Is there anything more random than rhythm game history?

Legend has it that the grandparents of the first true rhythm game were an obscure and apparently successful japanese skirt lifting simulator - in which the player had to lift girls skirts in time to some rhythm - and one of the most boring games you that you could find in early 70s arcades: Atari's Touch Me, in which the player had just to repeat a growing sequence of blinking lights hitting buttons.

Yeah, Touch Me mechanics sounds a little like the more famous and beloved Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison Simon game. And, in fact, they almost cloned it on purpose.

Baer said about Touch Me that it had "Nice gameplay. Terrible execution. Visually boring. Miserable, rasping sounds". That's why they added colored buttons and musical sound effects, turning a failed game in an eternal classic.

And looks like that Baer's mantra driven the rhythm game genre from the first excellent attempts, from the standard gamepad of the 1996 rapping dog game PaRappa The Rapper by NanaOn-Sha, now considered the first true entry of the whole genre, to the full fledged DJ set 7-buttons-and-turntable of the Bemani Beatmania series. And then more colors and button layouts with the frets, whammy bar and motion control of Harmonix's series Guitar Hero plastic guitars to even whole sets of controllers for a single game, with the plastic drum kit, microphone, keyboard and an even more complex guitar/bass of Rock Band.

More colors. And more buttons. And layouts. Colors. Buttons. Layouts. Colors. Buttons. Layouts... till the collapse of 2009, in which a saturated market started rejecting another more of the same.

Meanwhile, from the late 90s, the Bemani music series splitted from the making paradigm of Beatmania to the more friendly dancing one with the Dance Dance Revolution series, which managed to both create a strong hardcore fanbase like the precursor and becoming widespread to the worldwide casual audience.

DDR games are the most recognized rhythm games and are still featured in movies and pop culture in general as cool game for cool people well past the genre market collapse.

The most straightforward and widespread reason of this cultural overtake is the one that tries to distance it from the gaming experience: dancing is more sexy, less nerdy and more immersive than hitting few buttons.

But, in my humble opinion, the reason is that Simon was already just perfect as it was: humans are sensory inputs and challenge seekers... and the basic 4-buttons learn and repeat gameplay of Touch Me with the the Baer's music and blinking lights disco/concert spice was already the perfect formula!

Plot!

Are you ready to rule the dance floor? Welcome to Nori Nori Revolution Open Mix! Start the game, select one of the three available songs and bust the arrows to the rhythm!

On the song selection screen, use UP/DOWN for selecting a song and the A BUTTON for confirming. While playing, use UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT for hitting an arrow: hit the right direction button just when an arrow reaches the top of the screen! Good luck!

PS: This game has been heavily inspired by the great opensource project StepMania. I've ported some of the original game data files to something more Wright! readable and written part of the game mechanics from scratch... and it's *very far* from being complete, making few tracks played in the wrong way due to missing features. Feel free to suggest some other opensource song as replacement!

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Install / Add to home View game sources ...or play it online below!