Old School RuneScape

Old School RuneScape exists because in 2013 Jagex asked whether anyone still wanted the 2007 version of the game, and 450,000 people said yes. Thirteen years later, that fork is the healthier product, and it is governed by a polling system in which updates require a supermajority of paying players to pass. There is nothing else like it in commercial gaming — a live service where the customers hold a binding vote.

The game itself is a masterpiece of interlocking progression. Twenty-three skills, each with its own hundred-hour curve, all feeding into each other: you fish to cook, you cook to raid, you raid to fund construction, construction unlocks teleports that make everything else faster. Nothing is isolated. A veteran's account is a decade-long record of decisions, and the reason people do not quit is that quitting means abandoning that.

The tick system

Combat runs on 0.6-second server ticks, and mastering the game means learning to manipulate them — tick-eating, prayer flicking, weapon switching between ticks. It is bizarre, unintuitive, and has produced a genuinely deep high-level skill expression that the 2007 designers never intended. The Chambers of Xeric, Theatre of Blood and Tombs of Amascut raids are built on top of it and are far more demanding than the visuals suggest.

The problems are the ones a twenty-year-old economy accumulates: bot farms, real-world trading, and an ongoing tension between a company that needs revenue growth and a playerbase that has repeatedly and loudly rejected monetisation beyond the subscription. The mobile client is superb and cross-saves perfectly, which means this is also the best game on this list to play in twenty-minute fragments.