Jordan Ferguson

Fun reading! The flashing lights and arrows in this book gave me and my two left feet a fun trip through this game's history. From the first page to the last, this book is narrated in a voice that speaks like the best of Reddit, Discord, and some fascinating new friend you just met at a con.

The time and effort taken by the authors to tell this story well shines through.

They honor the creative work of the artists and musicians, the evolution of dance, the players, the love of rhythm, the show more love of the digital game.

But, it isn't all a bubble gum and candy love fest. The story is salted with business decisions to release and pull support. To "end of life" different versions. Data driven decisions to maximize profits on the technology, er, gaming adoption curve, while navigating the cross-currents of the decline of the arcade and move to consoles. Rug pulls, ghosting of countries and continents. Open source alternatives. Coin-op to e-currency. Supply chain quality problems. If you want to know why we can't have nice things, read this and weep.

For game developer types, this book offers a bit of a case study in the freakonomics of game security and longevity. Are we breaking ourself into or out of jail with all of this, and if so, are we still having fun?

In one corner is the gaming business, product lifetimes, cost of goods sold, and revenue curves.

In the other corner is a community trying to find ways to enjoy older games they fell in love with. Who want to remember and replay the songs of their youth. In spite of game playability being rug pulled, paywalled, firewalled, encrypted, vpn'ed, cease and desist'ed and discontinued.

Is it a fight or a dance?

Although not the focus of the book, there are plenty of exercises left to the reader who comes from a security engineering, reverse engineering, archival, and software preservation angle.

Is it ethical to preserve gaming experiences? To shunt new software onto old hardware? Is it wrong to find ways to preserve the playability of a dance station worth thousands of dollars in hardware alone when the original software becomes unusable? It seems there's another revolution happening there. Suddenly it feels like this book isn't so old, and is highly relevant even in the context of today's front page gaming news like the Stop Killing Games movement.

If you have an interest in any of music, dance, rhythm, games, game security, game history, or just want the chance to jump into a cross section of tech in a world that might be totally foreign to you, I highly recommend this read.

You can feel the feels with this book. At the end, I was sad. Sad that the story was over and there wasn't more to read, sad that I couldn't hop on a dance pad myself right then and there. Sad that I didn't even have my old Rock Band gear. Sad that we as a society have not come up with a better way to preserve and promote the evolution of games like this that go viral, promote dance, expression, movement, athleticism, feats of skill, memorization, laughter, and play.

But even still, there was a very nice and unexpected silver lining to all of this. And a reason to be glad my early review copy was electronic and not paper. The hyperlinked references! Normally something I completely skip -- but in this case all the links worked and shot me over to websites that brought the scenes and music referenced in the book to life. Youtube videos, a worldwide map to find machines, a Wired article on the world of importing, Vice videos. The list goes on. And so does, in its own way, DDR. show less

Lots of interesting facts twisted together with fun memories. It is obvious that the authors took a lot of time researching and gave credit where credit was due. At times, I found myself looking up old videos to watch exactly what they were referring to. It was interesting to hear about how they would take the machines apart to move them and then rebuild them again. The story of Nancy was the perfect ending!

I was never much of a gamer, but for a while I made an exception for Dance Dance Revolution. This book was fascinating, and reading it was like dancing with friends in college.