MMO student places a $500 bounty on veteran variations of RuneScape as allotment of a neighborhood archive venture: “You would possibly maybe maybe well maybe moreover need ALL of the game’s misplaced variations!”

I’m sure many of you out there, like myself, are nearing (or perhaps have already crossed) the big 30, and fondly recall returning home after school, bickering with your sibling to secure that bulky PC in the living room so you could log in and play RuneScape while mining ores deep into the night. That wasn’t my case; instead, I was engrossed in Habbo Hotel (and I was the younger sibling consistently on the losing end of those arguments). Nonetheless, the cherished memories others have of their RuneScape days—like my dramatically edgy Anakin Skywalker username after Revenge of the Sith had just been released—led to Jagex launching ‘Old School RuneScape’ back in 2013.

However, Old School RuneScape has evolved into a unique entity, incorporating features that weren’t available during its early days. Although RuneScape originally debuted in 2001, the Old School variant is based on the August 2007 version of the game, and community members are eager to explore even further back. Enthusiasts have initiated the RuneScape Archive Project in an effort to preserve every iteration of the game from 2001 to 2012, which would otherwise be forgotten. To showcase their commitment, the community has placed a bounty of $500 on finding earlier versions.

In a Reddit post, a RuneScape Archive Project member named Hlwys informed players that, interestingly, older versions of RuneScape were downloaded to players’ computers and may still be lurking on their hard drives. Thus, it’s possible that someone could unknowingly possess every version of the game. In the same post, they publicized that the community is willing to pay $500 to anyone who can retrieve a version from 2001-2004 (or $250 for an incomplete version). According to a spreadsheet shared by the community, it’s evident that the later years are far more complete (with 2009 boasting a 90% preservation rate), while the early years of the game’s existence require significantly more work (with the sparse 2003/early 2004 section being just 5.88% complete).

So if you played a lot of RuneScape and happen to stumble upon an old computer from two decades ago, or even just that hard drive, you might be…