Jagex

Jagex Limited® (acronym for Java Gaming Experts) is a company based in the United Kingdom. They produce online games by a combination of the programming language known as Java and Jagex's very own programming language, Runescript. They host a variety of games, though are best known for the MMORPG RuneScape.

History
Jagex was founded in December 2001 by Andrew Gower, his brother Paul Gower, and Constant Tedder to continue producing their game, RuneScape.

RuneScape existed before 2001, in the form of DeviousMUD. This version never reached the alpha stage of development, and was eventually scrapped by Andrew in 2000, in order to work on a game with a completely new Java based engine. This game was released to the public in January 2001 as RuneScape.

According to the Sunday Times, "the brothers own 79% of their company, whose £2.7m profit on £5.2m sales in 2005 values it at about £40m." It is easy to tell from those statistics that Jagex has truly become a very profitable company, thanks to RuneScape.

Current Operations
Jagex has vastly grown since the founding of the company. Jagex now has two offices, one in Cambridge and one in London. The company currently has 302 staff members.

Jagex strives to make RuneScape enjoyable for all. To do this, they continue to add more servers (commonly referred to as worlds) to expand the area in which players can play. Servers are currently located in Canada, the United States of America, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, Stockholm, Helsinki and Berlin. They are hoping to add some servers in Asia.

In mid-2003, an Australasia server, located in Singapore was added to serve players in Australia and Asia. However, due to negative feedback and high costs of bandwidth (20 times of what Jagex usually pays), the server was taken off after two months.

In February 2007 the first non-english language version of RuneScape was introduced as a beta version for German speaking players.

Related links

 * Jagex moderator