London 2008

Real Life Meeting

London 2008
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Location	London, England
Dates	12 January 2008
No. of Attendees	7
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London 2008 refers to the first Real Life Meeting event hosted by the RuneScape clan the Wilderness Guardians. It took place on 12 January 2008, and had 7 WG members and 2 guests present. Throughout the day the clan performed some pranks, visited Jagex's London headquarters, and consumed drugs and alcohol. As the first example of WG's real life meetings, the event gained popularity in the wider RuneScape community and served as a showcase for the clan's developing community aspect.

The Meeting

The meeting was centred around His Lordship's holiday to Europe in early 2008, and he took the opportunity to organise a meet-up between 7 other WG members:

• Cameronm123
• Groedius
• His Lordship
• Holykier
• Jaxx456
• Snowzak
• Stokenut

Two of Jaxx456's real life friends also attended, bringing the total to 9 persons - though the two guests left fairly early on.

On the morning of 12 January 2008, WG organised at Admiral Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square. The event was divided into three sections, starting with some "RuneScape pranks": members perfomed game emotes, reinacted the home teleport on a busy London street, asked random people for directions to "Falador", and attempted to sell paper partyhats (which in-game were rare items worth millions of coins). Some footage was also recorded for a potential Recruitment Video, though it was ultimately not used.

After, WG attempted to visit Jagex's London office - however they found it closed as it was a Saturday. Nonetheless they were able to enter the premises through a car park entrance. While exploring, His Lordship inadvertently set off a disabled toilet alarm - thinking this was a security alarm, this caused a slight panic and the clan made a quick escape from the building. Jagex employees working at the office were unaware of the visit until they watched His Lordship's video the following week, and found it humourous.^{[citation needed]}

In the evening the members purchased marijuana and vodka from the Piccadilly area, though this began with an unsuccessful attempt where Snowzak attempted to obtain marijuana but purchased tea leaves by mistake - leading to the creation of the WG in-joke "Got tea?". After drinking and smoking, the clan made their way to a Burger King restaurant. Here, Stokenut was escorted off the premises, became ill upon a reaction to the drugs and alcohol, and had to be taken to a hospital via ambulance.

Aftermath

A video of the meeting was produced by His Lordship and released on 24 February 2008 - though a lot of footage had to be cut due to the 100MB file size restriction in place on YouTube at the time. Despite being initially popular, Jagex requested that His Lordship remove the video as it could potentially encourage other players to meet up unsafely in real life. His Lordship complied with the request at the time, but re-released the video in 2011 after two RuneFest events had been hosted by Jagex. The video was again made private at a later date, but reuploaded to a clan channel run by Vio in 2018.

The meeting was covered on the Across the Ditch podcast in 2020, featuring attendees Stokenut and Groedius: