What Made You Interested in DDR in the First Place?

Just like the title says, what made you get into DDR in the first place? Did you see an ad? Did someone showed it to you? Or maybe you saw it in an arcade and got into it? Tell me your story (try to make it brief though). Oh, and if there's already a thread like this I will be more than glad to delete this.

Okay, to get started, I'll tell you how I got into DDR:

It was about 5-6 years ago. My brother showed it to me on the computer one time. The song was DoLL. I was just marveled by this game. Heck, I even pretended to play the charts on the computer screen (no pad) because I loved it so much! lol. I started actually playing it myself. I started off on I believe. Then I started to play easy and then I eased my way to easy . Then I started doing harder and songs which is where I'm at today. And I'm getting better every day too. I'm just so glad I found out about this game. I truly believe it is where I belong to; like it was my true calling.

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Right, I THINK the duplicate thread issue is because people are clicking the Post Thread button repeatedly. Remember, you only need to press the button once.

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I got into it because I noticed it at the Taito Station arcade in Minami-Matsumoto (Nagano) with my Karate group in 1998. I recognized the music in the game and it was all unique and fun and stuff.

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I had to have a friend of mine get me interested in DDR.

When I first found out about DDR, there was a DDR USA machine in my local bowling alley (this was about 12 years ago). At first I didn't know what to think of it because I never saw anything like it, but I decided to try it out. I put however many tokens it cost to play it, chose a song, and failed immediately. I just did not understand what had to be done and I walked away in shame.

Then a year later, I went to visit a friend of mine in the Bronx and she had Dance Dance Revolution, DDR KONAMIX, and DDRMAX. I realized that she understood the concept of DDR and watched her play. She could only play on BASIC/LIGHT mode, but just seeing that and how she played it really helped me understand how the game worked and I decided to try it out for a second time. This time, it worked out and I passed my first song ever, which was Groove. Since then I wanted to get better and kept playing over the years. The first goal I gave myself was learning how to pass AFRONOVA PRIMEVAL. I heard the preview of that song in KONAMIX and I fell in love with it, but was too afraid to try it because I could tell it was very fast.

Hmm... its lovely existence got me into it?

I first played Pump and, probably just because it was my first game, I hated it. xD; Theeeen years and years later, I found a DDR machine while I was by myself at some arcade. Fff, I really don't remember what happened... only that the rest of the arcade was kind of boring so I spent that afternoon hogging the DDR machine (or spamming Love Shine) because it was inexplicably awesome. And... I've always been physically inactive, so this was a good game to get into. Then I roped my sister and my cousin in it.

Once I met other people who played the game, I stayed hooked onto it. :D There's so much to the game that makes it last several years... getting exercise, a little freestyle, training friends, shipping, competing with people, collecting the overabundance of awesome music, making charts... and stuff.

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I was dared during a band field trip to Panama City.

I've never seen it before but I was a quick learner (as in, don't stand in the center, etc). I distinctly remember the first song I failed, and that was So Deep. The song that struck me the most was HVAM. A week later, I got MAX2 with the bundle and some time after that MAX. Continued up to X, but stopped until I went to college where a certain person on this site got me back into it, among other people.

When I got to college (there was an Extreme!), at that point, I could barely do 8s, but within that year, I went up to 9s -- my friends even helped me through the list and then some, ha. I've still got some work to do on the X scale (Legend of Max, I'm gunning for you. Super Samurai, you're next!)

I had seen the game for years at arcades/malls/theaters and stuff, but I had never had any interest in playing it. I remember seeing it once at a party my sister was throwing when I was quite young, but it was for her and her friends so I wasn't allowed to play.

A year or two later I got to play it at my cousins' house, DDRMAX for the PS2. I think the first song I played was BABY BABY GIMME YOUR LOVE because I was scared to fail. The songs I was comfortable with were OVERBLAST, SANDSTORM, and PEACE-OUT. I loved electronic music, but I had never been able to find any good sources of it except for 90's bubblegum pop groups (like Aqua). So DDR gave me a bunch of neat music to play and listen to.

I kept trying to pass Dark Black Forest (short trip), CANDY★, exotic ethnic, and stomp to my beat. I didn't end up passing them until the next year when I got DDR EXTREME, MAX, and MAX2 for myself.

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I remember playing DDR on the occasion at friend's houses or arcades, but I was never really good and I decided the game just might not be for me. However, when my family went on vacation, I saw this dude play on doubles on a brand new SuperNOVA machine and was extremely fascinated(no pun intended) and really wanted to get that good. I got the game as a Christmas gift when I was in 9th grade and worked my way up to expert. What truly got me started on loving the game to an obsession was the DDR characters! Robo-Zukin and Baby-Lon were my absolute favorites(Zukin(s) still remains to be my favorite)!!! And I eventually got into Stellar Master Mode to the point of having so much drive to unlock Pizza Box(it was really bad actually). When I got my metal mat in late 2009 though, I really brought things to another level and enjoyed DDR because I was actually improving on songs and getting better scores. Now I like it because of everything(except Justin Bieber).

That game also changed my music interests. I used to be a super-major prep who listened to mainstream stuff, but DDR opened up a world of techno, euro-pop, jpop and so many better musicians and songs out there. Without it, I'd probably be a fan of some manufactured fake pop artist instead of the amazing Sota Fujimori!!!

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One day, my brother told me about this fun game where you had to stomp the arrows following the music, and we went to an arcade that had a DDR machine. That's where everything began.

Then, we bought a CS DDR game, and we also started to frequent the arcades to play either DDR, Pump It Up or even EZ2Dancer.

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I had heard about the game for a while but had never gotten the chance to play it. Out of curiosity I tried it at an arcade, and one run of CARTOON HEROES (Speedy Mix) later, I was hooked. Got it on PS2 (SuperNOVA) a few months later.

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My sister got into it after playing Disney Channel edition at her friend's birthday party. Said friend was rich and apparently had two metal pads with bars. Anyways, a few years later, she got DDRMAX for PS2 used at GameStop, since she couldn't afford the newer DDR games at the time. She fell in love with it, but I disliked it. I remember she would stay up late playing it and I would be kept awake by the sounds of her stomping on the mat downstairs. Every once in a while, I would play with her just so she would play a game I liked with me. I liked RUGGED ASH, so much that I put it on my MP3 player. Eventually we got Hottest Party 3, but I still didn't like DDR. Eventually I just tried playing lesson mode on MAX (by this time, DDRMAX was a faint memory after watching my sister play HP3 for so long) and I started to get a hang of it. The first song I managed to play was 5.1.1. . I couldn't even beat the later lesson mode chapters.

Soon I started playing more. I remember I was terrified of 8th notes. I would play on little at all times to avoid them. I kept getting better and soon I was able to beat my favorite song, RUGGED ASH, on with little turned off.

And then I became an addict.

It seem like such a long time ago that I started becoming "good" at DDR (and by that I mean just being able to play most songs on ) but in reality only a year ago was I playing Paranoia Evolution and getting chills up my spine.

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i forgot how i got into it i think it was from my school i think i got into bemani from SilverSprit though

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From my About Me:

"My first experience with DDR was in Wildwood, New Jersey around the year 2000. I was seven years old at the time. Me and my family were walking on the boardwalk one night, and we happened to notice a strange, yet eye-catching machine in the arcade. It was called Dance Dance Revolution. (Key mind you, this is DDR 1st mix.) After one guy played a round, I decided to play. It can't be THAT hard, can it? WELP, I was wrong. The first song I picked was BUTTERFLY, and I failed miserably.

The next year, at my local arcade, a DDR machine was installed. My face lit up. I played it again. This time, however, I didn't fail at songs. However, I got low grades like D and C, but that didn't phase me. I loved playing it. Once again, the year after THAT, the DDR machine was replaced with DDR EXTREME. Boy, was that fun. I got a little bit better, but that was not what sparked my inner player. This is:

In Christmas of 2005, I got a bunch of presents, mostly video games. The two games that made my Christmas so special were Guitar Hero and DDR Extreme 2 for the PS2. Of course I played Guitar Hero, but I didn't play it as much as the DDR I got. That was when I made the jump from to / in about a couple of months. Talk about a MASSIVE improvement.

That was six years ago. Now, you would see me at the local arcade playing on a DDR SuperNOVA. After those years of practice, it's safe to say that I'm one of the best in my area."

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EDIT: How did I just double post?

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Saw some guy playing it at the arcade and thought it looked cool and so I played it and got really addicted to it.

How did you triple post, even?

My friend showed it to me when I was over at his house. He had two pads and every mix from DDRMax and earlier. We mostly played Konamix and Max, and later Max2. Eventually I decided I liked the game enough to buy one of those cheap $10 pads from Gamestop and borrowed his copy of Disney Mix, which was what I learned on. By the time I got my first DDR game, DDRMax2, for Christmas that year, I was into the low-to-mid Maniac range (I could clear everything on Disney Mix except My Summer Love -- funny because slow songs now tend to be my favorites).

It might be odd, but I was doing nine-footers at home on Konami soft pads before I ever got to try an arcade DDR game. Maybe that's why it never occurred to me to hold the bar or use mods or anything like that. A few months after I got Max2, my uncle opened this big indoor sports place with an arcade in the basement, which contained a perfect DDR Extreme machine, with working memory card slots and everything. At the time I was confused, because it had been upgraded from a DDRMax2 without changing the marquee, so I was expecting it to have lots of songs from my home version (I didn't know about all the songs hidden within the sort options). It was also tough to get started as the thing somehow had ten tokens jammed in the coin slot that we had to dig out with a paperclip. Either way, I got to practice on it a lot, as my uncle would have all-night New Years' parties so I'd get probably four or five solid hours in without much interruption. Sadly my uncle sold the place and the machine is now a SuperNOVA.

I was very hungry and there's only my sister, no one else in the house. She was playing this game on the PlayStation. I was disinterested but she told me I have to play it if I want food. So I played it and got addicted that I forgot I was hungry and didn't even realize my sister had made food. Since then, I got stomach ulcers.

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agentmargo: Think about it - DDR could be the difference between you now, and your Belieber evil incarnate!!


Mine started with my Marvel vs. Capcom 2 addiction. I was always into fighting games and was quite the metal head at the time.
ImL >.< JmI

Playstation was still the console of the times, and the internet was still really fresh. 56k dial-up was the "high speed" of the internet which at the time, was still sparing with images, nonexistant with music/sound/video, and the biggity diggitys on the block were AOL and Yahoo!, and people that didn't like IE didn't get Chrome or Firefox... they got Netscape Navigator. If you were lucky, you could download a song via Napster, and it only took about three days.

Personally, I always wondered why they never went with an actual "gator" icon. But w/e.

Now that the mood is set, DDR Solo 2000 popped up right behind MvC2 - which was still Dreamcast only, and nobody I knew had that much cash rolling around. Watched a couple of people play it early on, and it got me intrigued. Songs like GET OFF and SEXY PLANET gave it that sexy edge that appealed to me, and I recognized TOGETHER & FOREVER as a Mickey Mouse March cover, but didn't quite formulate why it sounded so familiar. I popped it on 3-panel mode... and failed. Three times a day, for three days.

Back then, there was no charts. There was ONE SONG per mix that had a L1 chart, and maybe 4-6 L2 ones. At three songs per game, it didn't offer a lot of variety to start with, but that also motivated players to push into L3s-4s, which were considerably more varied and ultimately, fun. This also became rather expensive with regular exposure, and back then, DDR wasn't localized at all.

A little after I'd gotten into it, and kinda roped some more people here into it as well, making the first major crew of friends I'd ever affiliated with for a long time; the arcade eventually added a 3rd Mix, and then replaced Solo 2k with a SECOND 3rd Mix machine. I kinda missed Solo, because I was just getting good at 6-panel when they flopped it. We also happened upon "Diet Diet Revolution," an indie engine that's like Stepmania 0.01. It didn't have MP3 support, so all the songs were uncompressed WAV files, or associated with burned CD tracks (like the 2nd Mix engine was). It also didn't support BPM adjustments at all, and didn't have a stepchart editor. This was raw Notepad, here; trial-and-error adjusting. Kinda banded together with some graphics peeps and helped knock out 3rd-4th Mix Plus simfiles (which also mirrored to Delight Delight Reduplication, a IIDX vs. DDR simulator that finally DID add BPM adjustments and 6-panel support, and MP3 compatibility; although versus mode had to be made manually - not just by playing two charts at once!). There was all of TWO fan-mixes I'm aware of at the time, the first a grip of stages made by RED ALiCE of Touhou fame, based on some original compositions, and the OST's of ParaParaParadise and DanceManiaX.

The second one was "Rock Rock Devilution."

Simfile mentality was totally different back then. It wasn't about perfect emulation/complete version of DDR and tournament-practice, we still used arcades for that. It was simply a means of practicing stepchart patterns that didn't cost us $40 per week. A bit later, I learned about importing Japanese PS1 games, which I'd never done before, and thought the whole PSX-Change was kind of sketchy, and I was mistrustful about modding my precious/expensive console for just that. But eventually I bit the bullet, and discovered the home version features like Edit Mode and Endless Mode, which was totally worth it.

Took about a year to get up to L5 , a second to easier , and around summer of 2001, friends and I were practicing to bust out the CATASTROPHICs. Ironically, the toughest ones for many of us were GRADIUSIC CYBER (AMD-G5) and LEADING CYBER. Once we hit the home versions, one look at ORION.78 -civilization mix-, and it was like WHOA. That is SO EFFING HARD!! Nobody's EVER gonna be able to keep up with a song like THAT! But trading edits was the funnest shidazzle ever.

2001 came along, and so did 5th Mix. And DDRMAX. -AND- the main US localization of DDR (FINALLY). This presented a few challenges, at the time. Pauses. Holds. The PlayStation 2 and that financial barricade. Things in DDR got great. Things in simulation got dicey. (The pauses were usually a 1/32 note BPM shift to something like 6 BPM, trial-and-error again, to make it work right - or sometimes just with the space left empty.) Along came Dance With Intensity and Stepmania 1.0 (which functionally looked like the 4th Mix interface, and was really slow/choppy!). But they added CRS format and streamlined stepcharting, so I spent 4.5 days recreating from MSD format to DWI; which on the poor man's computer, was the sim I went with - SM was high-end stuff in it's day. DDRMAX 2 followed surprisingly rapidly behind DDRMAX - so much that our arcade went directly from 4th Mix PLUS straight to MAX2. And right about then, I went to school in Long Beach. It kinda divided me from the DDR communities, although I met a few players down south, and in the CSULB Anime Club.

When I returned, hooooley crap. BMR, BemaniStyle, DDR:UK (which took simulation to extremes, even reproducing errors and inconsistencies in the games, and recreating 5th Mix's DATA BANK), EXTREME and In The Groove. I look at the simfile/fanmix/DDR community and... WOW. It's still staggering what it's all become!

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I was one of the ones dragging in by a specific song that grabbed me. For most people, it's usually something like Butterfly, Love Shine, Cartoon Heroes, or (there's another one that people usually name, but I forget it at the moment). For me, it was Dancing Pompokolin.