On September 6, ChatGPT employee Rohan Varma, who works on the company’s Codex coding tool and previous worked at Palantir, proudly revealed Elderwood, a vibe-coded multiplayer game which he later openly described as a “RuneScape clone.” By September 9, actual RuneScape developer Jagex had filed a legal notice “asking us to take down the website,” and now Elderwood is no more.

“Elderwood has closed,” reads the copycat’s website. “We received a notice from Jagex asking us to take down the website. Following that notice, we are discontinuing Elderwood’s operation, and the game is no longer available.”

From the tearful goodbye letter – which is attributed to Varma but, given that he said he used ChatGPT to showcase the game, was likely written with AI assistance – you might think Elderwood was an original game, not a shambling pile of slop and broken copyrights.

“Thank you to everyone who joined us,” it adds. “For the levels earned, the laughs in chat, the suggestions, the patience with bugs, and all the little moments in between: you made this a joy to build and a world worth sharing. We’re keeping the high scores available as a record of what you achieved together.”

As videos from Rohan show, Elderwood was flagrantly styled after early RuneScape, with many menus and items lifted one-to-one and the overall aesthetic mirroring Old School RuneScape closely. It goes without saying that there are several things wrong with it, and it looks noticeably worse than OSRS. But skills like Woodcutting, items such as gold pieces (GP) and party hats, locations like Varrock and Falador, and reams of other details make the ripoff obvious. This was surely a layup for Jagex lawyers.

“In [sic] asked GPT-6 Astra in Codex to build RuneScape and deploy it to a ChatGPT Site,” Varma said at the start of this short saga.

Over on the Old School RuneScape subreddit, players are celebrating the death of Elderwood like it’s an upstart gladiator that just got gutted in the Roman Colosseum after insulting all their mothers.

“VICTORY DOWN WITH AI SLOP!” declares a top post.

“‘Inspired by.’ The utter disconnect these people have to reality needs to be studied,” reads one reply.

“Weird how inspiration just means stolen assets and AI generation of the game itself. How inspiring,” a player agrees.

“Couldn’t even write their announcement without AI,” says another.

“This stupid project got 1000 times more attention as a result of this sub and we’re all dumber for having learned of it,” observes one user.

Earlier this year, dozens of game developers told GamesRadar+ why they don’t want to use generative AI.

After 25% positive Steam reviews, Soulslike dev realizes people hate AI slop and admits “if it looks like the effort is not there, that is a fair reading of what is on screen.”