Pc's had only rudimentary sound, you got a 'bleep' from the speaker. An add on sound card was required for really anything more complex and the Creative Soundblaster 16 was the single most popular choice. Games back then needed setting up, there was no default on board sound, so you had to set the sound manually, and there was generally 5-10 popular choices. But if you had a different card than models listed, it became a challenge, did you use Soundblaster drivers, or the Pro or the Realtek or AVI etc.
Pc's back then were Very user unfriendly, if you wanted multi-player, you had to manually enter ip addresses to log into select servers...
Windows 95 was a blessing and a curse. It allowed easy internet access and ability, click an icon for AOL or Netscape etc, wait for the dial up and multi-player was now a choice in menus. It was a curse because it made life easy, no longer required knowing how operate a pc, to use one. Ppl got lazy. Just button clickers.