Many people did slag the whole idea of the music off because they said it was al just hip-hop beats speeded up, but mabye some of it was but it definately had its own originality for the time. Ways and means may have primitave at the time for producing the beats, but never the less it was gaining a huge underground following.
Around this time the music had already started to diversify into different genres, mainly to say the Happy and the Dark...all those chipmunk vocals pitched up...yuckkk!!!.....I suppose I`m one to talk, at the time every second record I dropped had a chipmunk vocal in it! But the darkside always had a certain feel to it, something deep and nasty. As time quickly passed, studio techniques were improving and all sorts of beats were flying out on vynil, which was a good thing because one can remember at a time you could nearly count the different amounts of breakbeats used in hardcore records. And while this growth of darkness went on the "happy hardcore" began to develop into something that I will not talk about, you know yourself!!!! AAAAAAGGGH!!
Even though some great records were coming out (eg.Doc Scott - Hear come the Drumz original mix) , all this darkness business was getting a little bit silly. Everybody sampling Mentasm and Predator to the death.....so something had to happen,something had to change.