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OpenAI employee Rohan Varma has taken down the browser-based, AI-coded RuneScape clone called Elderwood following negative attention from the RuneScape community and a cease-and-desist request from developer Jagex.
Varma did not post video footage of Elderwood in action, but screenshots on his X profile (via Eurogamer) show a game with extremely similar graphics and UI to Old School RuneScape. Elderwood further had identical place names to OSRS, including the celebrated Lumbridge, and Varma explicitly described it as an OSRS clone in some of his posts. Varma is a developer on OpenAI’s Codex project, a coding-focused AI tool he used to build Elderwood.
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According to Eurogamer, Elderwood was taken down at some point on September 9, with the browser-based game replaced with a farewell message from Varma. “We received a notice from Jagex asking us to take down the website,” the message reads. “Following that notice, we are discontinuing Elderwood’s operation, and the game is no longer available.
“Elderwood began as a browser-based multiplayer adventure inspired by RuneScape. In a few short days, it grew into a shared world of exploration, skilling, quests, trading and duels—shaped along the way by the people who showed up to play and share ideas.”
Some interesting stats about the RuneScape clone I launched yesterday (https://t.co/UbLIpSmgQo):- 3,000 people created accounts- At our peak, we had 55 concurrent users player and we’re averaging about 35 online players per hour- A collective 1,000+ hours have been spent… pic.twitter.com/dOVTR6s39cSeptember 7, 2026
Varma further thanked players, and said that the site would remain up with a leaderboard of Elderwood’s high scores.
The message strikes me as a bit much for a vibe-coded, inferior clone of a game that already exists. Elderwood’s launch-to-takedown speedrun reminds me of the fate of so many Nintendo fan games, with the crucial caveat that those are typically noncommercial creative projects, as opposed to a blatantly copyright-infringing advertisement for OpenAI. For another example, id Software making a Mario 3 port on spec to prove they’d mastered fast-scrolling 2D graphics on DOS? That’s cool copyright infringement.
I’m awestruck at the truly ham-fisted “move fast, break things” of this particular exercise: OpenAI is a company already under scrutiny for its impact—generally negative—on creativity, creative ownership, and people being able to make a living from making art. Whatever Varma’s intentions with this project, he is a representative of OpenAI, and was using Elderwood to demonstrate the company’s projects.
Elderwood was an irresponsible exercise in copyright infringement-as-advertising reminiscent of the nonsense coming out of the US White House’s social media account, leaving Varma’s somber eulogy all the more galling.
