DDR at the End of Time | Clean~Room Exchange

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In 2023 I got good at DanceDanceRevolution.

Not a pro necessarily, but a year playing a SuperNOVA2 cabinet at a retro arcade and I can clear most songs with difficulties of 8/10. On modern‐day instalments, which score out of 20, these 8/10s are usually re‐rated to 11/20, though I can clear some that are now 12s too.

During summer 2023–24 I decided not to let upstairs apartment living discourage me and got a third‐party controller to emulate DDR songs on PC. Downstairs was a bachelor so I’d only play when his car was out to avoid noise complaints, and midyear I moved to a one‐storey place anyway.

This new practice method (unlimited songs at home vs 3 songs per credit) makes me reflect anew on whether what playing DDR ‘means’ has changed. And ultimately, despite the practical differences, I believe learning it works the same as when it launched in 1998.

What follows is less an account of my gameplay experiences and more a philosophical tract on the technological developments that have given DDR continued relevancy. While DDR might appear samey, it’s survived shifts in arcade demographics, birthed a decade‐long console run and more, hence the need to unpack my claim.

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In particular, DDR has evolved from twice‐yearly instalments to infrequent instalments maintained digitally, with console releases being succeeded by PC emulators. But it is still experientially consistent because DDR is effectively a test of two different skills: physically stepping out the arrows but also reading them.

This secondary skill test means watching DDR gameplay is a more involved form of practice than most video walkthroughs of games. While like always watching gameplay helps with rote memorisation of what comes next in a stepchart, what it helps more with is building ‘chart literacy’.

Simply put, charts in DDR increase in difficulty by having more arrows and less time in between them. Chart literacy is about both parsing the most efficient body movement for the next arrow and still understanding this when more arrows are on screen.

For example, if you saw ‘←→’, you’d know to jump with your left foot on the left arrow and your right foot on the right arrow. But ‘←→, ↑→, ↓↑’ in sequence is harder to interpret as ‘jump, repeat with your left foot up, then again with your right foot down’.

As such, just watching DDR can help build literacy, because understanding a given note pattern helps recognise the corresponding movement in whatever song it appears. This has always been part of the franchise’s gameplay loop, whether watching at the arcade, on YouTube or Twitch, or playing at home.

Also on this point, I believe the ‘encyclopedification’ of DDR through videos and wikis isn’t a deviation but a continuation of its original social aspect. An example is how players engage with the rating system itself, which changed because difficulty creep meant new 10/10s (and everything below) kept getting harder.

By SuperNOVA2 for instance, there were around 100 songs with a Difficult chart rated 6/10, which were re‐rated anywhere from 6/20 to 10/20. While having these undifferentiated was unfair, people would’ve known a ‘Kind Lady’ (6/20) from a ‘Paranoia Eternal’ (10/20) simply by seeing and talking about it.

Re‐ratings didn’t entirely help either, as spikes still exist between charts like ‘Cutie Chaser (Morning Mix)’ Expert (9/20 – 5/10) and ‘Love Shine’ Expert (9/20 – 7/10). Here, the artefacted ratings actually indicate which 9/20 is easier or harder, so as long as disseminating this knowledge rewards players, DDR’s social aspect remains.

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Another factor to DDR’s experiential consistency is its gameplay format, since setting step arrows to music is more conceptual than a regular video game level. Besides enabling watching DDR as a form of gameplay, this makes no instalment’s iteration of a stepchart the original – instead it exists ‘outside’ the games.

Compare with something like the first level of Super Mario Bros., which can be remade in official level editing software like Super Mario Maker. Even if every block, enemy and item was remade in the exact same spot, the gameplay is different because Mario Maker’s physics engine is inexact.

DDR instalments that a song appears in just change external factors like scoring and difficulty ratings, barring some chart revisions to fix unfair step patterns. The physical gameplay remains consistent, even in emulators and videos, meaning the ‘true’ chart is in all of them and thus no individual one.

This means changing release frequency from twice‐yearly to sporadic (and discontinuing console releases) amounts to differences in distribution methods, explained away by contemporary technological developments. Earlier instalments’ offline status demanded new machines with new music as player count and skill grew, but this became unnecessary once digital updates were possible.

In addition to being replaced by emulators, console ports arguably also ceased because new arcade instalments included more and more of the series’ historic songs. When machines had few songs from previous instalments, their port was their only archive – now they aren’t needed for this purpose (except for discontinued songs).

As such, even without counting community contributions like wikis and third‐party controllers, official DDR instalments are unchanged from their original franchise direction 25+ years ago. DDR gameplay is as abstract as an historical dance diagram, with the games only serving as different platforms across time to ‘officially’ grade your performance.

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And yet the series probably could have only been made in the 90s. It could’ve started any time since CD‐quality audio has been possible, but early adoption meant fans could discover and ‘encyclopedify’ it before arcade audiences dwindled.

Additionally, balancing song lists of licensed pop music with originals to minimise costs was only possible because of the affordability of 90s dance music composition. Session musicians would appear from 3rdMIX onwards, but early originals were constructed from sample CDs and synth presets – making them surprisingly contemporary with industry trends!

This also speaks to a wider development in 90s media, where just once the cost‐effective option of digital sampling over musicians was innovative practice. Genres like drum’n’bass showed its cut and paste nature could make sounds unlike any instruments – even if the technology homogenised music after it became standardised.

Once digital production was used in popular music, copy‐pasting more just enabled things like repeating instrumental tracks across verses, cheapening the sound, not distinguishing it. This is the irony of 90s innovation – without any reappropriation or changing of parameters, the technology overwrites its own history just by being used.

The transition from hardware‐based digital technology to online software is the same, as software’s virtual reproduction of hardware forcibly reframes it in a modern context. While analogue is imitable but technically distinct, digital hardware is completely replaceable, making its physical components an arbitrary manufacturing decision on the path to standardisation.

Yet, DDR circumvents this homogenisation due to its abstract gameplay loop being sustained, not subverted, by the digital standardisations of video recording, streaming and emulators. It’s innovative firstly for contributing to techno music as a video game and secondly for surviving the scene’s death without changing anything about itself.

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If you believe in software‐borne homogeneity, the next question is whether DDR offers anything to us by circumventing it. After all, if I have concerns about its retroactive effects on ‘in‐between’ hardware (eg, digitally printed writing), just writing about a unique topic is ineffectual.

This is the second reason why DDR’s start in the 90s is contextually important. Even if its gameplay eventually transcends twice‐yearly instalments, the initial need for new songs to be on new machines forcibly creates ‘snapshots’ of song lists.

A ‘snapshot’ of DDR is precisely what I used to learn the game by practising on a SuperNOVA2 instalment in a retro arcade. With DDR’s encyclopedification meaning I could survive without modern ratings by researching song difficulties, I came to prefer it because of the finite song list.

As a retro instalment with an archival song list, the SuperNOVA2 cabinet reprises the function of a corresponding console release – but in a public space. Its nonlinearity lets you prioritise clearing songs or score, going off original/re‐rated difficulty, BPM and more, yet with boss songs as an end goal.

Modern instalments have boss songs too, but while the series remains supported, their cabinets can be updated with new challenges to keep pace with players. SuperNOVA2’s value here as a retroactive pseudo‐console counterpart is that you have an unusually nonlinear game for an arcade cabinet, but with a conclusive goal.

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The need for nonlinear but completable games in public is because digital homogenisation means interactions in the digital can only communicate that an interaction occurred. However, interactivity in public may still create environmental footprints that leave traces of our actions for others to encounter and communicate through.

By ‘environmental footprint’ I mean the indirect physicality of our social interactions, from either participating in the activity being undertaken or encountering previous people’s footprints. It’s like if everyone chiselled once into marble, leaving marks like well‐worn paths in grass, except if this was in lieu of direct communication.

Arcades generally don’t exhibit this because the reframing of cabinets as arbitrary hardware by homogenisation makes them solely into an interaction in the digital. Here, the interactivity’s communication, ‘I chose this over software‐only gaming,’ obfuscates and stops players from making environmental footprints – but DDR’s abstract gameplay circumvents this restriction.

Conversely, its completability subverts another zero‐sum relationship nonlinear games enter, one between player and developer, where the player relies on content updates to create goals. As callous as it sounds, players are worse off from developers offering quality‐of‐life improvements, speedrun support, etc, because it stops the game from being discrete.

However, our senses are still calibrated for digital interactivity, even when not forcibly limited, so experiences of footprints aren’t observably attributable to being from them. I can claim a euphoria comes from environmental footprints, and that I experience it while exhausting DDR in public, but elaborating would require another zine.

At minimum, DDR’s consistency and leftover retro instalments prevent the overriding of public activity with digital interactivity and player–developer interactivity respectively. As a 90s game, DDR emerged from the end of history, but unlike other period art its thesis hasn’t been disproven by the new millennium.

As such, I only feel justified spending ink on the innovations of DanceDanceRevolution to advocate for this idiosyncratic form of play as a subversive act. And with it relying on historical instalments of an historical franchise whose origins can never be replicated, its rarity makes exploration all the more important.

May it exist until the end of time!