Dance Dance Revolution

Dance Dance Revolution has been my primary hobby since 2021. You may be familiar with the game if you've passed by a DDR cabinet in a public arcade: the dance game where you move your feet to step on the arrows corresponding to the targets on-screen. It's great exercise, and my main physical activity that keeps me fit.

I have a YouTube channel where I upload all of my DDR clips here. It has a lot of uploads, so I put my best ones in my "highlights" playlists by year, if you were interested in seeing a few of them. Here is a video of one of my favorite popoffs:

DDR is a niche interest, so it has a small but tight-knit community across the US. I'm pretty active in the overall scene and know players from different communities (SoCal, Ohio, New England, to name a few). When I took a trip to New England in Summer 2023, I met some of my friends through a community meetup in Holyoke!

My History with DDR

When I got into the DDR community in 2021, I wasn't a stranger to the game. DDR was my childhood interest up until I was around 10 years old. In DDR's early days in the US, you could find DDR cabs in most local arcades to play it, or you could play the console versions on the PlayStation 2 with a soft mat. I owned a few PS2 games and was obsessed with playing these on my soft mat as a kid:

Over 10 years later, I saw DDR again at a Dave & Buster's in Austin, which reminded me of how much fun I had playing it... but so much about DDR had changed over the years. Several new mixes were released, and with much harder songs than before: DDR step charts are assigned levels from 1 to 19, and most new content was level 15 and above. I witnessed people play those upper levels, and the movement looked inhuman to me--how were they moving their legs that fast?! What was only a casual, fun game to me as a kid now had an intense and rapidly growing competitive scene.

Little did I know that I would become part of that competitive scene myself in just a few months. I met my closest DDR friends one night in Austin, and they kept inviting me to the arcade to keep playing. They were far better than me when I met them, but they inspired me to keep improving, giving me advice on how to get better, and introducing me to an online ranking system called LIFE4: a goal-oriented progression system which placed players into ranks based on their ability. Achieving new LIFE4 ranks pushed me to improve at DDR, to the point where I got good enough to rival my closest DDR friends in skill.

In 2022, I eventually became more involved in the broader DDR scene. Communities across the US hosted tournaments, which gave me opportunities to meet the players I met through LIFE4 in-person, and compete with them to see how far my skills have gone! The biggest annual DDR tournament is Mistake on the Lake, hosted by the Ohio DDR community. Here are some photos from when I competed in my tournament pools:

DDR Cab Ownership

Unfortunately, DDR became much harder to access over the years. They stopped doing console releases, and the game became much harder to find in local arcades, as the only arcade chains with the newest cabs are Dave & Buster's and Round 1. If you don't live near one of those arcades with a cab, accessing the game is hard unless you own a home setup or cab. You can buy your own pads to play at home, but the arcade experience is hard to replicate unless you buy a whole DDR cab. DDR cabs cost thousands of dollars, are heavy to move around, and take up a lot of space and electricity.

Owning a DDR cab wasn't on my radar until my living situation changed. It made no sense to own a cab while living in a single-room apartment in Dallas, but when I moved to a house in Austin with my closest DDR friends, we obtained a cab when the opportunity came up. In August 2023, I bought a DDR Extreme cab that was sold in Dallas for $5k, and transported it to our house in Austin! The majority of our playtime is now on the cab we own, which saves us the driving and spending money at the arcade.

My personal major problem with owning a DDR cab is that I'm responsible for maintaining it myself--public arcades can have experienced techs that keep their cabs well-maintained. As someone who lacks DIY and hardware experience, it took me a painfully long time to initially fix the arcade pads up, since I needed exposure to how the arcade parts worked together, and there aren't very many guides on DDR cabs on the Internet. But once you're well into cab ownership, there's so many ways you can improve and modify a DDR cab to your liking, to the point where cab ownership pretty much becomes a hobby itself!