As some of you have heard and few us have seen, there used to be no wilderness at the dawn of RuneScape. In this thread we'll take a peek at how the grim arts were.

To kill someone, you and your enemy had both need to have set the pk mode on. This meant you could only be killed if you wanted to kill the others. To avoid abuse (switching from pk to non-pk at 1hp), the amount of switches were limited to few. In few cases this caused problems as people tend to be stuck forever either at pkin or nonpkin. With a lack of item banks, training skill was really hard if you had the skull over your head. Below there's a picture of this method to switch into a pker or stay non-pker. Note that there were level cabs to avoid people being massacred from a lot stronger players and Lumbridge (but not the lumby basement for example!) were safezones without the ability to attack others. In cities the guards also had an important role: When they "saw" someone being attacked, they stepped to the arena and joined the action.



Of course the top pkers were recognised even back in then and rivalries were born. Down there's few pictures of the best of the best.





Robin Hood2 (aka Robin Hood) and Erixson were not just the top pkers. They were also ranked really high in combat skills. Because of level limits, they couldn't massacre anyone. The low number of high level pkers caused rivalries to be born. In that pic their armours (adamantite legs, mithril plate, steel long, steel kite, etc) look noobish, but it was the best possible set to get back in then. The lower pic is from the same battle but from a different view and doesn't show unfortunately any names.


Rab, Lightning and Erixson here. Rab and Light were not just top players, they also were literally one of the first players ever. Note that Lightning also is the heart of Tip.IT forums and the first player moderator ever.


Here's RH2 again.


Legendary Sunjon and some Jagex staff. Sunjon was one of the feared pkers and highest leveled characters in whole game. Unfortunately he stepped to the dark side and got caught in the first massban ever, the Runebot massban.

Of course the big things are the most important ones. Who cares about the single fights when you can get wars. Here's few pictures from a legendary clan Gladz.




Not as big as current wars with at tops hundreds of players smacking each other. Not as many different armour variations. Not same kind of organized groups. Still, this was the fun part of rs pkin. In current world of RS2 it wouldn't work as well as it did, but that sure was fun. Of course time makes memories golden, but with a hand on my heart I can swear that having my first newbie before level requirements and pkin people with it at cabbage fields, luring them to Lumbridge basement and tanking against groups were one of the best memories I got from the early days of RuneScape.

Very cool. But could you possibly edit out some of the profanity in those pictures? :$

Hahaha, I remember that.

Might want to add in the role of guards in cities such as Varrock during this time.

Pity you don't have a screenshot of when people use to crowd along the area just out of the Lumbridge safezone.

Interesting to see screenshots like that once again :-P

Cropped few pics so the comments can't be seen anymore. Also mentioned the guards there now

Lmao i remember this when i first saw my brother playing
Very nice pics, didn't think of getting any myself

Hey its rs classic i loved that game nice pics!

I think there's a list of the first ever RuneScape players, I'll try to find it.

Lol I made a name in rs classic like 2years ago to check it out. I tried at like the lowest lvl to fight someone else my lvl. It was horrible lol I died. I remember I had to ask someone how to log out cause I couldn't even figure it out lol. I am glad i came around after claSSIC.

Classic was quite different from now. I've heard plenty of stories of weird things they had back than compared to now. I'm no that old school ={ 2004 ftl

That's really interesting, do you know what combat level those top PKers were in those days?

never knew about that !

Alchemon and Sandytrain hit 100 combat around the same time when wilderness was released. They weren't pkers, tho. I'd say the top pkers were somewhere around 80-90. The training was a lot harder as there were no good items to train with, even the best training spots were horrible xp and being a pker always reduces your chances to train or at least made it harder.

I remember that And cabbage wars lmaoo

I'm sure glad I did not play RS back then, the game play might've discouraged me from continuing my member ship

nice vintage photos though, classic RS. (or should I say, "RS Classic?") hah

i remember i used to be a black pure on my nub

Nice. Although I'm not too sure I would've liked it if I got stuck as a pker.

Still profanity in it And it looked fun and weird at the same time.

Hmm this must have sucked big time if you got stuck on pk mode all the time.

awww the good old days:( i still remember my current main rex432 in there:P

Cool i never played back then

I heard about out-of-wilderness pking, was a very long time ago in the RS world though, before alot of people played.