Dance Dance Revolution got put into Japanese arcades on Sept. 26, 1998 with 11 tracks, a metal platform and four arrows on the floor.
Twenty-eight years later it’s in a hall of fame.
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How the Machine Worked
Arrows scrolled up the screen and you hit the matching pad with your foot, on the beat. The machine graded every single step: Perfect, Great, Good, Boo or Miss. Final scores ran from SS, which meant you hadn’t missed anything, down to E. Difficulty ran from Easy to Maniac.
Every other cabinet in the building asked you to sit down or stand still. This one put you on a lit platform in the middle of the floor and asked you to dance.
You weren’t playing a game so much as doing something in public, and people watched.
What Was Actually on It
The 11 tracks leaned on licensed dance music from Toshiba EMI’s Dancemania compilations, plus originals written in-house at Konami.
Two were already familiar in America. “Kung Fu Fighting” made the list, in a 1998 cover by Bus Stop rather than Carl Douglas’s original, and so did KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way (I Like It).”
The rest ran to Eurodance, including “Butterfly,” by the Swedish duo Smile.dk.
Two Kinds of Players Showed Up
Technical players, the ones who called it Perfect Attack, chased 100 percent perfect steps on the hardest setting while moving as little as they possibly could.
Freestyle players did the opposite. They took easier songs and built full dance routines on top of them.
It Got Out of the Arcade
Dance Dance Revolution reached North American and European arcades in 1999, and a PlayStation port landed the same year. The platform became a fold-out plastic mat on a living room carpet.
Konami has put out more than 100 official releases since, including spin-offs built around Disney, Mario and Hello Kitty.
Then it went somewhere games don’t usually go. By 2007, more than 1,500 American high schools were running it in gym class, and Norway had already made it an official sport back in 2004.
A machine that shipped with 11 songs ended up on a curriculum.
The Hall of Fame Took It in 2022
The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Dance Dance Revolution into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2022. That’s the same shelf as the games people write books about.
Arcades were full of licensed oddities by then. There was a Michael Jackson cabinet in 1990, and a Journey one as far back as 1983.
In 2011 a player named Alexander Skularek set a Guinness World Record on the pads. He lasted 16 hours, 18 minutes and 9 seconds.
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