So… lets take it back. Back sometime around this time. The arcade had just introduced a Dance Dance Revolution machine!
This was a post from a friend back in 2015. Those are likes from some of my friends today. The tagged friend writes step charts for the game now. Except.. I didn’t know these people. I wasn’t around to see this post, and I just so happened to find out about this machine some time later.
I really never called myself a fan of rhythm games. I could round-off to double-backflip but I never called myself a gymnast. I could play Guitar Hero, but I wasn’t a rhythm game enthusiast. It was a cool game. Better yet, you could play it in the comfort of your own home. No one is around to laugh at you for missing notes on easy mode. No one is around to watch you fail on medium, on hard, on expert.
So, when I entered the arcade scene, if you could call it that, I was a polished act. I would play my songs, score pretty well, feel good about myself, and walk away satisfied.
There was a catch however. One song on Guitar Hero was $1. Four songs on Dance Dance Revolution was $0.50. I had only had a job for a couple of months at this point (I was freshly 18), and I could not take that kind of wallet abuse.
What I probably couldn’t take even more was the embarrassment of trying the game though. I’ve tried it before as a kid. I can’t tell up from down and I am sure of it. The notes scroll along the Y axis and Guitar Hero along the Z. I feel like I made every excuse in the book. I really did not want to humiliate myself playing this game. I was not going to magically be an expert. On top of that, it’s… dancing. I stayed away for a little while, but my meeting with the machine was inevitable. So, I did try it shortly after.
I sucked. Just as bad as I thought I would. I had no history with this game unlike the other players and I could not tell up from down. I failed on the easiest difficulty and it made me feel pretty bad for some time! I went from playing on the highest difficulty on a similar game to failing on the easiest on here.
However, this machine was not a typical machine. It just happened to be running OpenITG, an open-source clone of In The Groove (a DDR variant), which was based on Stepmania 3.95, and if that sounds convoluted, it is!
The previous owner must have loaded the machine with songs, because there were a lot of recognizable hits aside the DDR official songs (that I really have no stake in). There were songs from the radio, songs I would listen to while driving, party songs, it really had everything. I kept playing for the music. It wasn’t long after that it started feeling…good. I wasn’t worried about people watching me, and it wasn’t because I got better. There was just an inexplicably good feeling about playing by myself, on easy.
Later on, I was given opportunities to load more songs into the game, I even wrote a few myself. I made friends with the veteran players, and some of us have taken up the task of maintaining the machine. I have revived another machine in the arcade (which will be featured soon), and I have brought this one back to life in December 2017, better than before. I have friends who write step charts and we have a group of some thirty people who play regularly. I would not have had the relationship that I did with them if it were not for the machine or this game I have come to love.
I’m really glad I didn’t let my fear of being judged hold me back. Sometimes you just have to jump in.
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