RuneScape player finally pulls off ridiculous ironman challenge he set for himself 8 years ago: 'Life? No.'

pcgamer.com:

A common habit among longtime MMO players is to set their own challenges. Outside of something truly emergent like EVE, even the best MMOs tend to become repetitive as the most dedicated players beat ultra-hard raids again and again to farm loot. So it was that an Old School Runescape (OSRS) player decided this was not his idea of a game of toy soldiers (thanks, GR+(opens in new tab)), and set himself a frankly bizarre challenge.

Levelling a character in OSRS comes down to 23 skills that can each be trained to level 99. Each skill level adds up to a character's overall level, making the game's level cap 2,277. On top of this, in 2014 the game added an Ironman mode(opens in new tab) in which players have to be self-sufficient within the game: Ironman accounts can't trade with other players, access the grand exchange (OSRS's market hub), and basically have to earn and gather everything themselves.

Ironman mode makes OSRS a much grindier and more difficult experience, especially when it comes down to training certain skills. Sounds like a good time? That's what a player called Devious(opens in new tab) thought, except… somehow this just wasn't enough. A Runescaper of his skills demanded an even tougher challenge. Something like a quad-Ironman run ought to do it.

Devious set himself the challenge of maxing out not one, not two, not even three, but four different Ironman variants, including the aptly named Ultimate Ironman that is basically isolated from any useful game feature. Ultimate Ironman accounts can't even use the in-game bank, have to carry all their items around with them, and if they die once they lose all their status.

Each of these Ironman characters was going to take hundreds of hours to train in specific