A dance mat is a controller big enough to stand on, with a switch under each arrow, and a game reads it much as it reads a joypad. When Konami showed Dance Dance Revolution at Japan’s JAMMA arcade show in 1998, Edge described the goal as “moving yourself in time with the music, with coloured foot pads to follow, much like an over-sized Simon game”. Four years later, on a Saturday afternoon in London, the magazine counted between 60 and 70 people standing round a single dance machine to watch.
Fast facts
- Layout: four arrows, forward, back, left and right, around a three-by-three square, in Dance Dance Revolution; the Korean Pump It Up puts five pads on the square’s diagonals instead.
- Arcade debut: Dance Dance Revolution, Konami, 1998.
- Konami’s home mat: PlayStation, Japan, 1999, ¥5,500 (£28), less than the ¥5,800 game.
- In Europe: the series was sold as Dancing Stage; Konami at first left the mats to peripheral makers.
- Precursor: Bandai’s Family Trainer mat for the Famicom (1986), sold in America as Family Fun Fitness and then, from 1988, as Nintendo’s Power Pad.
Before the arrows
The idea of a controller on the floor was twelve years old when Dance Dance Revolution appeared. Bandai released its Family Trainer mat for the Famicom in 1986, and Nintendo sold it in America from 1988 as the Power Pad, a vinyl sheet with twelve sensors in a three-by-four grid, bundled with the NES in the Power Set. World Class Track Meet had players running on the spot, and Dance Aerobics asked them to copy the computer’s steps. David Sheff put the Power Pad’s American sales at half a million, but only a handful of games used it. Ralph Baer called the problem a “Catch-22”: nobody wrote games for a controller nobody used, and nobody used a controller with no games. Dance Dance Revolution approached it from the other side, starting with an arcade game people queued for and bringing the mat home afterwards.
The arcade machine
Dance Dance Revolution came out of Konami’s run of music games, later grouped as Bemani, which began with the DJ game Beatmania. Edge’s 2002 visit to the Trocadero’s Funland in London described the machine: “There are four pads — forwards, backwards, left and right — and arrows move up the screen in time with the music.” And the rule: “Hit the pads at the right time and you get points. Miss and you fail.”
Rivals soon changed the geometry. At Funland Edge found Konami’s European version, Dancing Stage Euromix, alongside two Korean machines. Pump It Up “offers five pads instead of four, placed on the diagonals of a three by three square”, which Edge called “the geographical inverse of Dance Dance Revolution”. EZ2Dancer surrounded three foot sensors with chest-high movement sensors. Edge opened its report with the fan-written Dance Dance Revolution FAQ’s list of injuries, from blisters after “2-6 hours” of play to a bruised head when the screen or buttons on the cabinet “are butted too hard”.
Mats at home
Konami brought the game to the PlayStation in Japan in 1999, and sold its own floor controller for it. Edge reported the mat “out now in Japan, priced ¥5,500 (£28)”, less than the game’s ¥5,800. It was “surprisingly robust (it has so far withstood the jiggling, lumbering hooves of Edge’s designers)”.
To the console, a home mat is an ordinary digital pad. The PlayStation programmers’ reference psx-spx describes the mats as “essentially normal joypads with uncommonly arranged buttons”, with the arrows wired as the direction buttons and the corner squares as the face buttons. There is one difference a programmer notices. A thumb cannot press left and right together on a direction pad, but two feet can on a mat, and “some dancing games do actually require those combinations”, while some ordinary games are confused by them.
Europe took longer. In the same August 1999 note, Edge wrote from Britain: “They said it would never take off in Europe, and it certainly hasn’t on anything like the scale it did in Japan.” That changed. By 2002 Edge found “thriving pockets of dancegaming in arcades across the country”. At home, Konami’s approach to Dancing Stage on the PlayStation was cautious: according to Edge in 2004, “Konami didn’t even produce its own dancemat, allowing peripheral companies to cash in”. With the second release, Dancing Stage Party, “sales boomed”. Edge reported that “only 14 PS2 games sold more copies in 2002”, and that Dancing Stage bundles were sold in toy departments and advertised on Saturday-morning television, places “traditional videogames just didn’t reach”. Other companies followed. BigBen, Edge noted, wanted its Dance UK to match Dancing Stage “in all respects”, with added features based on market research among eight- to 14-year-old girls.
Sources
- Edge issue 64, November 1998: the JAMMA show report on Dance Dance Revolution.
- Edge issue 74, August 1999: the Dance Dance Revolution review (PlayStation, ¥5,800) and the note on Konami’s ¥5,500 floor controller.
- Edge issue 115, October 2002: dance games at the Trocadero’s Funland, London: Dancing Stage Euromix, Pump It Up, EZ2Dancer and the dancers.
- Edge issue 132, January 2004: Dancing Stage in Europe, the absent Konami mat, sales in 2002 and toy-department bundles.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: Dance Dance Revolution in a round-up of rhythm-action games.
- psx-spx, “Controllers - Dance Mats” (web, secondary): mats as ordinary digital pads and the simultaneous-direction difference. https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/controllersandmemorycards/
- Power Pad sources as cited in the Power Pad entry: Nintendo Power issue 2, September/October 1988, p. 91; David Sheff, Game Over; Video Games & Computer Entertainment, June 1991, p. 74.