Bink videos were the hot shit for games for a while, and RAD Game Tools started a whole era of standardization for multimedia processes that culminated in DirectX. With computing power increasing along with the market share of PCs, using standardized libraries for audio & video drivers became the sensible thing to do. Previously you had games programmers eking out every iota of performance by fine tuning that stuff at an assembly level (the Origin games with their memory managers and Chris Sawyer’s amazing if kind of insane feat in creating Transport Tycoon come to mind).

It’s probably going to be cold hamberders again anyway.

God, the first music files I downloaded were MIDI and Soundtracker .MOD files using a 14,400k modem & BBS. That was after upgrading from my PC/XT to a 486/SX 25…those were the days.