How 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2004 I played too much RuneScape on a 56k modem that died the moment Mum picked up the phone. A 3D world, up to a couple of thousand players on a server, dozens on screen at once - in the browser, on 5 kilobytes per second. It worked. Let’s follow a single step and see how.

How Cities: Skylines uses a stock-market analogy to drive almost everything in the game

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to find out how Cities: Skylines drives the constant motion you see in a growing city - residents looking for jobs, tourists visiting attractions, garbage trucks doing their rounds, even cims looking for love - and I couldn’t find much written up about it. So I decompiled the game and dug in. What I found is that almost every interaction in the game runs through a single, elegant system: a stock-market-style trading market.

Gaming on jkm.dev

How 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up

How Cities: Skylines uses a stock-market analogy to drive almost everything in the game