StepMania package history

What were the earliest simfiles that we know of? Is there any way to chronologically organize roughly when certain StepMania packages came out?

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SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME...

Anyway, my guess is that people probably made official DDR files and nothing else for a while as the game WAS touted as a "DDR simulator" at the start.

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The earliest DDR simfiles pre-dated Stepmania by a few years.

BM98 came out in 1998, and gave birth to the .BMS format. The progam could be skinned to play DDR, but this wasn't really a thing people ever bothered to do, since Beatmania was several times more popular than DDR, and it made no sense to create songs that only used 4 lanes of notes.

Delight Delight Reduplication came out in 1999. It was given a DDR skin later that year, and custom DDR charts for it came out right around the end of 1999. It used also used BMS , but also MSD files. The release of Delight Delight co-incided with the release of both official and bootleg home DDR controllers onto the market, and so all of a sudden, DDR could be played at home, and re-skinning BMS simulators to play 4-lane DDR songs made complete sense.

The earliest custom simfiles were definately in 1999, but were almost certainly just shoddy "conversions" of custom Beatmania simfiles, with 2 lanes of notes either deleted, or moved into other lanes. There's no way to tell who made them or what they were, because all of the websites that hosted them are long gone.

The first arcade simfiles I remember seeing were early 2000. There was no Youtube, so people would usually only put them together for songs they wanted to memorise, either for PA or freestyle routines. The music and steps could be copied from the Playstation games, but Japanese fans didn't really bother - they just played them on the Playstation, unless they had some specific reason to play the chart in a simulator.

The first real concerted effort to publish a "complete pack" was in 2002, when we put the original DDRUK arcade packs together. I'm sure that people collected sets of MSD files before this, and people probably had complete arcade-perfect collections, but they were never shared in public.

If by "StepMania packages" you mean charts with .sm files, those can't be any older than about 2003 because .sm was added in StepMania 3.0. Older versions used the .dwi format only (which was essentially extended .msd with an incompatible way of defining the offset).

Wow good info,you have been around haha

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Yes that is an extremely informative response. Is there any way to determine which arcade packs were the first? I guess there is Archive.org for DDRUK. I am more curious when the first StepMania package originals started coming around. Is there anyway to determine which were the first originals in our history?

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There's no way of knowing, because the internet was a different pace back then. Instead of having online services like Facebook and ZIV giving everyone a portal to communicate on the internet, everyone pretty much just had an EMail address, and a small website on a service like lycos or geocities.

Geocities was huge in Japan (it actually still exists), and pretty much everyone had one. The only way to find simfiles was if somebody hosted their simfiles on their Geocities site, and then made an effort to join a Webring. A webring was essentialy a massive HTML page of links to sites with similar interests. In this case, there would be a dozen or so webrings dedicated to people who liked Beatmania, and a maybe a handful of those pages would post their own DDR .MSD files. You really had to trawl through them to find stuff, and the vast majority of sites that were around in 2002 have now been deleted, to free up space on the Geocities server.

The DDRUK packs came about when Lawrence wanted to create a full set of files for Dance With Intensity, and contacted me at first, because I'd collected a full set of .MSD files for all of the DDR games that existed at that point. The thing is, I have no idea where any of those MSD files came from. Everyone just threw together MSD files for the particular songs they wanted to play at home, and you had to really search them out. In my search, I definitely did find websites that had huge collections of songs, but nothing I'd consider complete. I'd like to say that the DDRUK pack was the first publicly available 'complete' arcade pack, but I doubt it's true. Just like I had a complete set of .MSD files, there had to be others out there who had done the same, and like me, they had no means or reason to publish them on the internet. Some Japanese guys probably did, and we just never happened to find them.

The same applies for Original packs. There was probably a Japanese guy out there who put one together, and put it on his Geocities site, but because it was impossible for anything to get popular back then, it's impossible to say anything about early custom simfile packs, and impossible to go looking for information on them, because all of those Geocities sites actually pre-date archive.org.

Here are the earliest landmark simfile collections I can remember :

Bemaniruler (2002)
The first simfile artist to achieve any sort of recognition in the community. BMR's popularity co-incided with the IDMusic chat room and DDRFreak forums being opened, which was when BMR started experimenting in putting out simfiles that were far more experimental and difficult than anything DDR itself offered at the time. What was unique about BMR was that although he did crazy shit like a 16-foot song in 2002, or a song that was 10 minutes long, his songs were actually fun and could just about be completed by people playing at home on soft mats. Bemaniruler never really released simfile packs, but it was very common to see all of his files bundled together in a .LHZ file.

DWI Extreme / DDR4Ever (2003)
Two very early (pre-Stepmania) song packs that attempted to create an entire DDR game's worth of songs. Both used a combination of licensed songs (usually Dancemania songs that Konami passed up), and crossover songs from other Bemani games.

Foonmix (2004)
Foonmix only pre-dates In The Groove by a few months, but it was the first successful attempt to create an entire DDR game in Stepmania, with completely original graphics, sound, songs and BGA videos. Most of the artists collaborating to Foonmix were successful BMS makers, so this pack really is the most representative of what early (pre-Stepmania) simfiles were like. One huge difference between Japanese simfiles and western simfiles is how complete they were. It was very rare to find anyone outside of Japan who would compose the music, make the simfile, and also animate a background video.

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It's also worth noting that when I say "pre-Stepmania", I mean before Stepmania became popular. Stepmania was unpopular for a long time, because it required a 3D video card in order to run, wheras Dance With Intensity could run from pretty much any PC or laptop of the time. I think it was around the time that Frieza joined the team that the project really took off, and became the de-facto simulator of choice.

So eventually what happened is that steps became more centralized when Bemanistyle went online. At first we only had the 2003 packs, but then Bemanistyle 6 gave us a user generated content server.

While that was going on numerous themed collections were packed up and often shared on forums and/or their home websites. 240-185's Dancing, Albumix, BEST-mix, Blue Generation, Dancing Wipeout, DDR OSC, DDR4EVER, DDRei TournaMiX, and Otaku's Dream to name a few.

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Love reading this stuff
(no sarcasm at all btw)

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