I’ve noticed on the radio that drum & bass is making a sneaky comeback. Usually not entire songs, but some modern songs will have a bridge or finale with a clear drum & bass beat. I like how younger people creating this music must’ve gone: “wow this ancient form of music has a sick beat, it’ll be cool in my song”. Same way as 90’s music often has references to disco.

I think Wipeout was probably the progenitor of this - the entire pitch of the game was basically “Futuristic racer set to techno bangers”, and a lot of other games followed suit with their soundtracks.

Check out Sean Seanson’s PSX Club Mixes for some absolute bops and a nostalgia hit.

Asphalt Legends does, im getting some free enjoyment out of it on my handheld, kinda like how the ai doesnt rubberband, feels good to mantain a fat lead compared to burnout

Tangentially to other comments. Though not as prevalent in the 90s as more conventional music software was getting more common also in game music. Tracker music lends it self pretty nicely to the sample chopping origins of jungle/drum and bass.

(I know that for instance Unreal Tournament 99 used tracker music still.)

I was recently part of a jungle compilation for the M8 portable tracker, and got addicted to how fun and easy it is to chop and manipulate drum breaks in the tracker.

So in addition to a feature of the time and culture of the 90s I think lots of music composers were still either using trackers or got started using trackers. So manipulating sampled drum grooves was in their toolsets. (As it frees up channels and is easy to do in a tracker)

Half-Life had quite the array of big-beat inspired pieces.

Haven’t played many late 90’s games, but I remember FFVII’s Cosmo Canyon having a quite unique track in that sense, and Parasite Eve’s opening being quite on the bass side.

Movies from that time period also had a lot of drum and bass tracks.

It was a (relatively) new genre in the late 90s and it works well for energetic scenes and gameplay.

GTA2’s Funami FM had some drum and bass influenced tracks. The GTA2 intro movie used drum and bass in a way that’s very reminiscent of the time period:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z5O29rLRnw

GTA3’s MSX FM had some top notch drum and bass tracks from the legendary (by electronic music standards) Moving Shadow record label.

TJ Rizing - Agent 007

Unreal Tournament 99 had drum and bass tracks.

Michiel van den Bos - Forgone Destruction

System Shock 2 also had great drum and bass music.

Eric Brosius - Engineering

I wish this trend of using drum and bass tracks would become popular again, it’s a such good fit for intense/energetic scenes and gameplay.

It’s also great for that cold and clinical, yet psychedelic sc-fi ambience (like the Engineering track from SS2).

This is good read

The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development

https://pikuma.com/blog/jungle-music-video-game-drum-bass

Jungle and many other genres of EDM were a perfect match for the fast-pace games that were developed in the 90s. Most of the titles using a jungle soundtrack were from the second half of the decade, although the trend continued all the way up through the mid 2000s.

Consoles from this generation were also able to store and play CD-quality audio, which meant developers could really take advantage of the entire spectrum of frequencies and sounds that both jungle & drum’n’bass demanded.

There’s a list of games at the end including Wipeout, Rage Racer, Gran Turismo, Bomberman, Sega Marine Fishing

F1 Racing Championship - Theme of Suzuka

Rollcage comes to mind straight away. 90s and early 00s games were full of jungle and drum & bass.

Lots of people make original music now influenced by the genre, like Pizza Hotline

Snowboarding games always seemed to have mostly drum and bass music like SSX and Transworld. And then you had games like Sonic that had a ton of it plus some great rock from Crush 40.