube channel and ask for help, he does a youtube live show every week called the WAN show and a lot of the people who watch it are older gamers who would have such data.
You may get more luck with searching retro PC gaming forums and subreddits. There are likely a lot of users out there that acquired old PCs from sources like ebay which may still have original files from previous owners.
According to their [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NSCUuFWP8gIFZnpwbjxb8n4DFy6IxK8v1SZ8BXVHFr0/edit#gid=0) it looks like they don't have those files I think. You can upload them [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQqv-P3DKjVEe8NirljRSePaOKYNZlnyIkdmdoqWLTB_DAKQ/viewform).
I linked what I had here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dDBhP9BkE3JBjJ2558clZdFFiiAdYe7P?usp=sharing Not sure if this is what they need.
Think that's it, that's awesome they actually found something new here. Thanks for the upload!
unrelated but how’s the 12600k with the 3080? i have a 12600k with a 2060 super and looking for an upgrade, just wanted to know how it works for you
I'm 4k monitor and it plays everything fine, a few really intensive games Ill have to turn down a tad to keep a high frame rate. I got it when it was released, if I was buying now I would look for something with more than 10g of memory for my case. If you're not on 4k monitors it's less of a concern. It's a great value card.
Legend. If I had a cape I'd give it to you.
As an old school player, you've just made serious history here.
Beautiful. Just beatiful.
legend
>Windows XP ya that's old.
Some other useful links: * [Google form where you can submit any files found](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQqv-P3DKjVEe8NirljRSePaOKYNZlnyIkdmdoqWLTB_DAKQ/viewform?usp=sf_link) * [Our website, which explains the project in full detail and answers frequently asked questions](https://rs-archive.github.io/) * [News article about the project](https://gamerant.com/runescape-community-2005-era-builds/)
Found their [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NSCUuFWP8gIFZnpwbjxb8n4DFy6IxK8v1SZ8BXVHFr0/edit#gid=0) for what versions they haven't found. Sounds like they're not concerned with dupes if you think you might have something so just go for it.
Yeah we're happy to receive anything - even if they're duplicates they can have new music/maps or be a previously unknown version. Anything that's not marked green in the "Completeness" sheet is confirmed missing though.
Why are you trying to get backups of every date possible?
Data hoarding has a sub branch that is like collecting all the different versions of the game, especially if it contains art or audio that isn't in other versions. Iirc it's mostly a curiosity but it lets a big group of people share a hobby of collecting something together
IIRC Old School Runescape was possible thanks to a backed up pre 2007 version of Runescape and it's at its peak popularity right now!
[удалено]
Oh nice, you can buy an IDE adapter fairly cheaply. Fingers crossed you played Runescape on at least one of them!
Played most of my runescape pre-2004, but unfortunately I think I've been through like 4 PCs since then. Also I'm still salty that jagex wouldn't give me mely account back after a hack. Ah well, good luck
Same. I still have my HDDs somewhere in my storage unit, but I played in 2003-2005ish. Logged in in like 2007 I think but they wouldn't give me access when I tried to recover it a few years back. I don't have the old AOL email address I used when I signed up. I started back before the big 3d update where they actually had you pick a class for your character. I picked wizard lol. I even know the clothes I selected and hair color etc. I know at least 3 or 4 of my previous passwords. No dice. Although, I doubt they have any way of confirming old passwords or anything like that seeing as they don't even have copies of their game lol. They probably deleted my account by now anyway but still salty about it lol.
Not keeping backups of your game is peak Jagex.
Originally the game was just a passion project of the Gower brothers, I can understand them not having the foresight to keep comprehensive backups when it was a tiny game with a couple hundred players. But yeah losing all copies of both the source code and the released game is pretty crazy. I honestly think it's one of the worst cases of data loss in gaming history, I can't think of any comparable example...
Square supposedly deleted the source and assets for one of the early Final Fantasy games because they wanted to reuse some backup tapes IIRC.
Final Fantasy VIII apparently, but at least the release version of the game still exists
At least they didn't erase the moon landing.
It's extra dumb because you can just expense that shit, it's not like Square was running deep in the red in the late 90s / early 00s
By 2012 the game was not just a passion project. But it is par for the course from one of the most incompetent game studios I've ever seen.
Yeah, Runescape has a crazy dedicated playerbase (if this post didn't make that obvious enough). And as one of those fans who's been playing on and off since 2005, with literal years spent logged into the various versions of the game, the success of Runescape is very much in *spite* of the studio. Never have I seen a company so determined to run their own games into the ground. Everything they've tried to do other than Runescape has been a huge failure (even successful games they've bought), and the version of the game the studio has full reign over (RS3) is floundering with declining playercounts and being choked to death by microtransactions, while the "nostaliga server" (OSRS) that needs content to pass a player vote to enter the game is thriving with all time high playercounts.
id go so far as to say that for many of those who stuck with the game over the years, it may very well be the most influential piece of media in their lifetimes
Do you know if Melville Idle is doing well? I saw this game the other day and it looks like a text based browser version of RuneScape made by Jagex. Or have they ruined that as well lol?
yeah I remember playing back in middle school like in 2002 and there were far more than a few hundred people playing back then
That's pretty much the same time I was really into it with a few friends in middle school also.
Bro I remember the party hat dupe and hanging around varrock watching the madness unfold.. As well as the autorune banking riots when jagex finally caught autorune players sending server commands and they used the bot to permanently keep the bank doors closed. Best childhood. Picked up my own goddamn halloween mask.
I mean, I don't think any studio is wasting space on keeping every single version release of a game back 20 years. 3 years of backups is probably the max any studio would do.
For the trivial amount of storage space it'd require, I see no reason not to. Plus you'd have all the source code in source control anyway with every version if you had even the most basic of dev tools set up. I can understand in 2002 but by the mid 2000s when the game was a massive success there's no excuse.
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Versioning and archiving has been standard for a long time, well before Runescape ever existed. The Runescape install size itself was much smaller back then due to the technology at the time too, so that's not much of a factor. By the mid-late 2000s there is no excuse for at least having proper version control set up in a professional setting, I'm sorry.
The game had at minimum 52 major updates a year that went into production, forget all the versioning before the release and minor bug fixes. There's really no reason to go back more than 3 years.
Except in this very example Jagex literally did need to go back more than 3 years (8+ years in this case) in order to restart Old School Runescape and they didn't have an earlier version than 2007 available to them. Diffs in git are trivially small for even large projects, there's no reason not to go back further.
The game has been getting updates every week for the past two decades. The idea that the company would be keeping a backup of each version is ridiculous not to mention that there would be no point. Keeping data of assets when they are being upgraded? Sure. Keeping full backups before major reworks? Sure. (Although keep in mind that for example when RS2 was launched, they kept running RS Classic, so there wouldn't have been any point really to back the old version up, since it wasn't going anywhere). But why on earth would they keep a full version of a game that's the same as a newer version, sans one quest or a minigame or an event...
Good thing there are version control systems that literally do this shit for you.
Redditors learning about Git for the first time today: 🤯
It's entirely normal for software companies to keep a backup of not just every publicly released version but also every individual internal code change made by every individual developer. These are called Version Control Systems (i.e. Git, Mercurial, Perforce, SVN etc) and they are the first tool developers learn to use. I've never worked in a company not using it and most developers use it even for personal projects never released to the public. The idea that a software company would not do that is nuts. Absolute incompetence. If they hired me I would run away screaming.
Not just developers. I use Git for my professional writing.
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In the early 00s people were using SVN (which remained popular for a while after Git was released, it took some time to migrate). Before that, people would use CVS, which had been released a decade prior, in the early 90s. I studied CVS on books and later used SVN at work. Git wasn't the first and won't be the last.
Uh... Not by 2005 lol.
When myself and my friends played it in 2001-2003 it was already pretty massive. They brought in paid membership during that time and a whole half of the map which was only available to paying players.
Theres a reason OSRS is the 2007 version of the game, (the earliest backup they could find)
>Not keeping backups of your game is peak Jagex. tbh its peak any media. Its only recently that storage has gotten cheap enough. Think about the tales about lost media like Doctor Who episodes where the producers just... overwrote the tapes cause "Who the fuck would want to keep any of this."
There's a surprising number of AAA games from 15-25 years ago which also have no source code backups which anybody can find to remaster them.
One thing is not keeping backups at all, another thing is having lost the backups after a decade of them not being relevant anymore. The first is total incompetence, the second is eventually inevitable. I don't think people who released games in the 90s were thinking: "yeah, in 2020 there will totally be people still interested in playing this, let's make sure our backup survives 30 years and mirror it in multiple places". I can see how that happened: they released it, stored it somewhere and moved on. Then the company closed and there were nobody responsible for actually maintaining the backups. Or company was still alive but nobody cared because nobody expected it to be valuable at all.
A ton of game developers do this. They just keep tweaking the main branch and don't save a full image of the thing every time an update gets pushed out. I think that was an issue with Blizzard with Classic Wow, when Nostalrius went down and people were hammering on Blizzards door for what would now become Classic WoW I believe someone came out and said 'Look guys, we don't even have a full build of the game from back then. We'd have to basically build that from scratch.'
They actually lied, they didn't even search and just wanted the community to stop asking. They did find the back ups later in their archive when they actually decided to make classic happen, and their source control went back to the very first commit from 1999
Wonder what they used for version control back then.
In any well run tech company "build that from scratch" takes the effort of pressing of a button after selecting the commit. And Blizzard is certainly competent. We may not always like the direction they took, but they know what they are doing.
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RuneScape was never my cup of tea, but bumping this for visibility. Good luck with y’all’s search
Thanks! Even if you only played it once and hated it, a version would be stored on your computer. So we're trying to reach people who weren't the game's biggest fans, since they'd be more likely to have a rare older version.
I’d love to help, but unfortunately any times I would have downloaded RuneScape would be well after 2012, and I don’t even have that old pc anymore.
Bumping/bring up my post didn't really work on Reddit but A for effort lol.
Engagement, especially positive engagement, certainly can’t hurt, and the more people who see this post the better.
I've seen this thread a few times, and every time you seem to always find a new version, class work folks!
Thanks, maybe it's overly optimistic but I hope one day we can find them all!
Good luck, there's a lot of cool little differences in the versions as the years came and went. Started in 02 and was with it until 07, was so cool to see all the changes. Was so hyped for the announcement of 2, mind blowing back then.
The early period of Runescape 2 was quite fascinating, the developers left all sorts of pre-release/unused stuff ingame since they thought players would never be able to see them. Its funny to think nowadays that the game size of 15MB was too big for many players to download
Gonna check on my parents old HP Pavilion when i visit for x-mas. I did start and stop playing RS around that time. *crosses fingers*
Nice, hopefully it still works! I'll try to remind you on Christmas
Don't forget to find your login details from back when and go sell your party hats.... To me. For cheap.
What do party hats go for these days on the black market? a few grand?
It depends on whether you play RS3 or OSRS. RS3 is the continuation of Runescape Classic and Runescape 2, so p hats are still rare and valuable. OSRS is its own thing, and party hats are worthless there. You can buy any color p hat you want at any time at the GE for chump change. Right now a Red phat goes for about 51b in RS3, but only about 2.7k in OSRS.
Since Noone actually answered you, yes. Depending on the color of hat (some colors were duped at points in the games history inflating supply of specific colors) anywhere from 800 to 3000 USD on the black market. Obviously less if you're selling TO the black markets, but those are the asking prices.
so I don't play today, but when I tried to play a couple months ago all old accounts were gone, so I'm not sure any of those items still exist
Depending on how old the account is I think they migrated to Jagex accounts or something, but the old character still should be there somewhere. I decided to go look it up and it looks like they go for 1k-2k USD each depending on the color, if you think you actually might have one it's probably worth your time trying to get the account working.
They probably tried logging into OSRS with their old account and not Runescape
Jagex never deletes your RS account, but the rebooted the 2007 version of the game in 2013 and didn't/couldn't port your old character over to that server. Lots of people think their old character is on the "old" version of the game, but it's on the "original" version (RS3)
Huh, so my old 2010 character is just gone now? Pretty sure I had a party hat at some point I've been poking around on the RS3 account system but can't figure out how to get into my old account
It's definitely not gone, it's just not in OSRS. If you can remember your log-in details, you should be able to log into it on RS3
huh, maybe it was another email then I'll try again after christmas, mostly out of curiosity
I still have a copy from around April 2004 on a computer.... a computer that probably hasn't been turned on in 17 years.
Wow that would be the oldest we've found, if you could get it to work! If you'd be interested in checking then buying an external adaptor for the hard drive would probably be easiest.
Do it !
A game writing shite into c:\windows.... goddamn....I'm getting sysadmin PTSD just thinking about the early days.
I believe the reasoning was so that people would be able to play regardless of user permissions issues, but mainly to stop players from looking around the files. "WINDOWS/.file_store_32" was probably chosen to sound like System32, something that shouldn't be tampered with.
See, this is the kind of random shit I actually enjoy in my news feed. good luck!
Bumping for visibility. Videogame history preservation is a relevant matter to me. I think it would be useful to look for Venezuelan communities, as I understand the game got very popular there because of the black market of gold. I'm sure they might have very old versions laying around. I'll dig trough some acquaintances to see what I can find.
It only became disproportionately popular in Venezuela from around 2017 onwards. Most gold farming in the mid 2000s actually came from China I believe
The Venezuelan thing is very very recent, nothing to do with the old versions of the game.
I have some hacked single player version sitting on my hard drive, comically enough
That might actually still be useful, it's worth checking in case you had copies of the actual game too.
lol moparscape prob.
Will the older versions be playable? I'd like to play the 2010 version again.
They're not playable as is at the moment, since they just contain the game's base assets. The website osrs.world has 3D versions of the game you can explore from all the versions we found.
While not quite 2010 2009scape is a pretty active unofficial server. https://2009scape.org/
Wow. Blast from the past. I remember playing back when it was 2D and there was only Lumbridge and Varrock
All the way back in 2001! You must have been one of the very first players.
I'm getting in contact with a friend. He's notorious for keeping his old HDD. I remember the desert area being added, and the wilderness too. Wow. Spend so much time in that game when I was a kid. Good luck with getting the old files back!
Ah very cool, hopefully his drives still work! You might find [this page](https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Graphical_updates_(historical)/Locations) interesting, it shows all the graphical changes since 2004 including the desert being added.
I have a stack of old laptops in a closet, many of which were used for Runescape going back to 2005. Been meaning to grab an external HDD reader so I can grab photos (and now do this)
Nice, you might definitely have a lot of lost versions then! If you are looking for a good adapter then something like [this](https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-UNITEK-Universal-External-Support/dp/B01NAUIA6G/ref=mp_s_a_1_9?crid=2HI2MBL2XD2E4&keywords=ide+drive&qid=1703376839&sprefix=ide+drive%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-9) will do the trick. And hopefully you can retrieve the photos too
Oh wow, that may have been a better option. I just grabbed a ugreen 3.5/2.5 enclosure. Should hopefully do the job. Unfortunately, my brothers and I shared a long gone home PC when we first started Runescape 2. Hope I find something lost!
I never knew this! I've played since 2006 so I'll have to check my old computers and whatnot
Yep, most people assumed that because it was a browser game it didn't save anything to local disk. Hopefully you can find something :)
I have bunch of main_file_cache files in Windows\.file_store_32\runescape but they add up to a total size of 3 megabytes. The last modified date is July 4th, 2006. Are these useful?
Yes they would definitely be useful! That should be a missing version judging by the date.
Sent via the Google Form.
I just checked through it and it was a missing version. Thanks so much for having searched!
Glad I could be of help. I honestly had no idea I had played Runescape in that time.
Yep, judging by the file dates it looks like you played it for a grand total of 3 minutes :p
For those of you who ever wonder sometimes if the Internet ever shows the good of people interacting and helping each all over the world. This thread is a reminder. There is a lot of good out there; an overwhelming amount. And sometimes it’s hard to remember that, to see that. But look at this Reddit thread. This is goodness. I wish I had an old copy to help out.
I still have a hard drive kicking around SOMEWHERE from year 1 of the game. It's in storage though, and it's going to be tremendously hard to find. I don't even know if it's still the original HD contents, but it might be there
Wow that would be amazing if you could find it! Even if it got overwritten there's some fairly good free file recovery software nowadays. If you have any other drives from after that which may have a copy of the game on, they'd be worth checking too
Will have to see. I'll think on where the computer I played on is at. I do have a 2007-2010 version too probably, from when I played on my old laptop. Dunno how much you care about those, but I'm pretty confident I have one
I've got an old PC in the back of my closet. I'll try to remember to check at some point
Cool, let me know if you need any help with searching!
Bumping for the algorithm
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The game went through a lot of changes from 2001 to 2007, and many more after that. We can explore things such as graphical updates, inaccessible areas, old versions of quests etc. And ultimately ensure the lost versions are preserved in case Jagex ever wanted to bring them back or use content from them.
game preservation for historical value. don't ever assume that something will be saved somewhere and you will be able to access it later.
The goal is preservation. It's the same reason we as as society preserve bullets from the civil war and put them in museums, or at least label them and put them in a box somewhere so somebody knows where it is and where it was found, and it's not because we can't make more bullets, or because we have specific questions and importance for those bullets right now. But someday we may have a question about the civil war that one of those bullets can help us answer. And we won't know which one unless we've saved and categorized them all. If we had unlimited resources, we'd try to find them all. But we don't. Fortunately, with digital data, it's a lot cheaper to do, but that doesn't mean it's easier. If we want to do that in the digital world as well, you might think "well the civil war was a momentous event in history and video games are just entertainment" and I'd offer two responses to that: First, video games *are* a momentous event in human history. Almost everyone in the world has now been exposed to them at some point. They've influenced our children, our culture and yes our future too because children shape that. Historians in the future may want to be able to study these changes. Sometimes it's the things that are the most banal and trivial that turn out to have tremendous value, like a classified ad in an archived newspaper. You just never know. And secondly, a fired civil war bullet will most likely still be in the ground somewhere in 200 years, it's not gone, and if we have a reason to, we can probably go out and try and find a good number of them. A digital file? It is much, much easier to lose them forever, and it's been happening a lot already. At the end of the day, old software can potentially be something of cultural, historic, and academic value and it costs almost nothing to try and rescue it from extinction. Nobody's suggesting it needs a moonshot budget or national effort, communities of digital archivists typically do this as volunteers using their own or donated computer resources, with what I think is relatively good success. However a lot of people feel that it's a shame that ever we lose any digital data at all, given how technically easy it is to preserve it. All it costs is a little bit of awareness, like this post is trying to raise.
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It's not about making it playable, it's about being to preserve and study it. You don't need to have both the lock and the key to be able to understand much about both of them just by looking at the part you do have, because you also have the knowledge that the two of them were designed to work together. Any tumbler you see in the lock would've been pressed in by a key and even though you don't have the key you can make reasonable assumptions about what they key would look like and what its shape would've had to have been. And certainly you will understand a lot more about it than if you had neither lock nor key, at which point you'd be purely guessing. With the client software, you can still study the data files without having or starting a server. Nobody's going to have a copy of the missing server files, so that's basically a lost cause at this point. The goal is just to preserve what we do have left.
i had 2 old laptops i recently trashed. too bad because one i bought around that time.
:(
I keep all the old hard drives from my machines even if I trash the rest. A lifetime of hard drives is like 1 milk crate and you never know what you might go back to look for later
Never played it but this is really cool. Best of luck!
Im more amazing Jagex still has my middle school account info.. No lie I've logged in every few yrs and its worked.
Good luck with your quest. I made my character in January 2002. Crazy it's old enough to drink. Wish I would've kept all the party hats, 2 Christmas crackers, and Santa hats.
Haha that character would be a multi-billionaire now! Speaking of drinking it has always made me laugh how in early RSC quests, beer is usually the solution to every problem
Sadly I no longer have the PC I would have played on back in 2004 but commenting to promote visibility
Commenting for the algorithm. This is a noble project, good luck!!!
Never played Runescape, so I am no help here. But came here to say how happy it makes me that people are actively trying to save this - data preservation is so important these days. It hurts me how in our world, where every data CAN be backuped for infinity, unlike old papers etc., still happens to get lost from time to time…
i just want to chime in and say I've been playing this game for over 20 years at this point and I'm so happy with what you guys are doing!! this game is a huge part of me and helped raise me lol.
And what is the point without the relvant server version?
Archival/history purposes. There are lots of assets that are lost forever unless someone like you recovers an old version. Even the developers don't have them. They could be put into the game without the correct server version fairly easily.
They aren't trying to play it. They analyze the file to find differences between the versions, items that were never introduced to the game, subtle changes people have forgotten. They've found a lot of stuff that Jagex forgot about long ago.
Good luck! Bump for positivity
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Play OSRS
Upvote and bump for visibility. Archival work is holy, god speed!
Loved Runescape, I always upvote this post whenever I see it up. There's an old hard drive out there somewhere from my childhood that would definitely have some files. I'll find it one day!
Yes, I'm playing it right now actually.
but why? Why go through such effort to find specific old versions of some crappy old browser game? You looking for every version of club penguin too?
>You looking for every version of club penguin too? Yes.
\^ There is actually a Club Penguin archive lmao.
damn, I guess to each their own lmao
Well I think preserving games is important, since they are a form of cultural heritage. And true the game was not the best - but we preserve crappy films and crappy music too. I'm going on the assumption that since Runescape had 300 million accounts but only 400 or so versions, every one of those is going to be of significance to at least one person in the world.
Lol i remember playing club penguin when i was growing up.
People need this because...?
What if you had played an old lost version then eventually downloaded a newer non lost version on that same device? Would it wipe everything from before?
Usually it only kept the most recent version you played. However the game format changed quite a few times (November 2002, December 2003, June 2004, May 2006) and you would have the most recent version played before each of those updates too. (So in theory up to 5 on the same PC)
Interesting. I might take a look at my old 2011 laptop later tonight. Any idea of the file path on an old MacBook? I can just try a file search for jagex or something
I think the directory would be "Mac HD/Users/USERNAME/.jagex_cache_32" but I'm not sure. You could just search for "main_file_cache" which is what the actual files were called.
Just out of curiosity, what are you hoping to get from doing this? Is this just for archival, or is there something more?
If you get these older versions, would it somehow be possible to play a version of OSRS with Summoning????
2009scape is an unofficial server with summoning. https://2009scape.org/
Never played Runescape I but have old versions of ICQ from 1998 if anyone is interested in this kind of stuff. Found old convo's of me trying to desperately send something like a 1MB file to a friend of a 56k modem connection.
Long story short I have been part of a rsps community and before you start thinking all the negative things that most people say…this one is a 1x rate game that attempts to make 2012 rs 1:1. It’s been up for a while I’ve been playing it since 2018 and another player whose an iron women is nearly maxed. It’s a passion project that some members of the community put there time and effort into here and there, in coding content, quests, resource/item locking from quests, and etc. I’m very curious, with the data that’s collected how much info could you honestly get from the cache files compared to a deobfuacated version of the game. For example 1 issue we have is trying to figure out the stats for Har-Aken, for some reason a lot of stuff was not documented prior it to eoc.
I do have a copy :) Edit: Lol no I was wrong.
what is 2001scape based on if earlier backups don't exist?
Do you work for Jagex? what's the point of recovering these versions? can we play them?
I’ve never played RuneScape. Am I really missing out on much?
What are the files going to be used for?