A channel on YouTube has released nearly 50 songs covered in the style of Old School RuneScape‘s nostalgic soundtrack, with covers ranging from Nirvana and 100 Gecs, to Spongebob Squarepants and Brockhampton.
Active since November 2023, YouTube channel Unpragmatic Covers has released 46 RuneScape-style covers of popular songs.
These covers pull from all sorts of genres, including RuneScape renditions of songs by 100 Gecs, Brockhampton, Muse, and Pixies to name a few. Movies and other games have also been given the RuneScape treatment, including tracks from Mortal Kombat, Ice Age, and Doom.
Some of the more recent covers include Ween‘s ‘Ocean Man’, Käärijä‘s Eurovision entry ‘Cha Cha Cha’, and Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’.
You can check out some of our favourites below.
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Besides the music, many of Unpragamatic Covers’ uploads also come with RuneScape parodies of their album art. Highlights include this reimagining of The Pogues‘ ‘Fairytale Of New York‘, a low-poly cow starring on Blink-182’s ‘Dude Ranch’, and Spirit Trees appearing on the front of ‘1000 Gecs‘.
The channel is the work of RosetaStoned (Sam) creating the music, along with artists LillySad (Lilly) and Micromole (Ren). Currently, their most popular cover is of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ which sits at nearly 185,000 views.
As for how the tracks are made, Unpragmatic Covers said ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was “arranged and recorded from scratch using a MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface] keyboard and Logic Pro X”.
“The music for our channel is recorded in Logic Pro X with an imported RuneScape soundfont that can be found online,” they shared. “We will look into editing a video that goes through the entire process of creating a song and posting that on a separate channel.”
Last month, the channel shared that it originally aimed to “fulfill as many song requests as possible,” but that’s no longer “feasible” due to how popular their videos are becoming.
“If we see requests already on our list, they’ll be pushed closer to the top of the priority list,” they explained. “Band recommendations, rather than song recommendations, would also increase the chances of getting a request fulfilled. Once again, thank you so much for the support and kind comments. It’s truly a privilege to have our creative outlet make so many people happy.”
In other RuneScape news, developer Jagex has been acquired by the backers of Six Nations Rugby.