The rise, fall and return of Dance Dance Revolution in America

For Chris Chike, Jeff Lloyd and Hudson Felker, the moment had been over a decade in the making. What started as simple hangouts with friends or family vacation diversions became a passion shared with thousands of others, one they’d dedicate their entire selves to, despite the company responsible nearly allowing it to perish.

The three young competitors had the chance to make history. For the first time in the Konami Arcade Championship’s six years, Americans were allowed to compete for the title of Dance Dance Revolution world champion. They faced stiff competition from experienced professionals from Japan, Korea and Taiwan, including former KAC champion “FEFEMZ.”

Chike, Lloyd and Felker spent their days preparing any way they could: Playing friendly exhibition matches with competitors around Japan, finding arcades off the beaten path, and burning calories by running up flights of stairs just outside the competition hall. After Felker lost in the preliminaries, it was up to Chike and Lloyd to take the title home, with the pair following FEFEMZ by less than 40 out of 3,700 points.

After a blistering final performance by Chike and FEFEMZ, anxiety and exhaustion had so riddled Chike’s mind that he wasn’t even sure who had won. Moments later, as the four top players embraced each other on the awards stage, the competition’s host shouted into his microphone, and scores flashed onto the screen behind them.

The crowd burst into shocked applause.

Chris Chike had become the first American DDR champion, 6005 to his rival’s 5974 points.

“I’m taking the title back to America,” Chike said onstage after being presented the championship trophy. He says it was a dream come true.

A Dance Dance reversal of fortune

For the decade prior, it was almost impossible to imagine an American taking home the DDR title, even one as rhythmically prolific as Chike, who gained notoriety for becoming the first player to 100 percent “Through the Fire and the Flames” on Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock.

After the arcade release of DDR USA in 2000, Konami effectively cast off the majority of the North American dance game scene, much to the disappointment of the local DDR fanbase. Konami had its reasons: America’s arcade scene was declining, and tumultuous lawsuits had nibbled at the company's resources and manpower.

American arcade visitors had trouble finding reliable DDR machines. While home releases came with regularity and new games kept releasing overseas, local arcades often ended up carrying imported versions, or in some cases even bootleg versions. Konami also partnered with third-party distributor Betson to release North American arcade versions of 2006’s DDR SuperNova and 2008’s SuperNova 2. Instead of these machines using the original Japanese parts, Americans received lower quality footpads and monitors.

“The lament of the DDR player in America [has always been] you find a machine, you’re just thrilled to play it, and the down arrow just doesn’t work at all,” says Felker, who placed third overall at KAC. “The sensors are just totally busted. You go to the tech and he says ‘Well, it works. It turns on.’ You’re like, ‘That’s not the point.’ I used to tell techs the arrow needs to be cleaned out a bit, and they would take some Windex and spray the top of the panel and wipe it. I’m like ‘dude, that’s not how this works,’ but they don’t want to do any work.”

In response to this, competitors like In the Groove tried to fill the gap, but that game’s less standardized format (modifiers allow players to change the appearance, speed or outright positioning of the arrows) led to disagreement on how to properly measure skill.

And in May of 2005, Konami sued In the Groove developer Roxor Games for patent and trademark infringement, among other charges. The court’s eventual findings were almost entirely in favor of Konami, and the company acquired the rights to In the Groove as part of the settlement, causing further confusion in the American dance game community. Developers from the In the Groove team later went on to collaborate on the Pump It Up series, another similar arcade dance game, but with the industry’s biggest player holding the franchise close to the chest, the future of dancing games still felt uncertain and splintered.

Konami also threw many arcade owners to the wind with regards to upgrade kits that converted older machines into newer versions of the game.

“They didn’t sell upgrade kits [in North America]. They only sold brand new machines,” says Felker. “Even though there were 1,000 machines in the country, none of those could become SuperNova. You had to buy a new SuperNova machine. In Japan, they offered kits. That alone segmented 90 percent of arcades. [Then] arcades had just spent close to $20,000 on these brand new SuperNova machines and the new version comes out and they say ‘you have to buy a brand new machine to play this.' At this point, everyone just gave up on the game.”

At the series' lowest point, 2009’s DDR X and 2010’s DDR X2 experienced a very limited release, featured recycled hardware from the Guitar Hero Arcade cabinet, and players often complained of lagging monitors and less responsive footpads than their Japanese counterparts. The machines still had no connection to Konami’s online service.

“At this point, Konami had screwed up four times. Everybody stopped caring,” Felker says.

It wasn’t until the release of DDR A in July 2016 that a shift in Konami’s approach to the American market would spell good news for players, or at least those who lived close enough to play the game.

For players like Chike, Lloyd and Felker, the dreadful gut feeling was inescapable. They’d had their hearts broken so many times, been relegated to off-brand machines over and over, that the thought of a new DDR machine with full leaderboard connectivity, quality parts and a relatively complete song list seemed like fantasy. Players still had to hope they might live near one of the initial 50 machines, considering upgrade kits were still only available in Japan, but the game brought enough to the table to turn player opinion.

“The day the machines roll out, and we have DDR A in our local arcade, and you play the game and it’s connected, it’s working fine, everything is just … as it’s supposed to be, you’re like, ‘Wait a second. This is actually happening. We have access to the game again,’” Felker says. “We [had] not been on the same level as Japan in terms of accessibility since 2002. That’s a lifetime. To finally be able to step on that pad and go ‘this is here to stay’ was revolutionizing. This was the start of a new era.”

DDR A featured connectivity to e-Amusement, Konami’s online service that tracks scores for its arcade games and allows access to exclusive events, already a huge game-changer for American players. Suddenly, North American players could upload their scores to a central leaderboard and establish rivalries with foreign players.

To top it all off, Konami later announced that at least two North American players would be selected to compete at the Konami Arcade Championship, throwing players like Chike, Lloyd and Felker into overdrive.

“DDR is now in this renaissance because we can be competitive again,” Lloyd says. “That was a big surprise to all of us. We had been getting the short end of the stick for so long that we thought Konami was just going to screw us over again and that it’ll be locked to Japan and Korea only. But no, we actually got to participate and qualify and be a part of this world experience.”

American competitors began the tough process of re-climbing the charts and establishing their records for the KAC qualifier. For Chike, it simply meant picking up where he had never really left off in the first place. For 20-25 hours a week, Chike would practice on the nearest DDR A machine in San Jose, California, a 40-minute commute from his home in California. Lloyd had to drive nearly an hour-and-a-half each way until a nearby Dave & Busters acquired its own.

“When Konami announced this tournament, I was like ‘OK, this is my chance to prove that I’m the best,” Chike says. “I was obsessed with improving and eventually being the best.”

Hoping for a marvelous future

Konami and the American DDR community won’t be without their future challenges. There are currently only about 50 DDR A machines in America, most relegated to large franchises like Dave & Busters and the Japanese-owned chain Round 1. Part of this low machine count can be attributed to Konami’s own production restrictions. A substantial order quota must be met before Konami can justify firing up the factory lines to produce a machine, leaving small or medium-sized arcades stranded without the aid of a distributor like Betson. Unsurprisingly, a majority of the machines so far have ended up along the west and northeast coasts, leaving the midwest empty, save for the areas surrounding Chicago and Dallas.

Konami was unavailable for comment by press time.

While lines at his local San Jose arcade have grown noticeably longer, Chike still wonders about DDR’s future.

“As long as we end up getting more machines, I’d say it’ll keep thriving,” Chike says. “I think that’s definitely something that needs to happen if it’s going to stay alive, because not everyone is going to stay interested in it forever.”

In some respect, it will be up to the players themselves to continue the push for ongoing support.

Julian Onyali

“What we’re all hoping for … as a community is to support the game as much as possible to show companies like Round 1 and Dave & Busters that there is a demand for DDR in the U.S. so they’ll eventually buy more cabinets. Then maybe one day a distributor will notice,” Lloyd says. “We’re kind of at the wind, in a sense, of these giant corporations that could decide they don’t really like rhythm games anymore and want to get into the bar business or redemption games. If we want to keep this alive, we have to put our money where our mouths are.”

Despite the concerns of a multimillion dollar company’s whims, for these three professionals, it’s almost always been about self-improvement and community. Formally competing against foreign players has opened up that community in strange new ways that still need to be tackled for American players, but the hope is that Konami acknowledges the west’s desire for more.

“We all had a great time [at KAC], and coming back to America and seeing all the hype this has generated, I want to see more people in arcades. I want to see this really grow,” Lloyd says. “There’s so many fans of gaming and esports now. This could be the next biggest thing.”