Rhythm Matching
Play to the beat
Judging button presses against a music track. PaRappa the Rapper (1996) switched between four CD audio tracks by score; the Japanese press named the genre "rhythm action" in 1997; Konami's Bemani division built the scrolling chart and the peripherals; Harmonix's founder credits PaRappa for Guitar Hero.
Rhythm matching is the mechanic of a game judging button presses against the timing of a piece of music. It reached the PlayStation with PaRappa the Rapper in Japan at the end of 1996; Edge reported the Japanese press calling the new category “rhythm action games” a year later, and Konami’s arcade division built the format that the genre still uses.
Fast facts
- 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 division — beatmania (1997), Dance Dance Revolution, 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 the mechanism: 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.
Matsuura told the magazine two months later how the judgement reached the 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 prototyped the track-switching on Philips CD-i before the PlayStation existed, and had been composing on computers since 1983.
The period reviews 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 is the thing 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’s was that he did not care.
The Japanese wave, 1997-2000
Bust a Move (Enix, developed by Metro) was 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 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.”
Dance Dance Revolution (Konami) moved the buttons under the feet. 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) was Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s first console project after Sega Rally. Edge’s description of 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 at ¥13,600. 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 progression structure. Edge called it “another Bemani title” — Konami’s brand had become the genre’s name.
What Konami fixed
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 had shipped GuitarFreaks, DrumMania, Dance Dance Revolution and Pop’n Music. Its verdict: “The scrolling note charts, coloured prompts and peripherals that define modern rhythm-gaming are all Konami creations.”
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 found it uncompelling, 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) put the Bemani scrolling chart on a guitar-shaped controller with “five multi-coloured fret buttons”. Edge’s coverage of the game’s stage at the 2006 Download festival reported 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 same 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. Its opening premise was that the genre had already passed that peak.