You want upbeat music? Try Outrun 2006, Nights, Daytona (though cheesy), the Sonic games (my favourite is S3), Virtual On, Streets of Rage, Burnout 2, the various Sega Tunes albums (Vectorman, Sonic, Toejam and Earl), use M1 player to play back tracks from ‘blue-sky’ games like Scud Race and Sega Touring Car Championship, also try Project Justice, Gitaroo Man, the Neverhood, the Terminator (SegaCD), the Monkey Islands, Earthworm Jim 2, Sonic Arcade (the album is called just that), Grim Fandango, REZ, Parapa da Rappa (sp?), Mike Oldfield’s Tr3s Lunas (an experimental FREE game), Cool Spot, the various Patlabor soundtracks, Paprika soundtrack, Super Sonic Dance Attack remixes, Puyo Pop Fever, Amplitude, Jet Set Radio (see a trend here with Sega games? ;)), Yakuza has upbeat music as well.. let’s see what else? Space Channel 5, Samba de Amigo, the Snatchers intro music (SegaCD), some tracks from the Mortal Kombat movies, Marvel vs Capcom 2, etc etc….
Also try italo disco, spacesynth (Koto, Laserdance, etc), scene/demo music, electronica like Robert Miles and Alan Parons Project, Giorgo Moroder, tropical music (UB40?), Jan Hammer (Miami Vice tv series score) eurodance and tons of other (sub)genres if you want upbeat music. I don’t know about this consensus among self-important music listeners that if it’s not gloomy or hardcore or depressing it’s not worth listening to, though I do listen to all that as well (30% of the time or more)