StepMania, the successor of Dance Dance Revolution

I recently learned of StepMania, and it has ignited an attempt in me to play dancing games in the comfort of my home once again.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to my music on shuffle as I often do and a familiar song came on. “Beethoven Virus” was originally on Pump It Up, but it is the iconic song for dance video games in my opinion. There are numerous songs from dance games in my music library (don’t judge me), but this is one that just takes me back. It’s high tempo, catchy, and it embodies the nature of dance game songs.

While that particular song was from Pump It Up, I was always a bigger fan of Dance Dance Revolution or DDR. The 4 buttons in up/down/left/right configuration always felt more natural to me than the 5 button configuration with diagonals and a center button used by Pump It Up. Not only that, but DDR was available both in arcades and on home consoles, so I could practice at home and then show off my skills in arcades.

For whatever reason, Pump It Up has become the more popular dance game in the United States, and seems to be the only cabinet I see in arcades now. I’ve heard talk of DDR cabinets in niche places, but nowhere I’m willing to drive to regularly. I try Pump It Up here and there when I go to arcades, but the button layout and songs just make me miss when DDR was more readily available.

In any case, hearing “Beethoven Virus” got me wondering if any sort of DDR game was available on PC. Even if there wasn’t an official port or PC release, I could look into emulating PS2 games. Surely, with as popular as DDR used to be, there should be a community that still enjoys it.

No matter if I emulated or found a PC dance game, I would need a USB dance pad to properly play it. Unfortunately, dance pads could get expensive and I really wasn’t in the position to spend a lot of money on reliving an old hobby. I still had my old PS2 dance pads, though. What about adapters? It can’t be that hard to convert PS2 controller ports to USB.

I did some research and found good news on both fronts. This reddit post indicated that StepMania was an ideal DDR replacement. The more I looked into StepMania, the more excited I got. Apparently, it originated as a simulation of DDR, but has grown into a full-fledged engine in use by actual creators of dance games.

Not only is StepMania a great platform in and of itself, it also supports “Stepfiles” for custom songs. There are files available for basically every DDR game ever released. No need to buy every individual game and switch between discs for specific songs. You can literally import all of the songs you want into a single core game.

Best of all, it’s free. StepMania is open-source, so anybody can use it, and it has still received updates even as recently as 2016. This isn’t some obscure project that died back in 2004. It is current, and it apparently has a huge following. Honestly, if this whole project turns out as well as I hope, I’ll definitely donate to the developers for creating such an awesome product.

As for the dance pad, I looked mostly into adapters. There are full-on cabinets available for purchase, and plenty of custom rigs like this one created by /u/dcls, but those are way more than I’m looking to put into the project. I’m much more limited, both on funds and time. There were several products in the $10-$15 range on Walmart and Amazon, but of course, the cheapest ones available were Chinese knock-offs.

I’ve used AliExpress before, so when I saw this product, I had a good feeling about it. Sure, the entire site looks a little sketch, but they didn’t steal my card information before, and I can dispute it if they do. I bought a phone case that ended up working pretty well, and I paid something under $2 for it. I used a card that only pays for Netflix each month, so if it DID get skimmed, I could just cancel it and migrate my Netflix payment to another card. No biggie.

It’s a buck fifty. Even if the product is garbage and doesn’t work at all, what am I out? A cup of coffee? Completely worth the risk to me. If it does work well, I’ll definitely be buying another one. Two dance pads to go head to head with friends? It’ll be like 2005 all over again.

I personally owned DDRMAX2, Extreme 2, and SuperNOVA. Obviously, I grabbed the mixes from those games, and I’ll probably get all DDR songs ever released eventually. Loading them into StepMania is super easy, and it isn’t like they take a ton of space. And fortunately, StepMania truly does play just like DDR did. It’s like I was in middle school all over again.

If the adapter doesn’t work and I can’t get the dance pad connected to StepMania, at least it was a fun attempt. I can still play all of the old DDR songs with my fingers on arrow keys for nostalgia at least. If it does work, though? Best. Cardio. Ever. Any time I have friends over for the next while, we’ll be playing DDR. I’ll be posting an update in the coming weeks to discuss whether the adapter worked and how things play out.