Chappell Roan just compared a rising pop album to RuneScape’s soundtrack, and gamers immediately clocked her as one of their own.
Before this week, Roan had already carved out a surprisingly sturdy lane in gaming culture. In February 2026, she headlined Fortnite Festival Season 13, landing not one but two in-game skins. It was a full-circle moment after she publicly asked Epic Games for a skin in a 2025 BBC Radio 1 interview.
Offstage, she has called herself a Nintendo Switch player who loves The Legend of Zelda, Mario Kart, and Fortnite. In other words, this is not a celebrity who discovered gaming last week. In fact, her latest interview hints at roots that stretch back to the early-2000s MMO era.
Chappell Roan shouts out RuneScape soundtrack
In a new Nylon interview, Roan took her gamer cred somewhere delightfully specific: OG Runescape. While praising Hemlocke Springs’ debut album, she compared its sound to RuneScape.
“Your album makes me feel like I’m listening… I don’t know if you ever played RuneScape, but it’s like… Do you know what I’m talking about?” she said, before clarifying she meant the early 2000s MMO with “video game sounds down” and “really medieval synth sh*t.”
She doubled down: “I’m a video game girl and I love synths and ’80s weird sh*t.”
She’s talking about the original RuneScape soundtrack, largely written by Ian Taylor, who composed more than 500 tracks of a sound wasn’t born from indulgence but from limits. Early-2000s browsers ran on MIDI, essentially digital sheet music, so every computer played it a little differently.
Shortly after the interview made the rounds, the official Old School RuneScape account replied directly to Roan on X: “thanks for the thinking of us @chappellroan, we love your music – if you or @hemlocksprings ever want the MIDI files let us know ❤️”
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