In the autumn of 1996 Edge walked round a Japanese games show and picked out “possibly the strangest title on show”: a children’s game, drawn by the American cartoonist Rodney Greenblat, in which the player copies the ever more complicated moves of a kung-fu teacher called Master Onion. Within a year its creator was telling Computer and Video Games that PaRappa the Rapper had “sent Japan into a PlayStation-buying frenzy last Christmas”. That is where the music game, or “rhythm action” as the British magazines called it, took off. The rules are simple. Music plays, prompts scroll towards a line, and the player presses, steps, scratches or strums as each one arrives. Within ten years the genre had filled Japanese arcades with turntables and dance floors, and a decade after that it had sold millions of plastic guitars in the West.
Fast facts
- The idea: keep time with a piece of music by matching on-screen prompts, with the score, and often the music itself, reacting to how well you do.
- The breakthrough: PaRappa the Rapper (Sony, PlayStation, Japan, 1996), by the musician Masaya Matsuura.
- The arcade genre: Konami’s Beatmania (1997) and its successors, which Konami grouped as Bemani, including Dance Dance Revolution (1998).
- The Western boom: Harmonix’s Guitar Hero (2005) and Rock Band (2007).
- The slump: price cuts in 2009; in February 2011 Activision closed its Guitar Hero business.
- Since then: Rock Band 4 (2015), Harmonix’s Fortnite Festival (2023), and arcade drum and dance machines still running in Japan.
Before PaRappa
Games had asked players to copy sequences of lights and sounds long before they asked them to keep a beat. Ralph Baer remembered playing Atari’s coin-op Touch-Me at a Chicago trade show in 1976, a cabinet with four big buttons that lit up in random order, and finding it “nice game-play, terrible execution”. With the toy designers Marvin Glass & Associates he turned the idea into a handheld game, choosing four notes a bugle can play, G, C, E and G, so that any sequence would sound pleasant. Milton Bradley sold it as Simon. When Edge first saw Dance Dance Revolution in 1998, it described it as “much like an over-sized Simon game”.
A few games in the 1980s and early 1990s put music and movement together. Edge, looking back in 1998, credited Epyx with leading the way “back in the ’80s with Breakdance”, a Commodore 64 game inspired by the dance craze of the day. On the NES, the Power Pad mat’s Dance Aerobics asked players to copy the computer’s steps. Retro Gamer counts the rhythm mini-games in ToeJam & Earl II among the genre’s earliest ancestors, and in 1997 Computer and Video Games compared PaRappa with an earlier PC game built around the band Aerosmith, Quest for Fame. But as Edge put it, “in terms of true games, though, there would be little else” until PaRappa.
PaRappa the Rapper
Masaya Matsuura was a pop musician with ten albums behind him and a contract with Sony Music. He told Computer and Video Games that he had started composing on computers in 1983 and grown tired of computer music that “always sounded the same”. He built his own sampler software for the PC, found rap “very funny to play on the computer”, and prototyped a soundtrack that changed with the player’s performance on Philips’ CD-i before taking the idea to the PlayStation.
The game he made with Greenblat was a series of lessons. A teacher raps a line, symbols for the PlayStation’s buttons pass along a bar at the top of the screen, and PaRappa answers by pressing them in time. The characters are flat cut-outs, “wafer-thin” in the magazine’s words, moving through scenes staged like a pop video. The music does not come from the console’s sound chip. Matsuura explained that the CD carries four versions of each track, for “cool”, “good”, “bad” and “awful”, and the game switches between them as the player’s rating rises and falls. Do well enough and the teacher leaves the stage and lets PaRappa freestyle; do badly and, as Computer and Video Games put it, “the rap sounds embarrassingly demented”.
The magazine’s March 1997 import review called it “the world’s first rap game” and loved it, but reported that Sony’s British office “don’t reckon there’s any market for it”. Sony did release it in the West, and it did not sell as hoped. Edge wrote at the end of 1998 that the game “received plaudits aplenty in the press” but “failed to sell in the west in quantities anywhere near the levels Sony expected”. Matsuura’s team followed it with Um Jammer Lammy (1999), which kept the controls and swapped the rap for rock guitar.
Konami’s arcade genre
Konami showed Beatmania at the JAMMA arcade show in 1997, where Edge described it as “the first game based on - get this - DJ mixing”. Its controls were five keys and a turntable. Players matched the prompts on screen with the keys and now and then scratched the record, and early attempts, Edge warned, “can get quite messy”. Hiroshi Takyasu, manager of Konami’s sound development, told the magazine he had not expected it to catch on: “I didn’t think Beat-Mania would become as popular as it is now.” The reason, he thought, was that “players can make a good-looking performance in front of other people looking on. Players can show off.”
Showing off became the point. Dance Dance Revolution, made by a separate Konami team in Kobe, was “a massive hit with JAMMA attendees” in 1998, Edge reported, and crowded out the new games from Sega and Namco. Players stood on the machine and stepped on four arrow panels in time with the music; the dance mat entry follows it into homes and, as Dancing Stage, into British arcades and toy shops. At the AOU show in Tokyo in February 1999, rhythm games were the leading genre, and Konami showed two more: Drummania, and “the rock-inspired and self-explanatory” Guitar Freaks, with a plastic guitar for a controller. An “elaborate version” linked the two cabinets “for a semi-band experience”, eight years before Rock Band. By then Konami had a name for the whole family, Bemani, from Beatmania.
Other companies followed with controllers of their own. Retro Gamer’s 2004 family tree of the genre runs from Enix’s Bust A Move (sold in Europe as Bust-A-Groove) and Sega’s Space Channel 5 through Vib-Ribbon, which made its levels from any music CD the player put in, to Sega’s maracas game Samba de Amigo and Namco’s Taiko no Tatsujin drums. Namco’s game is still in Japanese arcades. Wireframe called it in 2021 “such a national institution in Japan” that its drum peripheral turns up cheaply in second-hand shops.
Harmonix, Guitar Hero and Rock Band
In the West the genre’s story runs through one studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harmonix’s Frequency (2001, PlayStation 2) played, Edge thought, like “one of the early levels from Tempest”. Each channel stood for an instrument, vocals, bass, drums or guitar; the player completed a bar on one, then moved across to another, building up the whole track part by part. Amplitude (2003) added online play, and Harmonix and Konami made Karaoke Revolution the same year.
Then came Guitar Hero. Harmonix built it with the independent peripherals maker RedOctane, around a plastic controller modelled on a Gibson guitar. It came out in North America in November 2005. Edge later called it “a surprise hit”. In 2006 Activision bought RedOctane for $100 million, and because Harmonix did not own the Guitar Hero name, it “found itself cut loose”.
Harmonix’s answer, Rock Band, came out in North America in November 2007 and in Europe the following year, published with MTV and Electronic Arts. It added drums and a microphone to the guitar, so four people could play one song together. It was also, in Edge’s words, “the first game to request the original multitrack master recordings of songs”, so that each instrument in its 58 songs could be played separately. “Nobody had ever asked for multitrack masters before,” the project lead, Greg LoPiccolo, told Edge, and some of them could not be found. Harmonix grew from 90 to 300 staff in two years, with developers “sitting in the hallways with their laptops resting on skateboards” because there were not enough desks. The company had never made hardware before; the chief executive, Alex Rigopulos, remembered going “from never having developed hardware to a year later shipping millions of units” of several instruments at once.
The slump
The boom was short. Within a few years there were, as one analyst counted, “four or five versions of Rock Band and Guitar Hero”, each followed by add-on songs. In January 2010 Edge’s review of British retail in 2009 reported “the waning of the music game market”, with rhythm-action games “undergoing dramatic price reductions ahead of Christmas”. The same analyst thought players were “unlikely to spend money on peripherals on a regular basis”. The surprise hit of that Christmas was a dance game with no instrument to buy, Ubisoft’s Just Dance, which the company’s British managing director said “significantly outperformed our expectations”.
On 9 February 2011 Activision announced that “due to continued declines in the music genre” it would disband its Guitar Hero business unit and cancel the year’s game. Looking back in 2012, Rigopulos did not accept the simplest explanation. “You often hear people saying Activision killed the category by over-saturating it with too many releases,” he told Edge. “Maybe that’s part of the story, but I certainly don’t think that’s the entire story.” He pointed to the recession, to gameplay that had barely changed, and to casual players who were “easily lured away to the next bubble”. Both companies, he said, went into the fight believing there was room for only one series, and Edge added that they overspent on marketing and song licences competing for the same shelves, while stockpiled instruments were later sold off at slashed prices.
Since the boom
The genre shrank but did not end. Harmonix moved on to the dance series Dance Central, and brought back its band game as Rock Band 4 in October 2015; it stopped adding new songs to it in January 2024. Epic Games bought Harmonix in 2021, and in December 2023 the studio launched Fortnite Festival inside Fortnite, a band game with lanes for lead, bass, drums and vocals that later added support for plastic guitars. In virtual reality, Beat Saber, in which players slice through blocks in time with the music, became the rhythm game Wireframe’s writers reached for as an example. And in Japan the arcade machines that started it are still there, drums, dance floors and all.
Sources
- Edge issue 38, November 1996: Tokyo show report on PaRappa the Rapper and Rodney Greenblat.
- Computer and Video Games issue 184, March 1997: PaRappa the Rapper import review (“the world’s first rap game”; the comparison with Quest for Fame; Sony UK’s view of the market; the rating and freestyle system; Greenblat’s artwork).
- Computer and Video Games issue 192, November 1997, p. 101: interview with Masaya Matsuura (his career, the CD-i prototype, the four-track soundtrack, the Japanese success).
- Edge issue 51, November 1997: JAMMA show report (“Beatmania, the first game based on - get this - DJ mixing”).
- Edge issue 64, November 1998: JAMMA show report on Dance Dance Revolution (“much like an over-sized Simon game”).
- Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998, pp. 46–49: rhythm-action feature (Epyx’s Breakdance; PaRappa’s Western sales; Hiroshi Takyasu on Beatmania; its controls; Dance Dance Revolution and Konami’s Kobe team; the 1998 JAMMA show).
- Edge issue 70, April 1999: AOU show report (rhythm action as the leading genre; Drummania, Guitar Freaks and the linked cabinets; “the genre it now calls Bemani”).
- Ralph H. Baer, Videogames: In the Beginning (Rolenta Press, 2005), appendix one, “From Touch-Me to Simon”.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: “Rhythm action family tree” (ToeJam & Earl II; PaRappa; Bust-A-Groove, Space Channel 5, Vib-Ribbon, Guitar Freaks, Samba de Amigo, Taiko no Tatsujin, Frequency, Amplitude, Karaoke Revolution).
- Edge issue 99, July 2001: Frequency preview (Harmonix, PlayStation 2).
- Edge issue 156, December 2005: Guitar Hero feature (Harmonix and RedOctane; the Gibson controller; North American release in November 2005).
- Edge issue 239, April 2012, pp. 144–147, “The making of Rock Band”: RedOctane and the $100 million sale; Rock Band’s release, partners, 58 tracks and multitracks; Harmonix’s growth and hardware; Alex Rigopulos on the collapse; Dance Central.
- Edge issue 211, February 2010, pp. 10–11: British retail in 2009 (the music-game slump; Just Dance).
- Activision Blizzard, press release, 9 February 2011, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (web): the Guitar Hero business unit disbanded. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000718877/000110465911005944/a11-5488_1ex99d1.htm
- Wireframe issue 57, November 2021, p. 42: Taiko no Tatsujin in Japanese arcades. Issues 22 (September 2019) and 30 (January 2020): Beat Saber as a rhythm and VR example.
- Wikipedia, “Rock Band 4” and “Fortnite Festival” (web, secondary): Rock Band 4’s release on 6 October 2015 and the end of new songs in January 2024; Harmonix’s purchase by Epic Games in November 2021; Fortnite Festival’s launch on 9 December 2023 and guitar-controller support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band_4 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite_Festival