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

In December 2001, the company Jagex Ltd was founded by Andrew Gower, Paul Gower and Constant Tedder. At the time of the company's formation, the MMORPG RuneScape which was created by Andrew Gower and launched as a Beta in January 2001, had more than one million accounts registered. The first tasks of the company were to create a version of the game with extra features that required a payment via credit card (currently £3.20 per month)while still offering a free, more basic version of the game, 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 4,900,000 users, with approximately 820,000 pay-to-play subscribers as of August 10th, 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 over 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 131 paying and free servers worldwide. The severs are listed by number and go from 1 to 132 (for some reason there is no world 126 to the public). these worlds vary from free to play to members

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:
MeltdownA space shooter game
Vertigo
Flea Circus A game kind of like lemmings.
Gold Mine
Monkey Puzzle
Fuel Critical Stage 1-3 A space game

These games can be accessed at Jagex.com

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. The animations showed you falling down a bottomless pit for a long period of time. It also told you some cheats for the single-player games after about 10 minutes because you were so patient.

The games "Reversi", "Tetralink", and "Checkers" can be found in "Runescape" in the Burthorpe Games Room under slightly different names.

Footnotes

External links

*Jagex corporate homepage
*Members of the Jagex Team