RuneScape usage typically spikes in the midafternoon, after school gets out. Cecilia Sinclair, 24 years old, witnessed that phenomenon firsthand two years ago at a public library in Denver, where she accessed the Internet with her husband. After school let out, the library computers filled up with youngsters playing RuneScape, and Ms. Sinclair and her husband got hooked.
Now the couple averages about two hours a day playing the game. Ms. Sinclair recently threw a birthday party within RuneScape for an online friend, a woman in Virginia she has never met in person. Ms. Sinclair had her character bake a birthday cake — cooking is among the skills players can acquire — using virtual wheat she had ground up in the game. The dozen or so partygoers belted out “Happy Birthday,” typing the lyrics in RuneScape’s chat program at roughly the same time.
RuneScape started as a pet project of computer programmer Andrew Gowers when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the late 1990s. Mr. Gowers — a fan of early text-based multiplayer games called MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons — introduced the first RuneScape online in early 2001, then formed Jagex with his brother, Paul, and Mr. Tedder.
The company hires as many computer-science graduates as it can from Cambridge to help improve RuneScape, Mr. Tedder says. Right now, the game is only in English, and players are concentrated in Britain, Holland, Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia, in addition to the U.S. To expand its reach, the company says it will focus heavily over the next 12 to 18 months on rolling out translations of the game in European languages, including German.
The Jagex founders like to foster a festive atmosphere. Whenever the company hits a milestone, Mr. Tedder says, everyone is quick to head off on “jollies,” a British term that translates roughly into junket in American English. In its most elaborate jolly to date, Jagex will soon charter a jet to fly the entire company to the Canary Islands for a beach party at a hotel.