Hi there,
I'm David. I'm 24 years old and I'm a developer for a 2007 remake called ScapeRune. I'm not familiar with this forum's advertising rules, so that's all I will say regarding the server.
I started playing RuneScape private servers in 2007 or 2008 I believe. I was talking to a friend about RuneScape who wasn't really interested in the game. He mentioned to me that "MoparScape" is way better, because you can get any item you want and be any level you want easily. I sort of blew it off like you would a RuneScape coin generator story. I didn't think it was real.
One day I decided to look it up, after a couple hours on YouTube, discovering the MoparScape webclient, and finding a server IP that I could actually connect to, I was amazed. I still remember the first one I played. It was "yscape.no-ip.org". It was very cool to me, you would kill the barrows brothers who were mass spawned around Morytania for barrows items, Jad was also in Morytania. It's stupid now really, but I loved it back then. Later yscape would shut down, and due to it not having a forum, I had no idea why I couldn't connect anymore and would try for days on end, to no avail.
I later found a really lame server that was based in Yanille. I can't remember the name, but the XP rates were very slow (for my standard at the time), and it seemed very empty content wise. There were just giant rats spawned in a line that never walked you would kill, guards or something, and yeah I quit on the same day.
I discovered the Silabsoft forum and their webclient, and there were tons of cool servers available for playing on that. I think they were mostly all the same base, which I do not remember the name of. I just remember God Wars was in runecrafting altars and you just killed air, water, earth, and fire elementals. Super lame. You also activated vengeance from clicking in the emote tab which you could spam click near players and kill them instantly, there was no cool-down. That's all PKing was.
Some more servers I played around 2008, 2009, 2010 are FrugooScape, DeltaScape, Paradise, BallScape, GrimsScape, 2Speced, Project Decimate, BaconScape.
This is where I "sort of" picked up RuneScape Private Server development. I say sort of because it was really just downloading sources, adding leeched models to them like pink halloween masks, dildos, wings, and a bunch of other stupid shit. They never really got far. The furthest I got was hosting a DeltaScape leech with my friend with a bunch of custom items and generic shops and selling a player moderator status for a RuneScape account with 99 woodcutting.
And then a new era sort of instantly came about. The timeline to me is foggy, but I remember playing a lot of Arrav, BattleScape, Near-Reality, and SoulSplit. I think Near-Reality and SoulSplit were the top private servers and had an insane amount of votes, fake or not. I think SoulSplit had around 1K players at times, but as I said, memory is foggy.
And then the remake era came along. After Jagex had completely turned their game into a dump, people were outraged.
I believe 06Scape was the first remake to really blow up like it did. There was a lot of wasted potential with all the publicity and hype it had, but playing it was very very fun regardless. And then ProjectRS06 came, which was incredibly fun as well. I'm really not sure how legitimate their numbers were because I recall there being around 2K players online and thinking they MUST have boosted the player count somehow. Anyway, this server was riddled with issues. Lots of dupes, their database being leaked, website being taken over by Dan and changed to this. I believe it shut down shortly after.
And then the greatest thing up until this point had happened. NEAR-REALITY released their 2006 remake. Near-Reality OSS. This was by far the most fun I had on a private server at this point. It was full of players, had an economy, had clue scrolls and quests. The way they released holiday items was awesome, I remember camping monsters for them for hours. Sadly, Near-Reality was shut down as a whole out of nowhere. I was logged in when it happened and I just remember thinking "shit... what now?". There were a bunch of rumors about the moderators duplicating items, so I posted a "confession thread" on the forums after the server shut down, which ended up being the most popular thread in Near-Reality's history, with almost 100,000 views and 2,000 replies of people confessing all the rule-breaking they committed on the server while it was up. It was then I realized I couldn't be bothered wasting my time hopping from server to server only for them to shut down on me, and took a very long break.
At this time is where I started to take development a little bit more serious. I never hosted a server after the first time, but I loved experimenting. Pushing my limits to see what ideas my friend and I came up with I could add, recreating actual RuneScape content, messing around with client work. Funny story, we actually came up with a minigame idea called "Nightmare Zone" which sort of resembles what Nightmare Zone in OSRS is today, except it was with the various bosses throughout RuneScape, and you would get tokens everytime you killed a boss to spend in the Nightmare Zone shop. It had things like King Black Dragon, Giant Mole, all 6 Barrows Brothers at once, 2 Tztok-Jads, you get the idea. This was in 2012.
I created some other interesting things, like server-sided bots, a last-man-standing-esque minigame in the Castle Wars map on a 2006 server, a few Spawn PK servers for my friend and I to mess around on, just fun stuff like that.
Another break in development happened when a server called Arios was released. Very fun to play 2009 remake revision #498. It had its flaws, but I truly believe it was at least a little bit revolutionary in the RSPS timeline. I was very surprised when the source was leaked that nobody used it due to how content-packed it was, despite some of the exploits that were planted in it and the sloppy code.
After Arios shut down I went on my search for the next server to play, that's where I came across the project thread for ScapeRune. All of the pictures of the server looked very promising and I was very excited to play. When it came out, I was addicted and played it non-stop. I loved the idea of recreating RuneScape as accurately as possible, the feel of a proper client being used and not #317 loading xxx, the vanilla feel, you know? After a while of playing and getting to know the development team, I offered to develop for the server and I became a developer for ScapeRune in late 2017! And that is where we are now.
Somewhere in between I briefly developed for an OSRS server called Atlas. It was fun, but unfortunately didn't work out due to real life complications.
Anyway, that is my history of RSPS! Hope I didn't put you to sleep
