At Japan’s JAMMA arcade show in 1998, visitors queued for a game with no joystick and no buttons for the hands. Players stood on a metal platform and stepped on arrow panels as arrows scrolled up the screen in time with the music. Edge called Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution “the game of the show” and described the object as “moving yourself in time with the music, with coloured foot pads to follow, much like an over-sized Simon game”. Within a few years the same game was filling British arcades under another name, selling dance mats in toy departments, and being wheeled into American school gyms as a weapon against childhood obesity.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Konami, as part of its run of music games later known as Bemani.
- Arcade release: Japan, 1998; British arcades as Dancing Stage in 1999.
- Controller: a dance mat of four arrow panels, forward, back, left and right; two sets on an arcade cabinet.
- Home versions: PlayStation (Japan, 1999), then PlayStation 2, Xbox and many others.
- Sales: 6.5 million copies worldwide by 2004, according to Konami.
- Series: still running in arcades; DanceDanceRevolution World came out in 2024.
Stepping to the music
Dance Dance Revolution grew out of Konami’s DJ game Beatmania, and Edge saw it as a change of direction for “the once highly aggressive company”, which only a year earlier would have been making driving and sports games to compete with Sega and Namco. The idea is simple. The player picks a song, from one of nine musical styles “from techno to disco” at JAMMA, and arrows rise up the screen. When an arrow reaches the target at the top, the player steps on the matching panel. As Edge summed it up in 2002: “Hit the pads at the right time and you get points. Miss and you fail.” The arcade cabinet has two sets of panels, so two players can dance side by side. Edge noticed that the game also asked for a kind of courage: at JAMMA “queues were long, but laughs were plenty”.
The game is not a simulation of dancing. Konami’s steps follow the rhythm of each song, and on the hardest settings they come very fast. One song on the “maniac” difficulty, Edge worked out in 2003, needed 578 steps in 88 seconds.
Dancing Stage
Konami brought the game to Britain in February 1999, showing it at the Amusement Trade Exhibition International at Earls Court under the name Dancing Stage, “the UK version of Dance Dance Revolution”, as Arcade magazine put it. Edge reported that trial machines had been “very well received” by the British public, despite the magazine’s own worry that players would be too self-conscious. By June Computer and Video Games had Dancing Stage at the top of its arcade chart. In Europe and Australia the series kept the Dancing Stage name for years. By 2002 Edge found “thriving pockets of dancegaming in arcades across the country”, and at London’s Trocadero it counted a crowd of 60 to 70 people watching a single machine (see the dance mat entry).
The dance mat at home
Konami released the game on the PlayStation in Japan in 1999 at ¥5,800, and sold its own floor controller for ¥5,500. The home version was a hit: it was in Japan’s all-format top ten printed by New Zealand’s Official PlayStation Magazine that autumn. By the start of 2001 Dancing Stage Euro Mix was on the PlayStation in Australia and New Zealand. Reviewing it, Kieron Gillen called it “physically exhausting, repetitive, yet exhilarating fun”, and “pretty much pointless to play without the dancemat”. It had a mode that counted the calories a player burned, which he thought “might help the aerobically minded”. In Britain Konami was cautious at first and left the mats to peripheral makers. Then its second PlayStation release, Dancing Stage Party, took off. “Only 14 PS2 games sold more copies in 2002,” Edge reported, “and it singlehandedly sustained the life of the seven-year-old PSone console”, with bundles sold in toy departments and advertised on Saturday-morning television. The series later reached the Xbox. Official Xbox Magazine’s Australian edition, reviewing Dancing Stage Unleashed in 2004, noted its workout mode, where “you can enter the number of calories you wish to burn off and then set about dancing them away”.
In June 2004 Jason Enos, a product manager at Konami’s American arm, told the Associated Press that about 6.5 million copies had been sold worldwide, more than a million of them home versions in the United States.
Exercise, and the evidence
The calorie counters were not a joke. Konami ran a chain of fitness clubs in Japan, and in 2003 it released Aerobics Revolution for the PlayStation 2, in which an on-screen instructor led aerobics routines on the same dance pad. Edge reported in 2003 that American colleges were promoting the game on their campuses “for both building community and fitness”, and that some Californian schools had added it to their physical education classes.
West Virginia went furthest. After a study by West Virginia University and the state’s Public Employees Insurance Agency, the state planned by 2007 to put the game in every public school. The Associated Press reported that the 50 overweight children in the 24-week study, who played for at least 30 minutes on five days a week, had kept their weight steady and lowered their risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. Edge was more sceptical. The original study had found that some students lost around 10 pounds, it noted, but the new data suggested that regular play was “only managing to prevent any further weight gain, rather than having a slimming effect”. The researchers’ paper, published in 2009, reported on 35 overweight children over 12 weeks. Those who played gained less weight than those who did not (0.91 kg against 2.43 kg) and improved their fitness, blood pressure and the health of their arteries.
Later history
Other companies copied the idea, among them the Korean Pump It Up, which put five panels on the diagonals of the square. In the West the arcade craze faded. Edge wrote in 2013 that “for a moment in the early 2000s, you couldn’t enter a western arcade without hearing the pattering of feet on steel”, but that “perhaps thanks to its familiarity as a home game, its popularity soon waned in western arcades”. In Japan the annual update remained an event. Konami kept releasing new arcade versions, updated online through its e-Amusement network. DanceDanceRevolution World reached arcades on 12 June 2024.
Sources
- Edge issue 64, November 1998: JAMMA show report (“a full-body version of Enix’s Bust A Move”, “much like an over-sized Simon game”).
- Edge issue 65, December 1998, p. 129: “the game of the show at JAMMA”, its descent from Beatmania, Konami’s change of direction, nine musical styles, the queues.
- Edge issue 69, March 1999: Konami at ATEI “introduced Dancing Stage to the west” after well-received British test runs.
- Arcade issue 5, April 1999: Dancing Stage, “the UK version of Dance Dance Revolution”, at February’s ATEI at Earls Court.
- Computer and Video Games issue 211, June 1999: arcade top five, Dancing Stage at number one.
- Edge issue 74, August 1999, p. 90: the PlayStation version (¥5,800) and Konami’s ¥5,500 floor controller.
- Official PlayStation Magazine (New Zealand) issue 28, November 1999, p. 30: Japanese all-format top ten, Dance Dance Revolution sixth. Issue 41, January 2001, p. 58: Kieron Gillen’s review of Dancing Stage Euro Mix.
- Edge issue 115, October 2002: dance games in British arcades and at the Trocadero, and how the game is played. Issue 132, January 2004, p. 75: Konami’s cautious approach in Britain, Dancing Stage Party and its sales in 2002, toy-department bundles.
- Edge issue 124, June 2003, p. 61: rhythm action and fitness, college campuses, Californian schools, calorie counters, the song with 578 steps in 88 seconds.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 178, May 2004: Konami’s fitness clubs and Aerobics Revolution.
- Official Xbox Magazine (Australia) issue 27, May 2004, p. 83: review of Dancing Stage Unleashed and its workout mode.
- Anita Chang, “Foot Frenzy”, Associated Press, in The Spokesman-Review, 6 June 2004 (web, secondary): Jason Enos of Konami on sales of 6.5 million worldwide and more than a million in the United States. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2004/jun/06/foot-frenzy/
- Edge issue 173, March 2007, p. 16: West Virginia’s plan for every public school, and the study’s weight results.
- “West Virginia to Put ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ in Public Schools”, Associated Press, in Fox News, 1 February 2007 (web, secondary): the study’s design and findings. https://www.foxnews.com/story/west-virginia-to-put-dance-dance-revolution-in-public-schools
- E. C. Murphy, L. Carson and others, “Effects of an exercise intervention using Dance Dance Revolution on endothelial function and other risk factors in overweight children”, International Journal of Pediatric Obesity 4 (2009), pp. 205–14: 35 children, 12 weeks, weight gain of 0.91 kg against 2.43 kg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19922034/
- Edge issue 255, July 2013, p. 22: Dance Dance Revolution in western arcades, “Dancing Stage” in Europe and Australia, Japan and e-Amusement.
- Kite Stenbuck, “Dance Dance Revolution World Release Date and New Songs Set”, Siliconera, 10 June 2024 (web, secondary): release on 12 June 2024. https://www.siliconera.com/dance-dance-revolution-world-release-date-and-new-songs-set/
- “Dance Dance Revolution”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the arcade stage with two sets of four panels.
- Pump It Up and the dance mat’s layout: see the dance mat entry and its sources.