History of the Japanese DDR Scene/Community

Hello, me again.

Since I have been working on this for the past small while, I thought I would share what I have now that it is a much easier to distribute PDF.

http://aaronin.jp/JDDR.pdf
(Apologies for it being 100+ pages)

I have been taking in comments and suggestions from over on Facebook as well as my site.

It is still *very* rough and I have a lot of content to change and pictures to add, but constructive feedback is welcome.

- Aaron

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This is fascinating, thanks

I really like this! That would be cool if it actually became a book.

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I read the first part on AIJ, so I was happy to read about 2007 on.

Things to fix:
"Xephyr" -> Xepher

That was nostalgic and all kinds of awesome

If there's another draft, I'd be interested to read more about the early Freestyle scene, particuarly A-Team / Pumpstreet videos hitting the internet, and how the Japanese players responded to that. Also, how the japanese public react to seeing freestyle on a DDR machine.

One thing I remember vividly from around the 4th Mix era was Japanese players recording MP3 files, and putting together websites that compiled graphics of each song's chart, then trying to forbid the files from falling into the hands of western players, because listening to the songs repeatedly and understanding the timing of off-beat arrows was considered a huge advantage over just being able to play the game in a crowded game center.

I remember the "trading" of MP3s and step charts as well.. God, that was retarded :{

Oh, also, BM98, and how that didn't exactly revolutionise the way Japan played DDR, in the way DWI revolutionised the way America did.

append : I think the "DDR Teams" fad in Japan was due to the fact that Initial D was hitting the height of it's popularity at the time. There was obviously a huge crossover audience, there.

Great one..

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So glad you crossposted this from AIJ! And that it's in a form suitable for crossposting XD

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Wow, this is extremely interesting, awesome job Aaron! You truly have a unique perspective into the rise and spread of DDR, it's awesome to hear your observations and thoughts.

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Loved it! I wanted to read something like this for quite some time. Great job!

By the way, I want to add some more bits of info, just if anyone cares.
IN THE NAVY - The Race - Comment from Captain Jack, from the Best of Cool Dancers event. I was quite surprised to see the page to the event is still up in KONAMI's website, though it's a bit hard to find.

The IR memorabilia mentioned from 5thMIX can be seen in 5thMIX CS' Gallery Mode.
Other interesting data is that you could win prizes with the DDR soundtracks from Toshiba EMI, such as the case of DDRMAX, where prizes were signed foot panels by CJ and Miss Papaya and NAOKI signed mouse pads and arcade ads.

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Rough Draft Revision 21...nice lol

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So I just read all 80 something pages of it and now i'm tired. Cheers and goodnight.
well, sort of.

Would make a brilliant log of everything DDR to date though. Good job aaron.

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Thanks for the feedback, all.

hyper kitten> Well, every time I think I am getting somewhere, I am reminded that I have forgotten to add a bunch of stuff. Who knows when this will ever be "finished".

DJ Tomoe> Thanks for the links on the King of Freestyle dancers event. I remember Konami's page and the event itself when it happened but I couldn't find much in the way of media for it nowadays. That helps quite a bit, actually. The memorabilia I remember though. Those were available in UFO catchers and at Circo Porto back in the day. I'm kicking myself for not picking up a DDR bag when I had the chance. There were other prizes specific to the IR, though. The folding fan with the characters printed on it, signed CDs, etc.

Tyma> Thanks for the info. on 4th mix. I *vaguely* remember that but I'm chatting with Akudaikan about it all now. He remembers it a bit, but that whole subculture was pretty isolated from what he said (he didn't want much to do with them, either). The home versions and soundtracks didn't come out so much later than the game, and there were other sites that had the stepcharts at the time. I'm wondering how I could write this all up. The Initial-D theory makes some sense, but I'm not sure if that is the only case. Teams were formed later during Extreme as well but that had nothing to do with Initial D, just a casual way of tying players to a certain arcade or region.

yindesu> Doh! I'll fix that in the next revision

agentmargo> I'd really like to, but I would think Konami would find a way to sue me to oblivion. There are places that will let you use them as a printing and distribution service for things like personal photo albums. Maybe one of those? :/ I'll look into that when this is (mostly) done and over with.


Hrm, come to think of it, I didn't mention anything about DAM DDR (The karaoke DDR). It had 10000+ songs (the ones in the karaoke library) but each chart was random and equivalent to a light difficulty song. Not sure if I can say much about it.

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I read all of it and enjoyed it. I learned a lot of thing from reading it. . Great work!

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Not trying to be nit-picky, but minor type-o on page 74....
"English voice had a think native English accent"

Doh, that should be "English voice had a thick native English accent"

The spell checker, it deceives me :O


Well, if there are minor nitpicks like that, I might as well take them all in now. I don't want people stumbling upon this years from now and laughing at my atrocious spelling and grammar errors.

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I read through some of it and enjoyed what I read. I thought about sharing my opinions in a video about DDR or the Bemani series as well however I haven't been in it nearly as long as some players so I didn't really get around to it.

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An excellent article, I really enjoyed reading it, many thanks for writing and sharing it. The person in Taiwan referenced on p81 has to be Dr.D, right?

I have a couple of points for consideration (only minor details):
* p9: Is "Bass 2000" correct? Shouldn't this be "SOLO 2000" (no Bass in the title)?

* p12: DDR 3rdMIX PLUS (a JP-only release, IIRC) incorporated the 7 korean songs that were released in DDR 3rdMIX ver.KOREA (A.K.A. DDR 3rdMIX Korean Ver or DDR 3rdMIX ver.KAA - there was also a DDR 3rdMIX ver.KOREA 2 adding 9 more songs that have never made it onto a JP mix), to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a mix called "3rd+ Korean Ver 1" or "3rd+ Korean Ver 2"

* p44 "Players will make some kind of vocal statement if there is dispute to who goes next" - that should probably be "if there is a dispute"

* p60 "rapid jumps were not done in groups of more than 3 until DDR Extreme" - this is true for JP machines, but just FYI DDR 3rdMIX ver.KOREA 2 (2000) has lots of charts overusing this silly gimmick on Maniac (Hi, "Starian").

As a total aside; with regards to DDR SuperNOVA, the hardware (Python 2) has an external memory card reader interface & controller board built-in (it has a multiple pin edge connector that looks a bit like an old SCSI external connector), but for some reason this was never developed further - I'd love to know why!

Now, someone should do the same for the US/UK scenes so we can compare and contrast

One final question: What did the Japanese scene think about overseas exclusive mixes (namely: Dancing Stage EuroMIX, Dancing Stage EuroMIX 2, Dancing Stage Fusion - I don't count DDR USA since it offers no exclusive songs)? Whilst you wouldn't have had the cabinets themselves, was there much information passed around about them, or was it just totally unheard of over there?

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This was a great read, and it only made my hours here at work that much more productive. Thanks!

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No ammount of 100-page documents could ever explain Jason Ho.

Not sure if you guys know who this player is, but there was a player here in the SF Bay Area by the name of Tigger who won pretty much every tournament that took place at least on this side of the country.

There was a fair amount of controversy over it from what I can recall.

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