After more than 10 years of game journalism, one of my favorite parts of this job is seeing all the ridiculous challenges that gamers think up and pursue for no particular reason, from 1,700-hour speedruns to absurd game-breaking corner cases in Baldur's Gate 3. Timeless MMO Old School RuneScape remains a premier source of this sort of behavior, as evidenced by one player who recently spent a week needlessly killing 16,000 chickens by hand just to prove a point.
I've reported on and spoken to a lot of standout OSRS players over the years, and I'll admit that the chicken slaying from MordorMordorMordor, as they're called on Reddit, didn't move the needle for me at first. But then I started to unpack the work that went into it, the math that came out of it, and the community response to it all, and ultimately I knew I had to talk to them. And yes, partly to ask why.
