When most people picture a massive stadium tour, they imagine endless afterparties, popping champagne bottles, and a completely chaotic rockstar lifestyle. And sure, maybe that was true in the 1980s. But if you walk onto a modern artist’s tour bus today, you are much more likely to hear the frantic clicking of a mechanical keyboard than anything else.

The truth is, touring is mostly just waiting around. You wait at airports, you wait in green rooms, and you wait for soundchecks. To deal with the exhaustion and kill the downtime, a surprisingly large number of today’s biggest pop stars and producers have become hardcore gamers. We aren’t just talking about playing a quick, casual match of FIFA on a console, either. Some of the most famous musicians on the planet are deeply obsessed with grueling, dark fantasy RPGs and mathematically complex hack-and-slash games.

Let’s take a look at how the worlds of heavy gaming and chart-topping music actually collide.

Post Malone: The Traveling PC Rig

If there is a patron saint of gaming in the music industry, it is definitely Post Malone. His obsession with gaming isn’t some hidden secret or a quick PR stunt to relate to younger fans; it is a fundamental part of his daily life.

Posty is famously known for traveling with a massive, custom-built PC gaming rig. After performing heavily emotional tracks like "I Fall Apart", he doesn’t necessarily want to go out to a club. He wants to decompress. He has poured countless hours into punishing titles like Elden Ring, often discussing his builds and strategies with fans. He’s also a massive Magic: The Gathering nerd, recently spending a fortune to buy the rarest card in existence. For him, diving into a complex fantasy world is the ultimate way to detach from the overwhelming pressure of being one of the most recognizable faces on earth.

Deadmau5 and Zedd: The Electronic Grind

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that electronic music producers—people who literally spend their entire lives staring at glowing screens and tweaking complex software—are drawn to PC gaming.

Joel Zimmerman, better known as Deadmau5, is practically a veteran of the hack-and-slash ARPG (Action Role-Playing Game) genre. If you follow his Twitch channel, you know he has spent ridiculous amounts of time streaming games like Diablo 3 and Diablo 4. There is something incredibly therapeutic about the “loot grind” in these games. You clear a dungeon, grab the treasure, upgrade your gear, and do it all over again.

Zedd, another Grammy-winning producer, shares this intense digital competitive streak, often playing high-stakes tactical shooters when he isn’t mixing a new track.

But here is the catch with ARPGs and complex hack-and-slash titles: they demand an insane amount of time. To reach the endgame content where the best loot drops, you have to grind for hundreds of hours. Now, imagine trying to do that when you have a flight to Tokyo in three hours and a press junket the next morning. Time is a luxury most touring artists do not have.

Because of this chaotic schedule, it is actually pretty common for busy, high-net-worth players to seek out a bit of anonymous help. A touring DJ might casually hop onto a community forum and look for a poe 2 carry to quickly bypass a brutally difficult boss fight. It lets them skip the frustration, enjoy the deep lore, and actually see the endgame content before they have to pack up their keyboards and head to the next venue.

Grimes: Where Dark Souls Meets Songwriting

For some artists, gaming isn’t just a way to kill time. It is a direct source of creative inspiration.

If you have ever listened to the ethereal, often beautifully unsettling lyrics of Grimes, you can immediately sense a dark fantasy influence. She has been incredibly vocal about her deep love for FromSoftware games, particularly Bloodborne and the Dark Souls series. These games are famous for their punishing difficulty, gothic architecture, and deeply cryptic lore.

As you analyze the lyrics that you can find on a website like this one, you will be able to notice this gaming DNA in her songs. The topics of an apocalypse, abandoned gods, and isolation are not just some arbitrary science fiction ideas; they are deeply inspired by the online worlds that she experiences through a joystick. The eerie choral music from a boss battle in a video game serves as inspiration for the music layers that she creates in the recording studio.

The Ultimate Equalizer

All in all, games will forever remain an equalizer. No matter how many times your artist received the Billboards, no matter how many millions of streams were received on Spotify – none of that means anything once you log onto the internet.

Once you enter the world of a dark fantasy role-play game as a superstar, you are one more anonymous avatar struggling to make it out alive from the dungeon. You level up the same levels, get hooked on the same rare item drops, and sometimes rage quit after losing to the boss for the tenth consecutive time. It is a pleasant thought to consider. The next time you form a party with an unknown player online and realize that he is completely obsessed with the game, remind yourself – you may very well be backing up a Grammy Award winner relaxing before her next world tour.