Oldschool Hardcore, Rave
4 - Major
Breakbeat, Hardcore
Acid House, Belgian Techno, Bleep Techno, New Beat
4-Beat, Darkside Hardcore, Hardcore Breaks, Piano Hardcore, Rave Breaks
Atmospheric Drum and Bass, Bouncy Techno, Dutch Artcore, Jungle, Nerdcore, Toytown Techno
It's tempting to think of genres as singular, continuous branches along an ever-expanding tree. In practice, a lot of genres even stick to that formula pretty well. They start in one place, continue in a straightforward manner, and then taper off at some point; a perfectly normal, easy-to-follow trajectory for a genre. But art never really operates in constants, not like that, and there are plenty of genres that famously buck this trend and end up being a complete mess to untangle. Hardcore is one of those spaghetti bowl genres, a seemingly simple idea (what if techno but harder) that in reality stems from one of the most chaotic periods in EDM history and continues to drive debates to this day over what it even means.
Here's the short of it: hardcore, when it was first born, was not one thing, but rather two distinct musical developments that were only marginally related. In the Netherlands and other parts of Western Europe, hardcore arose as Hardcore Techno, a harder variant of the acid techno that had become popular in the region in the late 1980s. In Britain, hardcore arose as breakbeat hardcore, a style which existed as part of the larger sphere of rave music that had popped up following the explosion of acid house around the same time. The two branches developed on their own before merging around 1994, a topic you can find covered in more detail on the page for Bouncy Techno, but breakbeat hardcore predates all that.
While breakbeat hardcore was very much a product of rave and house and techno, its primary origins lie outside of any of those - in fact, they lie outside of electronic music altogether. The real grandfather to all breakbeat hardcore is britcore, an obscure British hip hop style that came to prominence in the late 80s. Taking influence from the hardcore hip hop coming out of America in the 80s - particularly the work of Public Enemy production posse The Bomb Squad - the genre had a distinctive break-based sound. As the 80s became the 90s, producers started making instrumental-focused tracks that folded in influences from the acid house and bleep techno that had become popular in British clubs, and breakbeat hardcore was born. The earliest breakbeat hardcore is pretty foreign to the sound we typically associate with the genre; much more barebones and straightforward, lacking the pumping syncopated break chops, dense sample layering, and rave stabs the genre is now known for.
Breakbeat hardcore's commercial peak was around 1991 to 1992,