On this day in 2001: Pumpkins for Halloween as RuneScape's first holiday event.

The 2001 Halloween event was RuneScape's first-ever holiday event and took place when the game was just ten months old, so it's no surprise that it was a fairly simple event; no elaborate quest-like event, but just Andrew Gower (one of the main creators of RuneScape) and Rab dropping the now-valuable and edible pumpkins all over RuneScape's safe areas for just one day. In this context, this means all over Asgarnia and Misthalin, as the P2P regions did not exist yet. Anyone lucky enough to spot a pumpkin could just pick it up, and that for only one day. That was all there was to the holiday event.
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Rab was not only one of RuneScape's four original alpha testers who gave feedback about the gameplay experience before RuneScape's launch in January of 2001, but he also created a small amount of content for RuneScape and he was a moderator who helped manage the community. Even though the system of player moderators did not exist yet, he was essentially a player moderator back in 2001.
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Both Andrew and Rab initially dropped pumpkins only manually, i.e. one by one, during the Halloween event by using an in-game command. After a while, Rab got a little tired of having to type the command over and over, so he decided to write his own script to automate the entire process while he ran around in RuneScape, which consisted of just Misthalin and Asgarnia at that point. Later on, Andrew created the "scatter" command, so that multiple items could be dropped at the same time.
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By the way, when these pumpkins were dropped all over Gielinor as part of the event, the best type of food that existed for healing was the swordfish. The game developers decided that the pumpkin should heal as many hitpoints as the swordfish did, so with both the swordfish and the pumpkin being the best food that was available to restore a player’s health, many pumpkins ended up being consumed in combat activities. Because who could have known that RuneScape would still be around two decades later, right?