On September 6, ChatGPT employee Rohan Varma, who works on the company's Codex coding tool and previously worked at Palantir, proudly revealed Elderwood, a vibe-coded multiplayer game which he later openly described as a "RuneScape clone." By September 9, actual RuneScape developer Jagex had filed a legal notice "asking us to take down the website," and now Elderwood is no more.
"Elderwood has closed," reads the copycat's website. "We received a notice from Jagex asking us to take down the website. Following that notice, we are discontinuing Elderwood's operation, and the game is no longer available."
"Thank you to everyone who joined us," it adds. "For the levels earned, the laughs in chat, the suggestions, the patience with bugs, and all the little moments in between: you made this a joy to build and a world worth sharing. We're keeping the high scores available as a record of what you achieved together."
In asked GPT-6 Astra in Codex to build RuneScape and deploy it to a ChatGPT Site.You can check out the game here (it is multiplayer, so I'll see you in there!): https://t.co/UbLIpSmgQoThe most impressive part may be that the demo video below is an Astra one-shot. My prompt:… pic.twitter.com/n8wXlMIVAJSeptember 6, 2026
As videos from Rohan show, Elderwood was flagrantly styled after early RuneScape, with many menus and items lifted one-to-one and the overall aesthetic mirroring Old School RuneScape closely. It goes without saying that there are several things wrong with it, and it looks noticeably worse than OSRS. But skills like Woodcutting, items such as gold pieces (GP) and party hats, locations like Varrock and Falador, and reams of other details make the ripoff obvious. This was surely a layup for Jagex lawyers.
"In [sic] asked GPT-6 Astra in Codex to build RuneScape and deploy it to a ChatGPT Site," Varma said at the start of this short saga.
Over on the Old School RuneScape subreddit, players are celebrating the death of Elderwood like it's an upstart gladiator that just got gutted in the Roman Colosseum after insulting all their mothers.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/mmo/chatgpt-employee-makes-a-runescape-clone-immediately-gets-slapped-by-jagex-lawyers-then-acts-like-hes-leaving-some-great-legacy-behind-in-a-goodbye-post-surely-written-by-ai
