[News] The story behind Runescape’s most expensive item

[YaKoMoS]

In case you don’t know, we’re rapidly approaching Runescape’s 20th anniversary. The pioneering MMO has led the industry in everything from regular content updates and free-to-play mechanics to educating players on account security, but Jagex’s crowning achievement remains its exuberant holiday events. Every year players can expect celebrations around Gielinor to mark Easter, Halloween, and Christmas, with holiday-themed quests, cosmetic items, and festive makeovers for different locations.

Of all the holiday events in Runescape’s 20-year history, one cosmetic item stands out: the humble party hat. Despite having no use whatsoever, the party hat would go on to sell for billions of gold pieces between players, and eventually became so valuable that it exceeded the maximum amount of gold that could be traded in-game. We spoke with Runescape design director Mark Ogilvie, lead designer Dave Osborne, and product director Matt Casey to get the inside story behind Runescape’s most expensive item.

Incredibly, this all started nearly 20 years ago, in 2001. Runescape’s designers at the time, Andrew and Paul Gower, wanted to surprise players at Christmas, so they logged into different servers around the world, went to po[CENSORED]r areas around Gielinor, and started dropping Christmas Crackers for players to pick up and open. Of course, Christmas crackers tend to contain a cruddy paper party hat, a lame joke, and some miniscule trinket, and Runescape’s were not too dissimilar; every cracker would contain a coloured party hat that players could wear, but there would also be a relatively valuable item like a silver bar or a gold ring.

“The idea was that two people would pull a cracker together. Somebody would get a silly little party hat which they could put on their head, run around, and celebrate Christmas. The other person would get a valuable or semi-valuable item and they wouldn’t get a hat, but they would be happy because they got something of value,” Ogilvie explains. “The hat is the junk item. It was intended to be the item you didn’t want.”

And so, most players tucked the party hat away in their in-game bank and forgot about it. “You have to remember, these are stat-less objects. You get no bonus whatsoever for wearing a party hat. Absolutely nothing. It’s just an object you wear on your head – it looks like a crappy hat. Our artists tried to redesign them many, many times and we were like ‘no, no, no, no, no – that is what they look like’. They’re supposed to look like some awful little tissue paper thing that barely fits on your head,” Ogilvie says.

Not long after that 2001 Christmas event, Runescape’s designers started changing the way they handled holiday events. Compared to the game’s modern events, 2001’s Christmas cracker drops were pretty tame. By 2005, the Halloween event had changed from dropping pumpkins that players could eat to a Ghostbusters-themed dungeon with a unique weapon. The rewards got better, too – help Diango clear his workshop of ghosts and you got a full skeleton costume with an alternate jack-o’-lantern helmet. Most of these rewards were also released as non-tradable items, so they didn’t affect the game’s economy.

For the first year, most players assumed the party hat might make a return some day, and the main factor steering their increase in value was an influx of new players, which naturally led to gold inflation. At this time, there was no Grand Exchange in Runescape, so all trading was done player-to-player, making it very difficult to get a consistent price on anything.

Shortly after 2002’s Christmas event the penny dropped – the party hat was not coming back. The realisation that their supply was now finite followed, and drove their first significant price increases. It’s estimated that they reached a peak of around 15 million gold pieces in 2003, before temporarily tanking after players discovered an item duplication glitch. But it was only one year later that party hats recovered their value, returning to 15 million, and a further six months for them to double to 30 million. After two more months? 75 million. By early 2006, a single party hat could sell for 190 million gold pieces.
The prices continued to rise, but they shot up dramatically in 2007 after the Grand Exchange was introduced to Runescape. This is a centralised marketplace that effectively makes the economy transparent. You can set up any trade you want, look for trades for specific items, or just window shop for things you can’t afford. It also made it very easy to find out how much items were worth, which only caused the prices for the rarest items to go through the roof. And as the game continued to expand, with new content and millions of new players bringing more gold into the economy, the party hat remained in finite supply.