When thousands of people from your favorite MMO's community flock to a strip club DJ caught hitting a crab at the club, you take notice. When that DJ responds to your hail mary inquiry on Reddit, you take notes.
Earlier this week, Reddit user, Old School RuneScape player, and strip club DJ Common_Vagrant (who I'm just going to call CV) turned heads in a post declaring, "It's dead at the club, so I’m hitting up the crab." The attached photo shows a laptop perched inconspicuously on a mixer, watching over a stage of blue, green, and red lighting and tellingly devoid of any patrons.
"The crab" featured on that laptop, as any self-respecting RuneScape scholar will tell you, is the Gem Crab, newly added to OSRS as an AFK training option that snowballed into a cult of crab worshippers. You click on it, whack it for 10 minutes, and then move to the crab's new hovel so you can click it again. The ride never stops.
"Update: Stripper saw me playing, I have been deeply judged," CV said in a reply to the post. "Jokes on her she doesn't have a stale baguette like me," he added, referring to one of the collector's items given out by the "Sandwich Lady" random event in-game.
I've learned by now that you may find MMO players, and especially OSRS players, in virtually any corner of the world, but I can't say I've ever seen RuneScape in a strip club before. Intrigued by this Grand Theft Auto character come to life, I reached out to CV to hear the story behind their instantly viral Reddit post.
It’s dead at the club, so I’m hitting up the crabfrom r/2007scape
After 12 years of game journalism, the story I've heard the most is, comfortably, of people getting into, then out of, and inevitably back into RuneScape. CV played the game in school, lost their original account to a tragic incident involving their parents' email, got back into mainline RuneScape before quitting after falling victim to a scam, and then found themselves in OSRS. Classic.
"I'm back on the horse. I'm 30 years old so I guess you could say I'm a veteran when it comes to the game," he tells me.
You simply do not quit this game. You take breaks. "I honestly thought I was done with RuneScape, I’ve stopped paying for memberships so often that I swear it’ll be the last time," CV says. "I gotta give credit to Jagex, they've kept me around for 20 years on and off, they seemed to have cracked the code for digital crack."
"It’s not very often a person like me would be playing OSRS," he reckons. "Stripclub DJs tend to be old men that are out of touch. I don't think I'm one of them, unless you're counting 30 as old." (I'm 31, soon to be 32, so I'm not.)
How do you wind up playing OSRS at a strip club? First, connect with staff incidentally via regular appearances at a separate bar that happens to be owned by the same person, ask the bartender if anybody needs a DJ after your gig economy dried up, and then stick with the position because it's remarkably safe income in today's economy, even if slow days can seem more frequent. I told you this was a GTA story come to life.
I actually mentioned this to CV, and he said, "I don't think I'd be a main character [in GTA] but maybe the quirky NPC that dies in a strip club shootout while playing a cool track. I’ll take it as a compliment!"
Shockingly, CV doesn't know any other club staff who play OSRS. This is surely partly his fault; he says he hasn't yet used or sampled any RuneScape music in his sets. One hit of classics like 'Sea Shanty' and they'll be hooked.
"I'm sure some of them have played in the past but none that I can think of now," he says. "It also seems to not be very appealing to the younger crowd, I tried getting my stepbrother to try it out and he made a sour face, and he's 20. He said he didn’t like the graphics."
However, I am told that some of the women who work at the club will not-infrequently spend downtime on Nintendo Switch games like Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, and Stray. Do you think Nintendo would agree to let Rockstar have GTA 6's inevitable stripper NPCs play with a Switch 2?
