When Jungle/DnB Music Dominated Video Games: A Brief Retrospective

Thank you all for watching, I never expected this video to blow up the way it has! To all the new subscribers - appreciate you coming aboard, I've got another videogame retrospective coming soon. One correction: as noted by several of you, Tim Wright worked on Wipeout 1 and 2097, not Wipeout 3. I sourced that from Vice's October 2018 interview with Tim Wright himself, but I failed to catch that the author mistakenly used "Wip3out" instead of "Wipeout" or "Wipeout 1": www.vice.com/en/article/a3pb45/video-games-90s-clu…

man i really wish this style of music came back into gaming nowadays.

Jungle and DnB was waaaaay more prevelant in the U.K. rave scene than the US and Japan. Ask most Americans and they won't have even heard of the genre. House music started in Chicago but DnB & Jungle are as British as tea and crumpets.

Jungle and DnB was an essential part of the late 90s - nearly 2000s "aesthetic" (if you'll forgive the pretentious phrasing) It heralded the end of an era, that 'end of the millennium' energy and excitement of entering what we deemed to be a futuristic new age we'd only read about and seen in films. Such an iconic sound that categorically and effortlessly sets a distinct time in recent history. Thank you for capturing this in your retrospective!

This is exactly why most of jungle/dnb sounds so ethereal, we all heard it as kids playing these games.

It was heavenly. The OST of 'Ridge Racer: Type 4' brings tears to my eyes.

I love the resurgence in Dnb, it's led me to some great artists and it seems like there's an endless amount of it being put out. I still play Unreal Tournament (2004) and usually put some Jungle stuff from this site on when I do. BallisticNG is another game which is essentially an unofficial continuation of the Wipeout series, and it has a killer soundtrack with a lot of DnB/Techno.

DnB is such an extremely versatile genre. I love it (and love making it) and I'm glad it's experiencing a comeback... But damn, I didn't know these old/classic games had so many DnB OSTs. Yet another example of how versatile the genre is :D

Still listening to the Namco Sound Team producers even today. Takahashi Kohta, Saso Ayako, Megaten, Miyake Yuu, Sakai Asuka... these artists have carved a permanent spot into my rotation.

Street Fighter 3: Third Strike had a stellar soundtrack. Necro/Twelve's, Gill's and Akuma's them are probably my favorite DnB/Jungle video game tracks.

The entire Super Monkey Ball and SMB2 OST are prime examples of this. I never knew there was a genre name associated with this, though.

I thank you deeply for publishing this. I'm 34 now and this sounds like my childhood. I didn't grow up in the best household but at least I had the hypnotic sounds of ambient drum and bass coming from across the world beamed into my dome.

i get that the focus of this video is on jungle's history in regard to video games, but i think it would've been helpful to spend a little more time talking about its origins in jamaican dancehall and UK club culture (not to mention the amen break's popularity starting with 80's hip hop), since i feel like a lot of folks just getting into it might assume it's primarily VGM or primarily a japanese thing

Unreal Tournament 99 and Bomberman Hero OSTs are 2 of the only albums I have actually downloaded on my phone that don't need to be streamed. I got excited when you mentioned both soundtracks back to back in this (very well made) video. Great work, thanks for sharing

Cool video. I think DnB is a good fit for the Nintendo 64 in particular - since DnB as a genre is based on short samples and drums, it seems well suited to midi and the limited storage capacity of the N64 cartridges. Shoutout to the Super Mario 64 title screen music. That was literally the first piece of music that came out of a lot of people's Nintendo 64. If anyone reading this, having watched the video, would like more of this sort of music in their life, I recommend checking out Hospital Records and V Recordings.

My current favorite genre of music. Its so good. We took things for granted back in the mid-nineties and early two-thousands.

The style of Drum & Bass in video games is good background music that provides intensity without distracting from the gameplay. It provides a fast rhythm juxtaposed with chill melodies. It fits very well with video games of the era.

MSX FM in Grand Theft Auto III opened my eyes to jungle / D&B and made me realize how a bunch of other games I had played had incorporated the genre.

I miss these kinda tunes, they were hype and they just... worked. Specially on racing games.

Soichi Terada's 'Sumo Jungle' was and still is a genuinely amazing jungle album