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30/01/2026 - An Ode To Beatmania

A real-time dance game hard and extreme.

That's beatmania IIDX! It's too cool!

beatmania IIDX combines the coolest songs with fun, eye-catching graphics for gameplay that keeps players coming back for more.

if for whatever reason you were reading my blog about 2 years ago when it was just a single big HTML file i'd append to because i was too lazy to make it page properly, you'd recall i wrote a post about my first time playing the game maimai.

looking back on it, my first time playing maimai was really a pivotal moment in my adult life, the little meetup led me to meet a good chunk of my current social circle, got me a date i didn't realise was a date (in retrospect an awful lot of my assumed lack of romance when i was younger was like, 90% down to being entirely unaware) and playing maimai for the first time, having never played anything like it, then sourcing the data for it to run on my computer at home was what really led me down the rabbit-hole of the underground arcade scene in the UK and across the world.

and it's not super surprising, maimai is *massive* across the entire world right now, asia is obsessed with it, america just started getting cabs officially, and everywhere that isn't is grey-market importing cabs and running them with cracked data on private servers, the version of maimai *i* played - finale - hasn't been officially playable online (so with profile support, progression, song licenses and events) for about 7 years now, and yet the cab i played on that flashed "This game is only to be played in Japan" on boot in the middle of Liverpool was running just as it would've in Japan before its servers were taken offline.

maimai was Sega's first foray into arcade rhythm games that really made waves back in 2012, which they followed up with Chunithm (my favourite game of theirs) in 2015. before that, pretty much every notable arcade rhythm game came out of Konami's BEMANI label, the most famous of which is probably Dance Dance Revolution, which i'm sure you've heard of.

BEMANI stuff has a certain vibe to it, it mostly all came out of the early 2000s and took heavy influence from western hip-hop aesthetics. it's easy to picture games like DDR being crowded around in a dimly lit corner of a bar or club, compared to the soft lights, plastic and moe of something like maimai they often really give off a more serious vibe, like they're a real piece of industrial kit, often sporting pretty chunky exteriors covered in obvious rivets, speaker branding and real neon lights. i don't think there's a single game that exemplifies that better than Beatmania IIDX:

You enter what seems like another arcade in some London shopping center, you feel your brain begin to canibalise itself in agony as the din of sugar-happy childen involuntarily floods your ears, there's hoards of the same old driving and shooting games you've seen a hundred times before being bathed in a sickly pink light - a product of the UK's arcade industry slowly collapsing under its long-gone success in the late oughts.

In the back left corner there's a metal door - "Staff Only", you approach it but hesistate, you feel like you're about to be yelled at, but you press on, past the cleaning supplies, down a dingy staircase, then left... another door! Just as you were told!

The room through the door is dingy, it really doesn't feel like you're supposed to be down here, but every inch of exposed wall in this supposed store room is filled by music games in the best condition you've ever seen them, all ready to be playe- then you see it.

It's huge. 10 foot tall at least, you count 6 speakers, 2 subwoofers, all look like they're straight out of a production house or a club, littered with information on their input wattages, resistances, expected outputs. Then the deck. 2 sets of 7 buttons and a turntable each, it'd probably be big enough for you to take a nap on (you do feel a little tired...). The control deck is accompanied by a set of sliders to adjust audio parameters and an array of industrial red 16-segment displays.

If you didn't know any better you'd say it was a piece of highly technical audio equipment, maybe a mixing deck for live shows and performances, or a booth for club DJs, but you do know better - that's a Beatmania IIDX arcade cabinet - and it's waiting to be played.

that was my first real experience with IIDX at VEGA in London - an enthusiast arcade with some of the earliest and best condition imported games in the world, and it really is hidden like that! Shortly after this dramatisation i proceeded to card in and promptly get my ass kicked harder than i thought it possibly could on the lowest difficulty of a rhythm game.

there's not an awful lot of people in the UK that play IIDX, it's almost to rhythm games what Quake is to shooters, half the people playing have been playing for 20 years and it's what i'd consider to be a "pure" rhythm game, like Quake is a "pure" shooter. IIDX is essentially just 8 buttons (one of which is triggered by spinning the turntable) that correspond to 8 columns of 2D, descending notes on the screen. When a note hits the bottom of the screen, you hit the corresponding button in time with the music

one of the reasons IIDX is hard is that it's keysounded, it's a music simulation game, and each note on the screen corresponds to a sound in the song you're playing - mistime or miss a note entirely and the song you're playing will sound wrong for everyone else in the room to hear. the important bit here is that being keysounded requires that the timing windows in the game be super strict, you can't let people hit a note 80ms after it played and stil have it count, because if the note *plays* 80ms early or late it'll be super obviously off. at 60fps, IIDX gives you a 2 frame window to recieve the best score for each note, that's tight.

when i first played IIDX i *hated* it, the machine felt incredible to play on but i simply couldn't keep up with it, but it really stuck with me. it was cool, everything from the machine to the menu music, the DJ aesthetic, the massive catalogue of original electronic music, it immediately wormed its way into my brain in a way only stuff i *really* like generally manages to. it was only a couple months before i'd strung together some aliexpress buttons, wires and a vinyl record in a cardboard box into a barely functional controller along with a cracked copy of the same game running on the cabs at VEGA through a compatibility layer, though said controller didn't last super long.

even then, playing at home was no replacement for a real cab, sure, the game basically played the same at home as at the arcade, but the style is such a huge part of IIDX and so much of that comes from stuff that isn't directly part of the game, i mentioned earlier that the machine had a set of sliders to adjust audio, these let you control the EQ, synthesiser filtering and gameplay volume of the machine, as well as the strength of any audio effects you can toggle in-game, such as echo and reverb, range compression and track distortion.

the other cool part of IIDX is the history of it. the current version of the game in japan right now is Beatmania IIDX 33 Sparkle Shower, while in the UK on our private servers we run last year's 32nd version Pinky Crush, the cab i played in london is a 1st gen cab, which means it originally ran the original release of the game, back in 1999! That cab is *literally* older than i am and its still going strong! The original Beatmania, which IIDX is a sequel to, was released in 1997 and hotly contests parappa the rapper for the title of the first rhythm game *ever*, which is pretty awesome.

(if you're curious why the sequel to Beatmania is Beatmania IIDX, rather than just Beatmania II, the story goes that Konami originally did make a non-deluxe Beatmania II cab, but that arcades in japan only wanted the deluxe cab, so the couple standard beatmania ii cabs were shipped off to korea as beatstage ii, one or two of which still exist)

so despite hating it at to start off with i just *knew* i was going to like it eventually, and it didn't take long to fall in love with it. i've probably been playing inconsistently for almost a year now across various arcades in the UK and home setups, i'm able to pass most normal level charts in the game now but anything higher than 7 on the difficulty scale (1-12) is pretty out of reach for me right now, so i've still got a way to go

if you're interested in trying out IIDX the best place to start is probably the arcade locator on zenius-i-vanisher, in general if you're in asia most rhythm games will be up to date on official servers, if you're in america Round 1 gets cabs on official servers but others will probably be offline or on private servers, if you're in canada or europe we don't get any support ever lol

see blog for many more new posts!