
- #IMPACT DANCE PAD GAME TRIAL#
- #IMPACT DANCE PAD GAME PROFESSIONAL#
- #IMPACT DANCE PAD GAME SERIES#
- #IMPACT DANCE PAD GAME SIMULATOR#
“I was fascinated by the origin of the game,” Hong told Poets & Writers.
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In 2007, nearly a decade after DDR’s initial release, poet Cathy Park Hong published a collection titled Dance Dance Revolution, a nod to the video game series that had inspired a poem that she’d eventually scrap, but whose “cultural zig-zagging” nonetheless aligned with the themes of her work. The power of systematic command chains (via rhythmless programmers) compels players into a bad toprock to the beat of a song.

Affixed near the top of the screen are four master arrows outlined in a near-translucent white as the song begins and colored arrows rise from the bottom of the screen, the player must sync each arrow with its corresponding master by making contact with the correct panel on the dance pad. Players stand atop a dance pad with four separate panels in each of the cardinal directions (up, down, left, and right). They eventually established the basics of the Dance Dance Revolution-a system of steps assigned to parts of a beat, visualized as a reverse cascade of corresponding directional arrows -by “having an engineer look at a dance book,” Ota said.
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They brought in professional dancers and used available motion-capture technology to break down movements into data points. Konami’s music game department soon became known as Bemani (an abbreviation of Beatmania, in the way Pokémon is short for Pocket Monsters).
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It wasn’t long before Ota and his group of 35 core developers mobilized to create an experience that would serve as a spiritual successor to Konami’s first rhythm-based video game, the club-DJ simulator Beatmania, released less than a year earlier. Ota needed a wild card and found inspiration in the clubs he’d visit on off hours. The industry could no longer be content churning out the same product for a changing market. Arcades, once the lifeblood of the video-game industry, were on the downturn with the rapid improvement of home consoles. He was in search of a more provocative muse. “Deep inside, no matter how many times I calculated things, I couldn’t imagine that this game would sell,” Ota told Japan Close-Up in 2000. Only months earlier, in the spring, Konami game producer Yoshihiko Ota pulled the plug on a formulaic fighting game he and his staff had come close to completing.

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Given the bewildered stares on the first day of trial runs, one of the biggest innovations in video game history might as well have been a particle collider. Four steps above the arcade floor, the first Dance Dance Revolution machine ever built was the ultimate novelty, a neon temple of uncanny-valley disco that towered over the sea of beat-’em-up sidescrollers and fighting games. In the fall of 1998, a roughly 900-pound contraption with blinking lights, blaring music, and a raised platform that housed two “dance floors” was wheeled into a Japanese arcade, then lifted onto another raised platform. Our series continues today with a look at Dance Dance Revolution, an embarrassing and exhilarating demonstration of the human spirit. Throughout the year, The Ringer ’s gaming enthusiasts will be paying tribute to the legendary titles turning 20 in 2018 by replaying them for the umpteenth time or playing them for the first time, talking to the people who made them, and analyzing both what made them great and how they made later games greater. Art may largely be a matter of taste, but one conclusion is close to inarguable: 1998 was the best year ever for video games, producing an unparalleled lineup of revolutionary releases that left indelible legacies and spawned series and subcultures that persist today.
