Jagex

Jagex Ltd. (or Jagex Software) is a United Kingdom-based producer of Java-based online computer games. According to developer Paul Gower, Jagex stands for Java Gaming Experts. The company is best-known for its MMORPG, RuneScape.

History

Jagex Software was founded in November 1999 by Andrew Gower, Paul Gower, and Constant Tedder. The aim of this company was to create and license Java games for websites. In December 2001, the company focused on their primary game, the MMORPG RuneScape. The company then became Jagex Ltd. At the time of the company's formation, RuneScape had already been created and more than one million accounts had been registered. The first tasks of the company were to create a version of the game with extra features that required a £3.20 monthly fee, while still offering the free version, and to develop partnerships with advertisers. Both tasks were achieved, and the pay-to-play version of RuneScape was released on February 27, 2002, gaining 5,000 subscriptions in the first week. Currently, RuneScape has over 3,000,000 users, with approximately 700,000 pay-to-play subscribers as of June 11th, 2006. In 2006, founders Andrew Gower and Paul Gower were calculated to be worth £32 million.www.timesonline.co.uk - Rich List 2006, accessed 22 May 2006.

Operation

Jagex has grown since the founding of the company in 1999. Jagex now has two offices, one in Cambridge and one in London. The company has been recruiting heavily in 2006 and now has nearly 200 staff members, grouped into the Development, Publishing, Web Content, Minigame and Customer Relations teams. Jagex continues to add more "worlds" (or servers) to expand the area in which players can play, focusing on adding servers in Asia. They have many servers in various locations all over U.S.A, Toronto, Australia, Amsterdam, London, and Sweden. On June 2 2006, Jagex added new servers into Vancouver, which gave them a total of 132 paying and free servers worldwide.

Beyond RuneScape

While most of the work by Jagex staff is now towards RuneScape, they still maintain a few other games that one can play online at their website. These games are:

Meltdown
Vertigo
Flea Circus
Gold Mine
Monkey Puzzle
Fuel Critical Stage 1-3

List of Other Jagex games

The games listed below were removed during mid-2004 and are no longer available, though they may be back. In the meantime, Jagex has focused resources on RuneScape.

The past games Jagex used to offer were:

Tetralink
Cyberwars
Warships
Checkers
Chess
Reversi
Go-mad
SlimeWar
The Bottomless Pit, although this was not actually a game, but meant as a humorous animation. It also told you some cheats after about 10 minutes because you were so patient. None of the cheats worked for Runescape.

Footnotes

External links

Computer and video game companies