Beatmania

About Beatmania

Beatmania (1997) is Konami's arcade DJ game of five keys and a turntable, which set off Japan's 1998 music-game boom and gave the Bemani line its name.

Beatmania in Depth

The player is a club DJ trying to keep a crowd happy. The controls are five keys arranged in a zigzag like piano keys, white on the lower row and black on the top, plus a turntable to the right that is scratched. Each key and the turntable has its own column on screen, and notes fall down them toward a line near the bottom; hitting the right key or scratching as a note reaches the line plays a sound sample that rebuilds the song. Each hit is judged from great to poor, and stray presses and misses drain the audience's satisfaction bar. Each song has to satisfy the crowd to move on to the next stage, and depending on the machine's settings the game can end early if the bar empties.

The score is counted in "money", but the final letter grade reflects overall accuracy. Modes ranged from practice, with a voice-over tutor called DJ Konami in the early versions, to expert courses of set songs. Konami built a standard cabinet with a 29-inch screen and ten speakers and a smaller mini cabinet with a 20-inch screen, six speakers and a turntable about half the size.

Making Beatmania

Konami released Beatmania in arcades on 31 December 1997, and it contributed largely to the boom in music games in 1998. Game Machine listed it as Japan's most successful dedicated arcade game in its 1 March 1998 issue, and by 2000 it had sold 25,000 arcade machines. A run of mixes followed, from 2ndMix in March 1998 to Beatmania The Final in July 2002, and from 3rdMix Konami used the name Bemani for its whole line of music games. The 1998 PlayStation version, a port of 2ndMix, sold 1.1 million copies in Japan; ASCII made controllers for it, and versions also appeared on the Game Boy Color and WonderSwan. The seven-key Beatmania IIDX spin-off was still receiving new versions long after the original series ended.