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Dance Dance Revolution, commonly abbreviated to DDR, is a music video game series produced by Konami. It was first introduced to Japanese video arcades in 1998, after being shown at the Tokyo Game Show earlier that year. more...

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Since then, the game has gained significant popularity elsewhere in the world, including large portions of North America, Europe and Australia. The Dance Dance Revolution series is a subset of the larger Bemani series of music games. As of 2008, over 100 official versions, or "mixes" of DDR have been produced, with over 1,000 songs featured across the various games.

The series is marketed and sold under the name Dancing Stage in Europe and Australia, as well as in certain Japanese versions.

The game is typically played on a dance pad with four arrow panels: left, right, up, and down. Additional gameplay modes may utilize two four-panel pads side-by-side (doubles mode), or a single six-panel pad with additional arrows corresponding to the upper diagonals (solo mode). These panels are pressed using the player's feet, in response to arrows that appear on the screen in front of the player. The arrows are synchronized to the general rhythm or beat of a chosen song, and success is dependent on the player's ability to time and position his or her steps accordingly.

Common gameplay elements

The core gameplay involves the player moving his or her feet to a set pattern, stepping in time to the general rhythm or beat of a song. During normal gameplay, arrows scroll upwards from the bottom of the screen and pass over stationary, transparent arrows near the top (referred to as the "guide arrows" or "receptors"). When the scrolling arrows overlap the stationary ones, the player must step on the corresponding arrows on the dance platform. Longer green and yellow arrows referred to as "freeze arrows" must be held down for their entire length for them to count. 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).

Depending on the version of the game, dance steps are broken into varying levels of difficulty. The main difficulty levels are "Basic/Light/Standard" (Japanese: 楽 raku, "ease"), "Another/Trick/Standard/Difficult" (Japanese: 踊 yō, "dance") and "Maniac/Heavy/Expert" (Japanese: 激 geki, "violent"). Some versions also include "Beginner" (Japanese: 習 shũ, "learning") and "Challenge/Oni" (Japanese: 鬼 oni, "devil"), which typically fall on the lower and higher ends of the difficulty scale, respectively. Songs are also given a "foot rating", ranging from one to ten feet to indicate the overall difficulty of the step sequence. Beginning in DDRMAX, a "Groove Radar" was introduced, showing how difficult a particular sequence is in various categories, such as the maximum density of steps, how many jumps are in the steps, etc.

Read more at Wikipedia.org