[subwayclub]

IIRC games made pretty good use of MPU-401 intelligent mode to drive the MT-32 module. The first really elaborate game scoring work on the IBM platform came through the MT-32(Sierra picked it up and everyone else followed - it was a good target for composers but in practice most people heard the music on Adlib/SB), so I would consider it successful in that niche.

And on that note, what I think Web Audio tried to be was a drop-in kit for game engines. Getting the full functionality of Unreal into the browser motivated the requirement for audio processing. But the actual implementation was muddled from the start: basic audio playback remains challenging(try to stream a BGM loop instead of load+uncompress and discover to your woe that it's not going to loop gaplessly, even when the codec is designed to allow that.) and my hobby stab at an independent implementation ran out of gas when I tried to get their envelope model working. The spec has a lot of features but not enough detail, and my morale sank further when I looked at how Chrome did it(stateful pasta code). I got something half-working, put it aside and never came back.

OTOH I had also tried Mozilla's system. That was very simple, and I got a synth working in no time at all with decent performance and latency. Optimizing from that point would have been the way to do it, but something in browser vendor politics at that time led to it being dropped.

[CamperBob2]

IIRC games made pretty good use of MPU-401 intelligent mode to drive the MT-32 module

Very few games used the MPU-401's intelligent mode, actually. Never mind how I know, that was a long time ago...