Thunderdome

Thunderdome is iconic in the hardcore scene.
Thunderdome is so iconic that it often becomes a name to refer to the genre itself, and it is the most known compilation.
In retrospect, in the late 2010s and 2020s, we see that Thunderdome, ID&T, hardcore gabber culture, all get the recognition they deserve:
Thunderdome is the first hardcore gabber compilation.
The guys of ID&T, through Thunderdome and their subsequent projects, laid the foundation for Dutch electronic festival scene, now an export product.
And gabber scene is a Dutch cultural product.
Now all of this is recognized in the forms of articles, books, interviews, even documentaries.
And gladly there are journalists, documentary makers who can move beyond the "drug scare", "neonazi" type of articles we saw in the 90s and early 2000s, and also beyond the "Gabber Piet" and other parody like approaches.
Gabber, Thunderdome, Hardcore are now accepted and respected musical, cultural phenomena.
The 2019 documentary "Thunderdome Never Dies" really captures how Thunderdome grew from being a dream by a few boys, into a recognizeable householdname, both a CD compilation and a party, and it eventually became the foundation of Dutch electronic dance culture.
And this was a collective effort, to which every party-visiting and CD- and merch-collecting Gabber contributed his and her part!

Now, if someone were to ask me my favourite CD's, I would not mention the "classical" CD's, which I nowadays find rather dated.
The happy hardcore times?? I'm glad it's over. Everyone was copying each other.
The most interesting CD's to me, are the 5 CD's from 2001-2003.
After all, inventing a new concept once is quite a feat! Re-inventing your concept, and still bring something new, that's really amazing!
Already in 1998, ID&T moved Thunderdome away from the happy, cartoon designs of the mid 90s and steered into a more "industrial" direction, both qua sounds and qua design.
There was a silence in 2000, and in 2001, you had a very industrial, minimal, dark approach arriving.
Thunderdome was reborn!
The "millenium" style was a reorienting.
Everyone really had their own sound, their own melodies, their own kicks.
While the CD graphics were very minimal and "dirty", the music far made for that up in creativity.
X-ess was the compilation man back then.
For us fact-addicts, as far as I know, these are the compilation men: Mental Theo, Weirdo, X Ess. Am I missing someone?

After announcing their final stop and their come-back countless times, Thunderdome still exists into the late 2010s and 2020s.
Compilations aren't really made anymore. What we get since the 2010s are mostly mixed CD's, featuring both "the good old days" sounds of the 90s and millenium era, but also encoming the newer sounds of the frenchcore, uptempo generations.
This too, is the Thunderdome approach: to explore new things. Never commit oneself only to the old and boring formulae.

As Drokz said: "Thuuuuuundeeeeerdooooome"!

Great series one of the best known hardcore/gabber series in the Netherlands. Very glad to own a lot of the cd's

Legendary serie of gabber hardcore:
- 5 is the more terror one, fast & furious
- 4 has many "low speed" tracks but is always a killer if you skip them
- 3 has to be sorted to the half.
After 5 it's the happy core era and i advise:
- 8 the clown (good speed, tracks are not the same)
- 13 the joker (good speed & fat kicks all the time)
- 11 chucky (happy and not bad)
I think 10 & 12 are the baddest ;)
I miss this time when this good music could be fine in any "no name" market. Crazyness and raving was a reality.

Well this is some proper mothafuckin' shit right here man!

wow after all these years. No credit to Mental Theo maybe the the first 5 complications after that nothing...

Funny how ID&T always get the credits for this series. It was actually Mental Theo who as a rookie A&R manager at Arcade had the idea to make a compilation of the sound he played as a underground dj. This was before het ed forces with Charley Lownose and blew up as an Happy Hardcore act. It was his persistence and knowledge of underground music that drove Thunderdome 1 to 5 to be a success of unseen proportions. "Thunderdome" at that time only existed as a rave event, but the lads at ID&T managed to work out a deal with Arcade (Theo did steal the name a bit) and managed the future releases of the Thunderdome series on their own without the input of Arcade.