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Beatmania is a rhythm video game by the Japanese developer Konami, released in 1997. It's the inaugural game of what Konami soon entitled the "Bemani" line, after this game. Beatmania, like all Bemani games since, is a music-based game. It can be found in arcades and in console versions. Simulators of the official games have been made for the home computer.
Description
The concept behind Beatmania is that you are something somewhere between a DJ and a keyboardist; in the original games you have five plastic keyboard-like keys in a zig-zagged pattern to press down on and a turntable which you can spin to "scratch" the music — Beatmania IIDX uses 7 keys, while Beatmania III uses 5 keys and an effect pedal.
The actual play is purely about rhythm. Each key and the turntable has a corresponding vertical bar onscreen—in these bars, horizontal notes cascade down. The player must hit each note, which will then play a sound sample, as it reaches the bottom of the bar, and is rated on how close to the actual timing he hits. The result is that the player adds instruments and effects on top of the existing song in real time. The challenge comes in the fact that a record of good and bad hits are recorded and represented in a life bar with a green and red portion. The red portion is at the high end, when the player does well. The green portion is much larger and represents the cut-off point where the player will "fail" the song, ending the game once the song is finished.
Unlike its successors such as Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania is very unforgiving of false moves. Not only does missing existing notes quickly lower your bar out of the red range, but hitting non-existent notes will also count against you. The scoring system is not unlike the one used in Dance Dance Revolution, where players are graded on their ability on a letter scale (from E to AAA).
Beatmania and its variants have a hardcore following in countries other than Japan. There are very few Beatmania arcade machines in the United States, but the number is gradually increasing. In addition to its arcade versions, Konami produces home console versions for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation in Japan. Official or custom-made controllers for Beatmania can range in price from under one hundred US dollars to several hundred US dollars. As with other Bemani games, players often compete and share high scores on message boards or other communities on the Internet.
The Beatmania series features many different styles of songs, ranging from rave and techno music to J-Pop and classical. Some regular artists featured in Bemani games include dj TAKA, TaQ, Orange Lounge, Mr.T, Ryu☆, good-cool, and Osamu Kubota, among others.
Famous Beatmania players include Lisu, who was featured in the Tatsujin videos contained in Beatmania IIDX
Sequels
As of 2005, there have been 5 sequels, all of which have titles which start with "Beatmania" and then have a number and the word "mix" after them (as in Beatmania 4th Mix - The Beat Goes On".
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