It was actually reasonably common around the mid 90's for game CDs to have their music as audio tracks on the CD.
I guess there was a point when CD-ROM was the target format anyway but game content hadn't necessarily grown to fill it yet. Having the CD drive play the audio directly (it could be directly connected to the sound card) with no decompression or software processing required probably saved some CPU cycles as well.
I think at least half a dozen games I had around the time did that. Of course most of the soundtracks wouldn't be interesting enough on their own.
I guess there was a point when CD-ROM was the target format anyway but game content hadn't necessarily grown to fill it yet. Having the CD drive play the audio directly (it could be directly connected to the sound card) with no decompression or software processing required probably saved some CPU cycles as well.
I think at least half a dozen games I had around the time did that. Of course most of the soundtracks wouldn't be interesting enough on their own.