Have you ever had the equivalent of cocaine in game form? Astonishing if you haven't, but to those who have you know EXACTLY what I mean. It's a game you could inject into my veins right now and I will be right as rain, forgetting everything that had to do with my life a few seconds ago.
The crowd applauds for me, clamors for my dance moves, I bring out the soft pad that never fuckin' stays in place, and I put my own two feet on the pad and select a song far too difficult for my adult knees. I rip the stage, I rip my pants, I am sweating buckets but I am having a GREAT TIME, feeling pumped up from the cheers and the great music. Standing in the exact same place as I was in 2009, when I was eleven year old and my knees weren't screaming at me. That is the magic of Dance Dance Revolution, no matter how old you are you will always be sweating buckets and a slave to its hypnotizing music that sounds like it was Nightcore before Nightcore got its name. Without fail, you are connected to all players in that moment after the song is over.
I have way too many memories with this game, from the first time my family gathered around a Playstation 1 to play the Magnum Opus of DJ TAKA. The classic .59, blaring through our stereo TV. I remember that feeling of wonderment fillin' within me while I watched my sister and brothers figure out just how to get a full combo on that game, using the controller of course — the pad hadn't made it into our lives until we got the Playstation 2 game but whatever. I remember watching the arrows and pretending to hit them myself, honing my useless hand eye coordination skills for future rhythm game challenges (and surprisingly ONE JRPG game that I will eventually have to talk about, you know who you are), and hearing that mythical piano melody decorated with techno beats and a grooooooove that still gets to me these days. I have taken a break from writing this article for a little dance break as I re-listened to it and it still hits eighteen years later. Yes, I'm not as tired as I was playing this game okay?! I ain't that hopeless.
Anyways, what I find very neat is that I can go back to these songs and replay them through stepmania, but more important I can always go to the comment sections of videos with this song and others and find a myriad of people from all walks of life and all different ages and directions bonding over their shared struggle to AAA the song. A brave challenge for those more inclined to proving themselves, but even those who casually played for the fun of it can chime in with fond memories of the song. Hell, even the songs that one would hate — bag, for example, or Ska A Go Go (I never hated those, I have CLASS and TASTE) — would have a dedicated little group of lovers that would bust out this song to break up the favorite's list and throw everyone for a loop. With 'bag' I remember it being especially controversial due to its sluuuuuugish rhythm and making the screen look like an jumbled alphabet soup but instead of letters it was full of colors and arrows that you could barely read. And because the song was so slow we had to use the special options of making the scroll time faster to stand a chance. When the song was over and you were suddenly thrusted into a song like La Señorita Virtual at 6x or 8x speed and you instantly failed even if you knew the song because the overwhelmingly fast arrow speed was so funny and intense that you couldn't get it together.
Speakin' of La Señorita Virtual, hands down one of my favorite songs in DDR now. But if you asked 8 year old me, she was SCARED TO DEATH about this song because she thought, with her primitive English, the song was about murdering someone for even WITNESSING La Señorita Virtual at all. I WAS A DUMB ASS KID. Now I’m a dumb adult but I know La Señorita Virtual is NOT going to kill me, okay?!
Apparently, a lot of people had this same feeling with DEAD END and AFRONOVA. Kids listening to songs with sinister undertones, turns out, will scare them! A spankin' new premise I just came up with, cite me in your fuckin' essays and shit. If you don't, CHAT GPT will do it for you and made up a bunch of shit in the process, too. Anyways, it's fascinating 'cause out of all the songs in the roster, Señorita Virtual is the one I understand the most in terms of, like, being frightening. DEAD END just made me feel anxiety because it was one of the toughest songs to play at the time, so I can't say that didn't help, PARANOIA was far more confusing than it was scary (until I got to Paranoia Survivor Maxx but that’' another tack entirely), so Señorita Virtual was just… that bitch. And if you listen to the song and you see the cover art you can kinda understand the ominous nature of it. 2MB does a great job of breaking down the original song and changing its atmosphere entirely with a sinister piano tune, darker sounding thingamajigs and brand new singer to sing those (completely unchanged) lyrics lower, almost whispering, giving it that ominous flair. It was probably the first time in my life I ever actually experienced how music and remixes can take the core product and change its tone without even modifying the fundamentals. Bravo, 2mb! You showed the true mastery of the craft.
I'm frankly just thankful I didn't grow up with Paranoia HADES, 'cause that shit IS terrifying LMAO. Song's cool as hell though.
Totally smooth transition but can we also talk about how BOTH Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania shared some songs in its library? A cross promotion, pretty sure, but very fuckin' clever. That brought the unintended feature of people relating to Beatmania players even though they only played DDR. Beatmania, if you don't know and don't want to ask Chat GPT, is a similar rhythm game made by the same people of BEMANI (Konami? I don't fuckin' know the details) and essentially it's a DJ styled game, where you have the turn tables and the little buttons that simulate those funny little funky things that DJs use on their sets. It's a real fun game that I genuinely recommend for those who love rhythm stuff and pressing buttons and doing the whole SKRRRPPT FUWUP FUWUP PFPFPFPFPF thingy on the turntables like a regular Grandmaster Flash.
Well, I think I've said more or less everything I wanted to say about the damn thing. It's a blessing to have those memories that connect so many of us no matter the times, with its unique style, its colorful music and characters and it's timeless gameplay that makes it so easy to pick up and play no matter which style you're doing.
Dance Dance Revolution was exactly that, a revolution. Will there ever be anything like it?
Well, Just Dance, but it's not the same thing damn it.