WHY DIDN'T THEY CALL ME?!

 

Boss Fight Books: Dance Dance Revolution

WHAT THE HELL, PEOPLE?

I need to find out exactly who they tapped for this because I am A Little Upset that I wasn't on the list.

There are innumerable DDR players. But there are very, very few like me. I was a tournament competitor and occasional champion for *decades*, very much one of the best players on the planet. No exaggeration there, I have gameplay world records that stand even today, several hundred tournaments under my belt, and enough prize money won to basically zero out what I spent playing. My time spent learning the game happened at one of the best-known independent arcades in the country, that hosted the east coast version of EVO for a dozen years and more, and later on the most competitive music game tournaments anywhere in the US and probably the world at large.

But skills aren't everything in a book like that. You need history, you need perspective. Again, stalwart of 8 On The Break. I knew basically every major player in the US off the top of my head via the DDRFreak and AaronInJapan forums. I watched communities all over the country and over in Japan form, grow, squabble, compete... everything. 

When the first regularly updateable scoretrackers like TeamGwailo and OverTheMonkey showed up, I held my own on the leaderboards and watched the shifts in player development in close to real time, with those who knew one another sending challenges and pictures to spur one another on. 

When the first two In The Groove cabinets appeared, one went to the Break. The mighty regulars, all manner of visiting competitors, and I all worked together to do a whole bunch of the beta testing as the game evolved, through Roxor, Andamiro, and the battles with Konami. Hell, my picture is still in the credits if you can find an ITG2 cabinet that hasn't been tweaked harder than Florida Man.

I should expect to see a great many names I recognize in the acknowledgements of this book when I finally get my hands on it, but... if I don't? Rest assured there will be Yelling.