Dance Dance Revolution, abbreviated DDR, and previously known as Dancing Stage in Europe and Australasia, is a music video game series produced by Konami. Introduced in Japan in 1998 as part of the Bemani series, and released in North America and Europe in 1999, Dance Dance Revolution is the pioneering series of the rhythm and dance genre in video games. Players stand on a dance platform or stage and hit colored arrows laid out in a cross with their feet to musical and visual cues. Players are judged by how well they time their dance to the patterns presented to them and are allowed to choose more music to play to if they receive a passing score.
Dance Dance Revolution has been given much critical acclaim for its originality and stamina in the video game market. There have been dozens of arcade-based releases across several countries and hundreds of home video game console releases. The series has promoted a music library of original songs produced by Konami's in-house artists and an eclectic set of licensed music from many different genres. The series has also inspired many clones of its gameplay and a global fan base of millions that have created simulators of the game to which they contribute original music and simfiles , collections of dance patterns to a specific song. DDR is generally considered the first machine dance game, followed by games such as Pump It Up by Andamiro and In the Groove by Roxor. DDR celebrated its 10th anniversary on November 21, 2008.
Successfully hitting the arrows in time with the music fills the Dance Gauge , or life bar, while failure to do so drains it. If the Dance Gauge is fully depleted during gameplay, the player fails the song, usually resulting in a game over. Otherwise, the player is taken to the Results Screen, which rates the player's performance with a letter grade and a numerical score, among other statistics. The player may then be given a chance to play again, depending on the settings of the particular machine (the limit is usually 3-5 songs per game). In some of the home versions, there is usually an option for event mode, where an unlimited number of songs can be played. On some DDR games, there is an option to use two pads at once, making it harder to play but increasing the number of moves to incorporate into songs.
On Dance Dance Revolution X, the foot/bar rating system was given its first major overhaul, now ranking songs on a scale of 1-20, the first 10 represented by yellow bars, and the second 10 represented by additional red blocks shown in place on top of yellow bars. All songs from previous versions were re-rated on the new scale, including the flashing 10s, whose true difficulty in comparison to other flashing 10s is also now known as a result for the first time. The best way to calculate the new ratings of songs is to roughly multiply the previous difficulty rating to numbers between 1.3 to 1.5 and round it up. However, there are some dramatic changes in the way songs are rated; Bag (Expert - 10) is listed as Level 12, The Least 100 Seconds (Expert - 8) and Paranoia Hades (Difficult - 8) are listed as Level 14, and Arrabbiata (Expert - 9) is listed as Level 16.
