AI-built RuneScape clone Elderwood taken down after Jagex notice

Elderwood, a generative AI website that its creator described as a clone of Old School RuneScape, has been taken down after a notice was received by Jagex, Eurogamer reports. The project surfaced on the internet this week, drew a hostile response from RuneScape players, and was gone soon afterwards.

The tone of the reaction is visible in the quote Eurogamer built its headline around, a player asking, "What in the vibe-coded s*** is this." The outlet applies the same label to the site itself, describing it as vibe-coded. The objection, as the report presents it, concerned a project that used generative AI to reproduce the look and feel of an established, still-supported game rather than to build something of its own.

What the report establishes about the removal is narrow. Eurogamer says the site was removed after a notice was received by Jagex, the studio behind RuneScape and Old School RuneScape. It does not publish the notice, name the party that sent it, describe the legal ground it rested on, or say whether the studio took any step beyond that communication.

Eurogamer attributes the project's own framing to its creator, who called the site a RuneScape clone. The outlet describes the thing itself as a generative AI website, a term it does not unpack: the report does not say what a visitor could do on the site, how long it stayed up, or how many people reached it before it went dark.

Jagex's involvement, by the report's account, came after players had already made their displeasure known. The two documented responses to the project are therefore the community's and the studio's, and Eurogamer records no public statement from Jagex, no comment from the site's creator, and no explanation of what in the project prompted the notice.

The sequence the report describes is compressed into a single week: a project appeared, players objected in public, a rights holder sent a notice, and the site disappeared. Whether that notice was a formal legal demand or an informal request is not something the report says, and the distinction shapes how much of this episode was law and how much was the prospect of a lawsuit.

Several questions are left open. Eurogamer does not say whether the takedown is permanent or whether the creator plans to revive the project elsewhere, and it does not indicate whether Jagex intends to pursue the matter further. The account rests on a single outlet's reporting, with the notice at its centre unpublished, so who sent it and what it demanded cannot be checked against the document itself.

What happens next turns on whether Jagex treats this as a one-off or as the opening of a broader effort against AI-built imitations of its games, and whether the creator tries again in a form the studio finds less objectionable. The report gives no indication either way.