If anyone's interested and wants to hear more, I have a mix of 92/93 era Jungle [1]
Some rough mixes here and there (especially the first one) because it was live from a NYE event. But it suits the style of music, that era was so raw and fresh, the future was being invented right there! Very happy days :)
I've been having a lot of fun learning trackers as a little hobby in the past year with a cheap portable midi keyboard and some samples to play around with. There's just so many resources to learn from these days on youtube which didn't exist 5-10 years ago and I guarantee you if you have the time for it you can go from downloading renoise and a bunch of samples to bumping out some songs within a week or two of learning. There's also a lot to be said for the kind of sound you get out of older hardware, you have kids who are like 20 years old picking up these things and doing shit like emulating the DSP in there to create a VST for use on modern systems for those who don't want to drop a bunch of money on getting an amiga 500 shipped to their door [1], but you also have people pretty much just doing that and busting out octamed or protracker. Lots of cool clips out there [2]. If anyone is looking to have some fun with all this I suggest bizzy b's channel [3], the 'groovin in g' channel [4], as well as stranjah's channel on youtube [5]
I can't accept Drum and Bass, we need Jungle I'm afraid.
Genuinely glad I got to experience so much of it growing up with a PS1 and the genre's stuck with me. If you want to focus on listening or have some soothing background noise, it's perfect, versatile.
While not all jungle, shouout to PS1 racing games for their killer soundtracks. The glorified mixtape of Gran Turismo 2 (all versions!), Colin Mcrae Rally's acid beats, everything in Ridge Racer. Really feels like vidya soundtracks peaked there.
I have been going through a heavy jungle phase recently thanks to these mixes I found when investigating what's possible on the Commodore A600 (I recently came into possession of one):
It's a channel called "off1k", and a playlist called "Jungle / Drum & Bass", and all the tunes come from people making music on Amigas in the early 90s on software called "protracker".
A600s, A1200s, maybe others, maybe other versions or variants of protracker, I'm not sure. Anyway, if someone can get through 30s of mix 1 without losing their sh*t, I want to hear about it, I'll keel over.
And, to top it all off, about a week in to these mixes on loop, I ask myself: what is that software? Is that still going? And I discover some fellow called "Olav Sørensen" recently wrote an identical-looking protracker clone:
https://16-bits.org/pt2.php
EDIT: GH link https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone
Which I can confirm runs very smoothly on Arch (btw). It says it's available for Mac and Windows on the site. In the words of the sample from the first track on mix 1: "annihilating the rhythm". Get jungling people!
Related to this is the Buck Bumble[1] theme song[2]:
> “That’s the whole point of it, we didn’t want to do sort of boring techno stuff as well, or jungle, so we picked speed garage, it’s funkier than house and garage.”[3]
Growing up, the music from PS1 games and getting my first computer with internet access sparked my interest in Drum and Bass, Jungle, and eventually other electronic music. In high school, I would spend hours every night searching for music and connecting with people who shared similar interests, discovering what they enjoyed. I also remembered going to Borders and spend hours browsing their library. It was a great time. I still have my drum and bass CDs from back then. Roni Size - New Forms was a game changer for me.
I recall the Wipeout 2097 soundtrack[1] blew me away as a kid.
I had heard some techno and eurodance was popular at the time, but the sounds coming out of the speaker at the store where the demo ran was on another level.
Bought the CD and listen to it every now and then, and Orbital's Petrol track is still up there on my top 100 list.
There was something raw, and edge, that seems lost in so much electronic music these days.
For easy listening jungle/Drum N Bass, excellent for work, search for "atmospheric drum n bass" or "liquid drum n bass". Artists: Photek, LTJ Bukem, DB (some), etc.
Best atmospheric mix w vocals ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXnFZ3anlE
To me there is/was a natural connection between electronic music and game development just by the sheer involvement with technology. And jungle just happened to be very popular and going thru some major grassroots scene development around the same time. Personally, alongside earlier exposure to popular/underground dance music, my deeper exposure to electronic music came from tracker music and the demoscene which of course went hand in hand with developments in the game industry.
Some excellent contemporary Jungle producers, if anyone wants recommendations: Dead Man's Chest, Tim Reaper, Equinox and Coco Bryce. These lads are producing bangers better, or on par, with the producers of the late 80s and 90s.
The article mentions Bomberman on the Nintendo 64, but they made a mistake — there were actually 4 different Bomberman games on the Nintendo 64, and the one featuring Jungle music is Bomberman Hero, not the one whose box art they used (Bomberman 64).
I've recently been into game development, and I needed music which lead me to discovering synthesizers--I was hooked the first time I saw so many buttons, knobs, and flashing lights--and now I've gone off on a huge tangent and am studying music theory instead of making my game. Oh well, it's all for fun.
Does HN have any advice on how to get started with synthesizers, with an eye towards creating a game soundtrack?
Ape Escape was mentioned. That game was released to promote the dual analog controller on Playstation 1. Back then the convention of camera control on right stick wasn't even established, so camera rotation was on the shoulder buttnos, while the right stick was used to control weapons!
Thank you for putting this together. For a certain generation this resonates strongly. For me in the mid to late 90's getting into coding and hacking assembly while listening to and coding underground music in trackers were huge influences that have had their impact on the trajectory of my life and my social circle.
I worked as an intern in the sound department at a video game company in 1997/1998. We had a full recording studio in house around the corner from my desk. One day, a drummer came in to lay down some drum’n’bass tracks for a game. So yeah, indeed the Jungle sound was present in video games back then. What a time.
If you were part of the rave scene, you should watch the whole film, it's full of comedy and nostalgia of those hedonistic times. One of my all time favourite films.
There was a game called “SILENT THUNDER: A-10 TANK KILLER II” my father had in his collection that I’d ruffle through as a kid.
While the gameplay (brutal flight sim) wasn’t that compelling to child me, it had a full soundtrack made of multiple genres that lives in my brain to this day, especially “Monk’s revenge”. In fact, I think it was setup so that you could put the disk in a CD player and have it play as an audio disk. No idea if any of it counts as “jungle”, but it’s very much 90’s electronic game music.
I had the luck/privilege of being in the UK back in the 90s, around the time Jungle and Drum and Bass were really high (pun intended). Those were the good old times with PlayStation arriving, Wipeout having a superb soundtrack, and many excellent artists providing tunes for games.
In case there are people interested in DnB have a look at Andy C ;-)
I remember Gran Turismo well. The Quest Mode theme from Tobal no. 1 goes unmentioned. It's just a short break looped over and over again. After playing this game, you realize if you like jungle or not.
AFD's soundtrack is interesting because it tends to be superficially EDM-ish but still pulls in that jungle influence. Track 2 on that playlist is a perfect example: you have a very standard drum beat front and center, but you also have a heavily-chopped drum beat as texture from the very first moment. The resulting syncopated effect with the piano and synth cords is a nice touch (especially in that bit around the 2 minute mark, which itself is a nice introduction to a broader motif throughout the rest of the soundtrack, particularly the finale Track 24 - which itself is another great example of that "EDM main beat with jungle-like chopping as texture" style).
Occasionally that style flips around, though. Track 15 is a good example, where it's the chopped beat (albeit not severely) that takes front and center, yet again producing neat syncopated effects with the synth chords now in the more rigid role. Similar deal with Tracks 8, 10, and 13, though most of these are less afraid to move the chords into the off-beats.
And then there's my second-favorite track, Track 11, which deemphasizes the chopped drums a bit but instead chops up the synth arpeggios for the same effect of adding that nice bit of texture to the pulsing beat and soaring synths.
My favorite track, Track 7, alternates between a very pure-jungle sound across the board (with the drums and chords being heavily chopped and syncopated, often in support of nice long notes) and brief moments of that EDM-like pulse, to great effect.
And of course there's plenty of great stuff outside of that EDM/jungle hybrid, like Track 23's Harold-Faltermeyer-esque "Top Gun Anthem" knockoff, or the smooth-jazz-ish segues like Track 22.
All in all, a fantastic body of work that defined my childhood.
I only had to read the title and immediately knew what the article was about: that breakbeat soundtrack you could hear in countless original Playstation games.
I don't know much about Jungle music, but I do know a lot about video games, and I want to shout out the Neo Geo game Shock Troopers. One of the best top down run and gun games ever made, and I'm told it has a Jungle/DnB soundtrack.
jungle & drum and bass were magical in the 90s. The breakbeats left so much room for crazy experimentation with synthesizers that you didnt really get out of other genres with the more familiar booming 4 on the floor kick drums. This was also a time when people were moving from hardware to software for music production so the evolution of the music, if you were to look at it from the early 90s to early 2000s was incredible.
What a nice writeup. I've listened to jungle and related styles on and off over the years but I wasn't aware the music had played such a big role in 90's game music!
most of this article is nostalgia. the reason game development use sampled music was because it was always about cutting cost, specially at Sony when they introduced CD audio to games.
And the impact of Jungle in the last few months of 2024 in K-pop
(They discovered two step garage earlier in the year, now they've moved on to jungle. I look forward to them discovering UK dubstep from before Skrillex)
One of the first things I asked ChatGPT when I got access:
could you write a song in the style of a uk drum-n-bass MC about why a fictional brand of study bible, "The Rilla Bibla," is better than others?
Verse 1:
Listen up, listen up,
I got a story to tell
About a brand new study bible that's straight outta hell It's called "The Rilla Bibla,"
and it's the real deal
Got all the wisdom, all the knowledge, it's the bomb, it's for real
Chorus: The Rilla Bibla, it's the one and only
Got all the beats and rhythm,
it's the holy holy
It's got the flow, it's got the style
It's gonna elevate your understanding, mile by mile
Uhhh throwback to simpler times <3 I loved the scene in Basel back in the days
For the adventurous Ishkur also has a nice opinionated guide through the history of electronic music with much of its facets: https://music.ishkur.com/
As someone who was so non-conformist in the 90s that he refused to listen to the music for non-conformists, I am constantly surprised that jungle doesn't sound the way it's named. Every time I expect EDM with Afro-Caribbean percussion, like bongos and steelpans and marimbas, realize it's nothing like that and promptly forget what jungle sounds like until the next revelation.
The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development
(pikuma.com)638 points by atan2 13 November 2024 | 307 comments
Comments
Some rough mixes here and there (especially the first one) because it was live from a NYE event. But it suits the style of music, that era was so raw and fresh, the future was being invented right there! Very happy days :)
1) DJ SS - Intro
2) Higher Sense - Cold Fresh Air
3) Deep Blue - The Helicopter Tune
4) Roni Size - Time Stretch (93 Mix)
5) DMS & The Boneman X - Sweet Vibrations
6) Engineers Without Fears - Spiritual Aura
7) Omni Trio - Soul Promenade
8) Codename John - Kindred
9) Brainkillers - Screwface
10) Dubtronix - Fantasy (Remix)
11) M-Beat - Incredible
12) DJ Rap - Your Mind (Gimp/Steve Mix)
13) Asend & Ultravibe - What Kind Of World
14) LTJ Bukem – Horizons
15) Bruck Wild - Silent Dub
[1] https://on.soundcloud.com/WjQVyJRfYMyQLP3f8
[1] https://potenzadsp.com/plugins/amigo/
[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/C0Pf1bNPgWy/?hl=en
[3] https://www.youtube.com/@TheBizzyBScience
[4] https://www.youtube.com/@groovining
[5] https://www.youtube.com/@STRANJAH
Genuinely glad I got to experience so much of it growing up with a PS1 and the genre's stuck with me. If you want to focus on listening or have some soothing background noise, it's perfect, versatile.
While not all jungle, shouout to PS1 racing games for their killer soundtracks. The glorified mixtape of Gran Turismo 2 (all versions!), Colin Mcrae Rally's acid beats, everything in Ridge Racer. Really feels like vidya soundtracks peaked there.
A600s, A1200s, maybe others, maybe other versions or variants of protracker, I'm not sure. Anyway, if someone can get through 30s of mix 1 without losing their sh*t, I want to hear about it, I'll keel over.
And, to top it all off, about a week in to these mixes on loop, I ask myself: what is that software? Is that still going? And I discover some fellow called "Olav Sørensen" recently wrote an identical-looking protracker clone:
Which I can confirm runs very smoothly on Arch (btw). It says it's available for Mac and Windows on the site. In the words of the sample from the first track on mix 1: "annihilating the rhythm". Get jungling people!-Can't forget Facing Worlds in Unreal Tournament 1999! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0G6WPuss4
-Andy C will be in Los Angeles Nov. 28 (typically plays LA a few times per year)
-Worth checking out: Modern DJs who mix DnB/jungle with "footwork" (musical genre), e.g. Sharelle https://m.soundcloud.com/iamsherelle
-BBC Radio 1, Radio 6, and Rinse FM all have drum n bass shows and are available for free online and through Alexa etc.
-h2k2 had at least one wicked drum n bass set, I wonder if any of you were there :)
> “That’s the whole point of it, we didn’t want to do sort of boring techno stuff as well, or jungle, so we picked speed garage, it’s funkier than house and garage.”[3]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Bumble
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8FQ-N0zb2U)
[3]: https://archive.org/details/64-magazine-15/page/n39/mode/1up
https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Moving_Shadow
For those interested I can highly recommend the "Moving Shadow Sampler Series" mix anthology [0]
[0] https://www.discogs.com/label/396717-Movingshadow-Sampler-Se...
I had heard some techno and eurodance was popular at the time, but the sounds coming out of the speaker at the store where the demo ran was on another level.
Bought the CD and listen to it every now and then, and Orbital's Petrol track is still up there on my top 100 list.
There was something raw, and edge, that seems lost in so much electronic music these days.
[1]: https://www.discogs.com/release/6385-Various-Wipeout-2097-Th...
Add these to the list...
Saint Etienne - The Sea (PFM Mix): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1JrnoEbQDE
Funky Technicians - Airtight (Original) (1996): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwC43QSY94A
For easy listening jungle/Drum N Bass, excellent for work, search for "atmospheric drum n bass" or "liquid drum n bass". Artists: Photek, LTJ Bukem, DB (some), etc. Best atmospheric mix w vocals ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXnFZ3anlE
For a tour of jungle over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgK8h9xRFls
For a famous jungle dj/vocalist pairing: AK1200 moonshine over america https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqRNrhQvYEc
Also, you may recognize Goldie, a pioneer of the genre, who turned actor, turned model, and more recently launched a record label
I still listen to the UT99 soundtrack when I need to concentrate on something.
https://youtu.be/O7TklQTeuSE
Didn't pirate radio broadcast from boats predate Jungle by about 20 years?
Tundra is a masterpiece:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G01DKEig14
Does HN have any advice on how to get started with synthesizers, with an eye towards creating a game soundtrack?
The game's soundtrack is iconic. Dark Ruins is a favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jbNHgmU1TM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhcqYxogdsU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7RRgGSMmjk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy69Heb33pg
P.S. Let's hang out )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn7ZDcx9w0
Soul of the Samurai: https://youtu.be/JAyu7o_t_Ys?si=6RvvXtpsLyxXndCu&t=7190
Ace Combat 2: https://youtu.be/_ylkb5td5K0?si=LJw4bf3JsDilDEnf&t=114
If you were part of the rave scene, you should watch the whole film, it's full of comedy and nostalgia of those hedonistic times. One of my all time favourite films.
https://www.youtube.com/@zorrovian
While the gameplay (brutal flight sim) wasn’t that compelling to child me, it had a full soundtrack made of multiple genres that lives in my brain to this day, especially “Monk’s revenge”. In fact, I think it was setup so that you could put the disk in a CD player and have it play as an audio disk. No idea if any of it counts as “jungle”, but it’s very much 90’s electronic game music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9c6PPlkvBE&list=PLc3TVNLOqs...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POxdm5dW7wE
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CGhBLHfP_M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1mC6K5kqZU
AFD's soundtrack is interesting because it tends to be superficially EDM-ish but still pulls in that jungle influence. Track 2 on that playlist is a perfect example: you have a very standard drum beat front and center, but you also have a heavily-chopped drum beat as texture from the very first moment. The resulting syncopated effect with the piano and synth cords is a nice touch (especially in that bit around the 2 minute mark, which itself is a nice introduction to a broader motif throughout the rest of the soundtrack, particularly the finale Track 24 - which itself is another great example of that "EDM main beat with jungle-like chopping as texture" style).
Occasionally that style flips around, though. Track 15 is a good example, where it's the chopped beat (albeit not severely) that takes front and center, yet again producing neat syncopated effects with the synth chords now in the more rigid role. Similar deal with Tracks 8, 10, and 13, though most of these are less afraid to move the chords into the off-beats.
And then there's my second-favorite track, Track 11, which deemphasizes the chopped drums a bit but instead chops up the synth arpeggios for the same effect of adding that nice bit of texture to the pulsing beat and soaring synths.
My favorite track, Track 7, alternates between a very pure-jungle sound across the board (with the drums and chords being heavily chopped and syncopated, often in support of nice long notes) and brief moments of that EDM-like pulse, to great effect.
And of course there's plenty of great stuff outside of that EDM/jungle hybrid, like Track 23's Harold-Faltermeyer-esque "Top Gun Anthem" knockoff, or the smooth-jazz-ish segues like Track 22.
All in all, a fantastic body of work that defined my childhood.
----
Another game conspicuously missing from the discussion is Buck Bumble and its jungle-to-the-max soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lax-KRVVPfo&list=PLeXmIIlkcO...
bump to the boom to the bump to the bass, bump to the boom to the bumble
Aka 'Some dnb tracks' funk goes to 10... ours goes to 11' jungle
(They discovered two step garage earlier in the year, now they've moved on to jungle. I look forward to them discovering UK dubstep from before Skrillex)
Verse 1: Listen up, listen up, I got a story to tell About a brand new study bible that's straight outta hell It's called "The Rilla Bibla," and it's the real deal Got all the wisdom, all the knowledge, it's the bomb, it's for real
Chorus: The Rilla Bibla, it's the one and only Got all the beats and rhythm, it's the holy holy It's got the flow, it's got the style It's gonna elevate your understanding, mile by mile
etc. etc. Golden.
For the adventurous Ishkur also has a nice opinionated guide through the history of electronic music with much of its facets: https://music.ishkur.com/
https://youtu.be/V_akDC1ztXQ?si=wxMOxlfvaN4IRSnw
and this:
https://youtu.be/iD9xk3SDSYc?si=KD5TvSg4UDMb-sh8
Tempest 2000 was probably more acid house influenced, but there was also a lot of early breakbeat hardcore/jungle tunes in there too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akf4vQs7R9A&list=PLCDB3A4909...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7dQELIwP0U&list=PLD48C6CD40...
https://www.playdosgames.com/online/jill-of-the-jungle/
https://youtu.be/V_b5-RWOfMo
EDIT: yup it's in TFA, facepalming myself.