On Saturday, June 20, something weird happened here in Chicago: 4,000 people gathered in person (and over one million tuned in to the stream) to watch Deadman All Stars, a PvP tournament of Old School RuneScape. Even with my only RuneScape experience having been getting cyberbullied in it by half of a pair of evil blonde twins at my middle school circa 2006, the good vibes were infectious.
Old School is hot and, by almost any metric, in a new golden age surpassing its original run in the aughts. But MMO PvP as a live esports event? It shouldn’t work, but it did, and I got to talk to Old School RuneScape creative director Kieren Charles about how Deadman All Stars came together, as well as the logistical challenges of bashing a 25-year-old MMO into shape for it.
But first, glory to the victors, Team Dino Nuggets, consisting of the eponymous Dino, as well as B0aty, 61M, Sick Nerd, and MMORPG. Well played to runners up the Odablock Warriors, Framed Friends, Westham Weasels, Rhys Rhinos, and Purpp Rebels. My personal favorite player handle at the tournament belonged to Skiddler on the Rebels.
Tourney Hero
RuneScape has a rock-paper-scissors sort of combat system, where every method of attack has strengths and vulnerabilities. So high-level RuneScape PvP involves a lot of item switching, inventory management, and fast inputs. Combat is based around classic RPG dice rolls, and two players in end game gear will tend to miss most of their attacks, furiously swapping armor and weapons until one slips up or the RNG delivers a hit.
Jagex senior communications manager Danni Amos told me that the players mostly brought their own kit—mice, keyboards, etc.—to ensure maximum comfort and that their muscle memory was on point. Much like how high-level Counter-Strike players sometimes opt for a low-res, 4:3 view to maximize performance and focus their aim, I was delighted to see the tournament players were all rocking with a tiny, 640×480 window on their massive, curved gaming monitors.
Amos told me that serves to limit the distance their mouse has to travel between the inventory menu and the play field, but I also find it rhymes with how you might have illicitly played RuneScape in a school computer lab or on the family computer back in the day.
“We actually started experimenting in competitive e-sports over 10 years ago now,” said creative director Charles. “We’ve done mini events like this in the past in the UK, but it was 50 people.” He attributed the Deadman format to prominent Old School RuneScape video maker and official Jagex collaborator, Solo Mission.
Matches are set up like a fighting game crew battle, or maybe a Pokémon fight with no substitutions. Each team’s first guy goes out to duel: Team A’s first player wins, so he stays out and keeps fighting until he runs out of health and healing items as Team B’s second member tries to take him down, repeat until one team’s roster is depleted. It’s a great format, pairing the purity of 1v1 with a layer of strategy and teamwork. There were a lot of hero moments, players sticking it out way longer than they had any right, or managing stunning upsets.
There’s also an added wrinkle with Deadman’s prep stage: All the players had to start from scratch with fresh accounts, with a 120-hour playtime limit over nine days to level and gear up. But the tournament itself did not occur in OSRS’ live game: Jagex had a special instance of the MMO running right there at the theater.
Logistics win wars
“RuneScape was definitely not built to have a LAN setup at all, so it’s actually been a really interesting challenge for the tech team to work out how we make it a LAN event,” Charles told me. “It was no small undertaking. We were doubting at times whether we actually can pull it off, because [with] a lot of the setup, the code expects to communicate with this server, speak to that server, and all of a sudden it’s not really a thing.”
After everyone was geared up and ready to go, they sent their save files to Jagex to load onto this special, instanced version of the game, with the offline Old School RuneScape server whirring away in a back room of the Rosemont Theater.
“There’s so many advantages to doing it. A lot of these online events, they have the risk of DDoS and network attacks—you’ve got to mitigate that,” said Charles. “But also it’s ping, it’s reaction [time] for the players. The smaller the ping, the better they will play.
“So the fact the server is right there next to where they’re playing, they’re playing in perfect conditions in a way they’ve never played before. But now that we’ve done it, I imagine this is the sort of thing we could do when we do similar events in future.”
And there seems to be a high likelihood of that: Deadman All Stars was Jagex’s first time hosting an event in North America, yet it was also its biggest, surpassing even RuneFest in the UK. And at a time when much of the games industry is struggling, it’s heartening to see a game and community thrive like this.