I'm not exactly sure when I started toi play DDR, but it all started like this. Me and my family went to a mall and I noticed an arcade, so I immediately ran into it to play some shooting games since those were my favorite. yet then, I heard some catchy dance music and I looked over my shoulder, and as steriotypical as it sounds, I see a group of asians jumping around on a metal pad. So out of pure curiosity, I go by the game to see what exactly they were playing. It was a DDR Extreme american cabinet. I felt that the music was kick ass, so I figured I would try out the game, full well knowing I wouldn't do so well. I don't remember which song I picked, but even on beginner I failed, and all the asians laughed at me. I was very embaressed at the time, but once me and my family left the arcade I told my father, "Dad I want that game for my birthday". About a week or so before my birthday started we went to a mall that's really close by my house, and I went into Game Stop. After about 5 minutes, I see DDR "Konamix" bundle pack, my mouth opened and I was in awe. I had completely forgotten about DDR since I was busy looking forward for other games, but once I saw that girl on the cover doing that DDR pose, I knew I had to have the game.
After about 20 minutes of begging, my dad purchased the bundle pack for me, and right when I got back to the hotel, I plugged that sucker into my ps1 and played for hours on end. We were celebrating my party at a hotel since it had a pool and stuff. yet with me being this excited for DDR, I can say that I only went swimming about twice that whole week, well every other minute of my time was playing DDR. My brother watched me play, and he got really interested in the game, and he quickly started to play with me as well. After hours of practice, I eventually was able to do standard songs, and then eventually heavy within a weeks timespand. This is when I figured out that I can adapt to rhythm games quite easily. I couldn't pass all the songs on heavy, but I was very close, and I also didn't know about speed mods either, so I was soley practicing on 1x everytime.
Eventually I got so crazed about DDR, I went to an arcade with my dad and brother everyday for 2 years, playing DDR 5th mix. Here is where I entered my first and only tournament ever. I ended up losing the second round because what the staff did was really stupid. They let the contestants from heavy division play there whole tournament first, then once it was over, they gave them an option to play in standard or light division once they were done, yet they had to pay another entry fee for the tourney. That was complete bull****, you have elite players playing agaisnt people who weren't playing for a while, so me and my brother got creamed and it was completely unfair. **** that tournament.
Months later, they replaced the 5th mix machine with an Extreme machine, and I was disapointed because I really preferred 5th mix over extreme because of the song selection. From there on we still continued the same routine by going to the arcade everyday, but then my life changed. I went to go play DDR and then my friends who I met at the arcade told me of a new machine the arcade had gotten, and it was called In The Groove 2. At first I thought the game was stupid and a DDR ripoff. but at that time, I didn't take into account the overall improvisions ITG had done with dancing games. They made everything better, the pads, songs, graphics, etc. I play ITG for the first time, and since I was very good at DDr on heavy at this time, I immediately went to expert, but that was a horrible choice. Since I was playing on default 1.5x because I didn't use speedmods at all, all the arrows were smushed and I was all WTF?!?!?!? I even saw the patterns of streams that were in ITG and I asked myself, how is that even possible? This is when I realized that ITG took dancing games to a whole new level. I realized I would have to start at hard mode if I wanted to get used to streams and stuff that I wasn't used to. I also realized that using the bar was essential. During my years of palying DDR, I was one of those guys who thought it was stupid to use bar and it was cheating if you did use it. I only felt that way because that's how the rest of the DDR community thought, so I just followed. But after seeing ITG, it totally changed my outlook on it, if the bar was put there, it was meant to be used, not neglected. So I started on hard and worked my way up. I had also saw that ITG now had quads on them, requiring me to use my hands. I was chubby at the time, so it was very difficult for me to do them, so I avoided songs at all costs that had any hand usage. But as time went on, I got really good at ITG and can now perform streams and crossovers, etc. for long periods of time, especially after losing so much weight. To this day I still play ITG, but not often because the arcade took away our USB ports, and officials get boring. The only thing I have to work on is timing, I can tri-star expert songs, like 10's, even 11's, but songs above that I can only double-star or single-star.
And in relations to SM/FFR, I found this site by watching Arch0wl's Quasar video, and at the end it said Arch0wl.com. So I decided to check it out, and here I am. This site and the video is what introduced me to SM, and then eventually I took Sm and FFR seriously and got better after practice. I was a hardcore index player because I didn't know spread was possible. But once I found spread, it was very easy to FC stuff back then before av-miss glitch fix. That's pretty much my whole story on how I got into rhythm games, now I pretty much play any type of rhythm game.
