Jagex has recently announced an incredible milestone achievement for their free-to-play MMO, RuneScape. The British studio revealed that game now has over 200 million registered player accounts.
The game was originally released back in 2001, and has since gone on to develop a strong and dedicated following (200,000,000 strong in fact). The studio puts things into perspective with these interesting factoids: "If RuneScape were a country it would be the 5th largest population in the world, and the game's over 200 million inhabitants have clocked up in excess of 443 billion minutes of game time so far."
Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard said: "Although RuneScape has achieved so much over the past decade, smashing 200 million accounts is a huge accomplishment for the dedicated development team and is thanks to our awesome community. When the game was first released, nobody could ever have expected it would reach such high levels of popularity largely by community word of mouth."
"It has been an incredible journey to get to where we are today, and by continuing our tradition of constantly innovating, evolving and lovingly crafting RuneScape we are certain to continue to break records by creating an online adventure like no other. We've witnessed a really strong resurgence in the game's popularity over the past two years and are seeing strong player growth year on year."
Jagex are celebrating with an event to mark the milestone (you can find out more here) and an interactive timeline is on hand to show the history of the MMO.