Finding The Old School Groove: History and Nostalgia in the Music of RuneScape

RuneScape (2001–Present) has had over twenty years of musical development. Throughout the history of the game, the music has shifted to meet the needs and desires of both developers and players. Through examining developer posts, design documents, and game file data, this article explores the history of the music of RuneScape as an example of a browser-based game from the early 2000s and examines how the composition and implementation of music for the game was altered when the underlying technological affordances of the game were expanded. The emergence of Old School RuneScape in 2013 also offers a chance to reflect on how constructs of nostalgia can emerge in contemporary media, and how we might consider player relationships to games with iterative development such as RuneScape as being centered in nostalgia, and also as a form of retrofuturism.