A rhythm game asks one question, over and over: did you press the button on the beat? The game knows when each note in the music falls; it compares the moment of each press with that moment, grades the gap, and lets the grade change what happens next. PaRappa the Rapper (1996) did it with four versions of each song on the CD, swapping to a worse one when the player slipped. Konami’s arcade games turned the notes into a scrolling chart and the button into a turntable, a dance mat or a plastic guitar. By 2010 Edge could say that “the scrolling note charts, coloured prompts and peripherals that define modern rhythm-gaming are all Konami creations”, and that the Japanese games were played for their “fractional hit-windows for notes”.
Fast facts
- The mechanic: button presses judged against the timing of a piece of music, with a grade for each one and feedback in the score, the pictures or the music itself.
- First game the sources treat as the origin: PaRappa the Rapper (Sony, 1996), by Masaya Matsuura.
- Ancestors the period press named: Milton Bradley’s Simon (1978), Quest for Fame (Virtual Music), Sega’s Digital Dance Mix.
- Genre name: “rhythm action games”, reported by Edge as a Japanese press label in December 1997.
- Format-setter: Konami’s Bemani games: beatmania (1997), Dance Dance Revolution (1998), GuitarFreaks, DrumMania, Pop’n Music.
- Western turn: Harmonix’s Guitar Hero (2005), whose founder credits PaRappa.
PaRappa the Rapper
Computer and Video Games reviewed the UK release in September 1997 and described how it worked. An onion head “moves across the rhythm bar at the top of the screen, passing symbols relating to the lyrics. Now a little PaRappa head passes over the symbols, and you have to hit the corresponding buttons in time.” Judgement was a four-step meter: Cool, Good, Bad and Awful. The player had to stay at Good or above to finish a stage; reaching Cool made the tutor “pop-off”, leaving the player to freestyle.
Two months later Matsuura told the magazine how the judgement reached the player’s ears. The soundtrack was streamed from CD, not played by the sound chip: “It has four different tracks of the same type, for cool, good, bad and awful. Play ‘cool’ and the other tracks aren’t heard. If the score system decides you’re not good, this cool track disappears and another comes in.” He had been composing on computers since 1983, and had already tried the track-switching idea in a prototype on Philips’ CD-i.
The reviewers reached for older games to explain it. C&VG: “PaRappa’s roots go further back to the electronic Simon game by MB, and schoolyard game Follow the Leader.” Jez San of Argonaut, reviewing it for Edge in January 1998, offered “Take ‘Simon’, the old electronic melody pattern game, add an ounce of Frogger for timing puzzles”. His one design complaint was the problem later games fixed: “you can’t tap the buttons along with the rapping, because they don’t always match up with the visual button sequences”.
Whether it was a game at all was a live question. C&VG’s answer was “neither. It’s an experience!”; Matsuura said he did not care.
The Japanese wave, 1997–2000
Bust a Move (Enix, developed by Metro) appeared in Edge’s Prescreen pages in December 1997 as “the latest in a new genre to emerge in Japan, currently being labelled by the local press as ‘rhythm action games’”. Its inputs were strings of commands entered “in a similar fashion to how specials are unleashed in beat ’em ups”. Metro’s designer Noburo Shirasu told Edge the project had started in October 1996 and been beaten to market by PaRappa: “Bust-a-Move is often compared to PaRappa because it is based on a similar rhythm system.” It reached the West as Bust a Groove.
beatmania (Konami, 1997) put the judgement on a peripheral. Edge’s Japan column in September 1998 described “a literally revolutionary ‘turntable’ controller which players use to scratch and cut along with a dance track”, a following among “the chic young gamers of Tokyo’s trendy Shibuya district”, and a PlayStation conversion with a ¥5,800 turntable made by ASCII. The caption tied it back: “Beatmania’s gameplay follows that of Parappa the Rapper to a degree, as players attempt to match an oncoming flow of ‘digital-sheetmusic’ instructions.” That oncoming flow, notes scrolling towards a line where the press is judged, is the form most rhythm games have used since.
Dance Dance Revolution (Konami, 1998) moved the buttons under the feet, on a dance mat. Edge noted the home floor controller in August 1999 at ¥5,500, adding: “They said it would never take off in Europe, and it certainly hasn’t on anything like the scale it did in Japan.”
Space Channel 5 (Sega, 1999) came from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who had produced Sega Rally in the arcades and had just set up Sega’s Software R&D No. 9 to make a rhythm-action game for the Dreamcast. Edge described the input: “you beat out the tempo of the music with one finger while executing different dance commands with the other hand - the closer you get to following the instructions in time, the more characters join in the dancing.” Mizuguchi’s stated audience was “people who don’t play games”, and Edge judged it “a lot easier than Bust A Groove”.
Samba de Amigo (Sega, 2000) shipped on Dreamcast with motion-sensing maracas, for ¥13,600 in Japan. Edge’s review: “six coloured circles inform the player of the height and position at which the maracas must be shaken”, to tunes from the “Macarena” to a rock “Take on Me”; it credited Yuji Naka with the structure that kept people playing. Edge called it “another Bemani title”, using Konami’s brand as the name of the genre.
What Konami built
Edge’s 2010 retrospective summarised the division’s output. Konami’s Games & Music Division, “later renamed the Bemani division in a nod to its breakthrough game, was the original pioneer of peripheral-led music gaming”, and before 2000 it had shipped GuitarFreaks, DrumMania, Dance Dance Revolution and Pop’n Music. The appeal of Japanese rhythm-action, Edge thought, had “little to do with the actual songs, and everything to do with the primal twitch-gaming rush of matching impossibly fast patterns”.
The Western turn
Harmonix founder Alex Rigopulos told Edge in 2010 that his studio’s move from music software into games “began with Parappa The Rapper”: “it wasn’t the first rhythm-action game, but it was the first great one, and it altered Harmonix’s trajectory.” He had seen Virtual Music’s Quest for Fame and not found it compelling, and found Konami’s games “sorely deficient in a number of key respects: the gameplay was shallow, the visual design was uninspired, the music selection and sound quality was poor”. Harmonix’s own Frequency “sold barely any copies”.
Guitar Hero (2005) took Konami’s arcade idea of a guitar game, with its scrolling chart, to a Western rock soundtrack and a controller with “five multi-coloured fret buttons”. Edge’s report on the game’s stage at the 2006 Download festival noted that Harmonix “has already branded its titles ‘superstar simulators’”, and that Guitar Hero “has brought music games out of the arcades and living rooms and into a more public arena”. The 2010 feature gave the peak: almost two million rhythm games sold in one month, with Guitar Hero 3 in November 2007, and $1.19 billion spent on music games in North America in a single month of 2008. By then, it said, sales were falling faster than the recession could explain, and “there’s a feeling that we may have seen the genre’s peak”.
Sources
- Computer and Video Games issue 190, September 1997: PaRappa the Rapper review (the rhythm bar, the four-step meter, Simon and Follow the Leader, “an experience”).
- Computer and Video Games issue 192, November 1997, Freeplay: “PaRappa World Tour! His dad tells all to CVG!”, interview with Masaya Matsuura (the four CD tracks, computer composing since 1983, the CD-i prototype, Bust-a-Move).
- Edge issue 52, December 1997: Bust a Move prescreen (“rhythm action games”, Digital Dance Mix, the beat-’em-up inputs).
- Edge issue 53, Christmas 1997: Bust-a-Move prescreen, with Noburo Shirasu and Yasuhito Watanabe of Metro and Enix.
- Edge issue 54, January 1998: Parappa the Rapper review by Jez San.
- Edge issue 62, September 1998, p. 20: “PlayStation gets the Beat” (Beatmania and its ASCII turntable).
- Edge issue 74, August 1999: Out There Japan (the Dance Dance Revolution home controller).
- Edge issue 77, autumn 1999, pp. 43–44: Space Channel 5 prescreen focus, with Tetsuya Mizuguchi.
- Edge issue 86, July 2000: Samba de Amigo review.
- Edge issue 165, August 2006: Guitar Hero at the Download festival.
- “Rhythm Attraction”, Edge issue 211, February 2010, pp. 71–74: the history of the genre; Konami’s Bemani division; Alex Rigopulos on PaRappa, Quest for Fame, Bemani and Frequency; sales figures.