My parents never let me have a Nintendo, even when most of my friends taunted me with visions of Super Mario and Tetris and Mario Kart. So it was a big deal when finally, after years of suffering, I got my hands on the next big thing: a Playstation. Yes, Playstation sounded like an impossibly childish name for a super-cool console system, but the controllers looked so cool! And it used CDs! And it had the coolest game ever—Ridge Racer, back then one of the slickest-looking arcade racing games around. It looked like it belonged in an honest-to-goodness coin arcade, that’s how amazing it was.

The in-store deal on the Playstation was the console and two games for $499.99 (ouch). Scanning the racks for another game, I picked up the anti-gravity racing game Wipeout because of the super-futuristic cover. And then I spent a month hating the game for two reasons: because I couldn’t drive the hovercraft without hitting every wall of the course, and because it had techno music. Lots of techno music. Ewwww. Like, why couldn’t they get Garbage and Soundgarden to contribute a bunch of tracks instead?

But a funny thing happened. I finally figured out how to race hovercrafts, and in the process started to like techno music. And then, just as electronica started to crest in North America, the second Wipeout game came out, complete with its own soundtrack. Arguably, the Wipeout XL soundtrack gave bands like the Chemical Brothers, Fluke and Underworld the crucial early exposure they needed to leapfrog into mainstream success. It was perfectly timed, and the people who chose the tracks for the game had impeccable instincts; it wasn’t long before people started gobbling up tracks similar to “Loops Of Fury,” “We Have Explosive” and the minimalist drum’n'bass of “The Third Sequence.” And while it was the big beat sounds that won out in the end, jungle and drum’n'bass had its heyday in the late 90s thanks to artists like Photek.