The Black Hole

The Black Hole, (also known as Thordur's black hole), was Jagex's early punishment system back on RuneScape Classic. Players who were misbehaving were sent to The Black Hole. It existed throughout most of 2001, but was removed by December of that same year.

It was essentially a place of total blackness where the players could not move, and were blocked from teleporting. Players were sent to the Black Hole for an indefinite period of time before being taken out. The Black Hole consisted of the void space outside the programmed areas. Players who were sent into the Black Hole would have their law runes removed to prevent them from teleporting out. This made the Black Hole nearly impossible to escape.

The Black Hole Experience


A lot of players began deliberately misbehaving to see what it was like to be inside of the black hole, so eventually Andrew Gower programmed a clone of the Black Hole, dubbed "The Black Hole Experience". Players went into the western section of the Dwarven mine (where Boot the Dwarf can be found on present-day RuneScape) and purchased a Disk of Returning from a dwarf named Thordur for 10 coins. Once a player had a disk in their inventory, they were allowed to go down the ladder into the mock black hole.

The Black Hole Experience was eventually removed, along with the real thing, due to players attempting to scam one another by claiming that "something really cool" would happen if players dropped the disk while in the hole, effectively trapping them until Jagex rescued them. This was before the game system could prevent players from dropping certain items, and almost 6 years before the Lumbridge Home Teleport spell was added to the game.

In RuneScape Classic there exists some bugs that allow the player to walk through certain walls and into the void.

Jagex's response to the removal of the Black Hole
Issue 6 of Postbag from the Hedge (released in April 2006) gives the storyline reason of why the Black Hole was removed.