Rohan Varma, an OpenAI employee, developed the browser-based game Eldenwood, an AI-written clone of RuneScape. After triggering negative backlash from the RuneScape player community and receiving a cease-and-desist notice from developer Jagex, Varma has taken the game offline.
Varma did not release any gameplay footage of Eldenwood, but according to Eurogamer, screenshots posted on his X profile show that the game's visuals and UI are highly similar to Old School RuneScape. The location names in the game are also identical to those in Old School RuneScape, including the well-known town of Lumbridge. Varma himself explicitly referred to it as a clone of Old School RuneScape in some posts. Varma is a developer on OpenAI's Codex project, an AI tool focused on code generation, which was the core tool he used to develop Eldenwood.
On September 6, Varma posted about Eldenwood on X for the first time. On September 7, user Nutty103X shared related content in the Old School RuneScape subreddit, drawing attention from players. The user called on Jagex to issue a cease-and-desist letter to this knockoff game, a sentiment echoed by most commenters, while others criticized Eldenwood's quality and lack of originality. On the same day, Varma also posted, "Early today we saw a surge in users because we unexpectedly went viral on the Old School RuneScape subreddit."
According to Eurogamer, Eldenwood was taken offline on September 9, with the browser game's page replaced by Varma's farewell statement. The statement read: "We received a notice from Jagex requesting that we take down the site. Upon receiving the notice, we ceased operations of Eldenwood, and the game is no longer accessible."
"Eldenwood initially started as a browser-based multiplayer adventure game inspired by RuneScape. Within just a few days, it evolved into a shared world featuring exploration, skill training, quests, trading, and combat—shaped along the way by all the players who participated and shared their creativity."
Varma also expressed gratitude to the players and stated that the website would remain online to continue displaying Eldenwood's high-score leaderboards.
In my opinion, this farewell statement is making a mountain out of a molehill for a knockoff game that copies the style and falls far short of the original in quality. Eldenwood's lightning-fast journey from launch to takedown reminds me of the fate of many Nintendo fan games, but the key difference is that those fan games are typically non-commercial creative projects, whereas this work is essentially a blatant copyright-infringing promotional tool for OpenAI. For another example, id Software once privately ported Super Mario Bros. 3 to prove they had mastered 2D high-speed scrolling graphics technology on the DOS platform? That was an interesting case of copyright infringement.
The "move fast and break things" approach in this incident was so clumsy it left me stunned. OpenAI has already faced significant controversy for its widespread negative impact on the creative sector, ownership of creative works, and creators' ability to make a living from their art. Regardless of Varma's original intentions for this project, he represents OpenAI and has been using Eldenwood to showcase the company's technological achievements.
Eldenwood is essentially an irresponsible act of copyright infringement for promotional purposes, akin to the absurd incidents involving the US White House's social media accounts, making Varma's overly solemn farewell statement appear even more glaring.