Just under than 1,000 attendees piled into the venue with some loyal RuneScape players travelling thousands of miles to meet their heroes. Building on the success of last year’s inaugural event, and coupled with the celebration surrounding RuneScape’s tenth anniversary, RuneFest 2011 was grander on every scale with a larger venue, longer opening hours and an even more action-packed schedule for the faithful RuneScape community.
Each of the venue’s three floors was themed around different aspects of the game and featured an array of activities and events designed to satisfy even the most ardent RuneScape fans. Attendees were given the chance to preview unreleased content, try their hand at real-life skilling and compete against RuneScape developers in a variety of competitions. The attendees were also treated to over 30 “Insider Sessions” where the game developers shared the secrets behind the games development, gave a sneak peek of content will be released over the next 12 months and allowed the community a direct channel to ask questions and talk to the Jagex Mods.
Highlights of the event included the late night celebration where players and developers partied the night away, the pitch and feedback sessions where players pitched their development ideas to the RuneScape content teams and ever popular developer talks. The most eagerly anticipated session was undoubtedly “Breaking Bots”, which filled the main stage area in minutes. The highlights video of the Bots talk was uploaded on YouTube on Sunday, was viewed more than 55,000 times in the first 48 hours. The video can be viewed at www.youtube.com/runescape.
The event closed with a massive balloon drop, champagne and the ceremonial cutting of the giant RuneScape-inspired birthday cake, created by the world famous Charm City Cakes. The cake, which was a metre squared and stood a metre tall and weighted over 80 lbs, depicted a floating Citadel incorporating various features of the RuneScape world and proved exceptionally popular with the RuneScape faithful.
