On December 25th, 2002 — yes, Christmas day — Japanese arcades were graced with what was, at the time, the pinnacle of the step rhythm game genre, Dance Dance Revolution Extreme — the 8th core game in the Dance Dance Revolution series, and a game I would spend countless hours of my late teens and early 20’s playing.
Indeed, the year of 2002 would be when I would discover dance games local to me and give them a try, falling in love with the the music, the gameplay, and the experience of stepping in time to arrow choreography on screen. In fact, that would sort of take over my world for the next 10 years — even this very site owes its existence, originally to me getting super into what I would otherwise call “dance games” in that time frame from Spring 2002 on to late 2012.
That’s another story however. What I can say is this — a local arcade had a DDR machine that was on Max2, the release before DDR Extreme. It wouldn’t actually be until Summer of 2003 that we would get an upgrade to DDR Extreme, so I would have to wait a while to actually play it.
When I did, it was actually a mixed experience (no pun intended.) See, the thing about these releases was that, at the time, there were new releases every few months, at least in Japan, and what would happen is as new songs were added older ones would be removed, and some of the ones which didn’t stick around happened to be tracks I really enjoyed, which was a bummer. Sure, I’d grow to love much of what was on Extreme — it of course had more songs than any other single DDR release before, with a combination of many classic songs returning as well as a great selection of new tracks, but at that time I was still a bit of a novice into the games at-the-time 4 year history, and so I couldn’t quite appreciate these classics as much as I would, let’s say, a few months later.
Something DDR fan’s didn’t quite know at the time was that this would be the last major DDR release until 2006 — for the 4 years that DDR was a constant thing, be it in Japanese arcades or with machines imported into the US, with its regular updates and releases, we’d go just as long without any proper new “core” release in Japan, or any proper US release in arcades since 1999, until DDR SuperNova in 2006. Yeah, there were home releases in the US and Japan, and at least one European release, but that’s just not the same.
The game kind of set a standard for dance games at the time and could be found most everywhere for years on end, far longer than any other release, all the way through the inevitable death of most arcades in my local area.
The stagnation caused by this 4 years hiatus would create a void that other games would come and try to fill – namely Roxor’s “In The Groove” which was originally designed as a straight replacement game for a DDR arcade machine, and Andamiro’s “Pump It Up” series — the dance game I originally started on — would gain quite a bit of traction in this time as its yearly releases became standard and the game grew even more to be it’s own thing, rather than, as many people treated it, a Dance Dance Revolution clone.
It’s been many years since I last set foot on a dance game stage, be it DDR, PIU, or anything else for that matter. I rather miss it, but I’m getting older and certainly, even if I was to get back into them like, for example, getting my own machine, I certainly wouldn’t be able to play the harder content I used to enjoy. Those days are in my past, but I will say, even with all the ups and downs I’ve had with the community (sadly a recurring theme in nearly everything I enjoy, it’s always the community which winds up ruining it) I will still say some of the best times I’ve ever had gaming were at a mall burning away calories on a DDR machine with a dying screen, going all out for the sake of it, just enjoying the moment, the music, the physical challenge…. the whole thing. Pushing myself to my limits and beyond, well, I can say it was the most fit I’ve ever been in my life, was when I played those games all the time.
With all that happened in my life in that first year, and things that would follow, I can safely say those are memories I do still hold onto strongly, and wouldn’t trade for anything, even with the bad attached.
Dance Dance Revolution Extreme just happened to be a centerpiece of that, and to know the game is still loved by so many of us more old-school DDR fans is just the best.
Keep on Movin’