Tell your story about how you started playing DDR...

[MistaCloudStrife]

First time was when I went to my friends house and he had DDR 2nd mix imported from Japan. This was when modding your PS would cost you 100+ dollars and pads cost like 50$ each. Basically a long time ago. And 2nd mix was fairly new... Of course, we all sucked bad. But it was really fun.

Few months afer that my friend went to the Phillippines and came back with a grip load of dance pads and burned copies of DDR 2nd mix thru 4th mix. At this point I learned about the CD switching trick you could do on PS' so you didn't need to mod you playstation, and I taught my friends how to do it as well. He sold them to us for a cheap price BUT of course he made some profit of of us. Oh well, still pretty good for us.

Anyway, I bought 2 pads and 4th mix from him and practiced for a long while. We played in arcades when the DDR bang was still faily big with all the asians. But of course it had to end at some point and we all stopped playing and so did alot of the asian people.

And about a year ago I started playing again. Still miss the old days though.
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[wellygurly]

well i started around 2002 and i well i think its was the fact that not really many maori's in wellington played it you know and it was funny how it all worked like the basic and beginner players had an arcade(lunar park) and the standard players had an arcade(time out xtreme) and if you really wanted to show up people you went to timezone manners mall. it was hard case though coz most of the people played at lunar!!! everyone really lacked confidence back then( well my mates did) and we always ended up in lunar coz it was a small damp and deserted arcade that no-one ever really went to!!!! I then meet one of meet tomtard and he was ( if you know him) really into it. he pretty much boosted my confidence in ddr and i still love the game to this day!!! im not as hard out as i use to be but its good to see that more and more people play in wellington. oh yea and HIIII TOOOMMMMM ( if your reading this)
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god created females from the males ribcage.
he did not create females from there heads,
to be gr8a,
he did not create us from there feet,
to be less,
he created us from their ribcage,
to be EQUAL.

[Bookworm]

I started playing Christmas 2003, I think. I got hooked because one of my sister's friends had a PS2 with DDR, and we swapped my xbox with her PS2 so we could play different games. My oldest sister proceeded to kick my @$$ at the game, which really pissed me off, because nobody is allowed to beat me at video games. So when I got DDR for Christmas and my sisters went back to college, I started playing. My first song was "lets talk it over" on standard. I must have played that song about 100 times. Eventually I got better, and now, 3 years later, my sisters have nothing on me.

The thing that ultimately keeps me interested in DDR is because my mom doesn't count it as a video game. For about a year my mom limited my xbox time to an hour a day, but didn't count DDR as a video game because it is exercise. Also fortunately for me, when I'm grounded and banned from video games, DDR still doesn't count as a video game, so it gives me some good practice time.

At first playing DDR got me labeled as a geek from my friends (not that I wasn't a geek before the game) but eventually my friends tried it out and one friend got hooked. About a year after getting my DDR, the friend of mine that plays DDR and I teamed up to buy DDR for my third friend, so now we're all just one big happy family (But i'm still the best)
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"Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open pit and die" (Mel Brooks)

"The worst part about being better than everybody else is that people tend to think that you're pretensious" (Despair.com)

[Team 5 Zigen]

I started playing around the summer of 2002, but the only arcade that had DDR was about an hour and a half away and the line to play the game was longer than stuff. LOL, so it was hard to get up there and I didn't have a lot of money to afford a game system to play on so I got to play once and a while, but I met someone who re-introduced me to it in 2006. I'm big into techno and she would send me all sorts of DDR songs and I got really into it, then was invited to play over a friends and became addicted. I have been playing for about 3 weeks and can't stop. I keep playing because it is fun, it is a pretty good workout, the music ROCKS and everyone I met that plays are all nice people. Anyone has any good tips for newbies hit me on AIM.

[eTom]

Bookworm, thats a great story

I went to Scotland on holiday (why?) to a caravan site (we dont have a caravan it was them biiig caravans), there was this MASSIVE arcade at the site and on the last day of my 2 week holiday i decided to play DDR, i had played it once before at an arcade in a service station on the way to france
(i got it on film too, i didnt actually know what you had to do, i knew you had to step to the arrows but i didnt know when you had to step on them LOL oh yeah and the song i played was on heavy)
Anyway, i played once on light and i could do it (after reading the "how to play" screen), then i did anotehr song on heavy and failed

You ask why i did it on heavy?
I thought, oh it would be sooo cool if i was great at this game, so i just wanted to see if i was great, and i then learned you needed to practise, so here i am! lol

That was ages ago, i basically randomly decided to get good at the game.
As soon as i got home, i bought Dancing Stage Megamix for PS2 and 2 soft mats, me and my friend from acorss the street started playing, she was better than me (i remember when she got an AA on Lovecats!) she then randomly stopped playing so i did Lovecats over and over again and got better, then went on other songs, and after months and years without playing, here i am!

[Ian2K3]

before APRIL 27TH 2003
i went to a few different malls and arcades and saw this big crowd over by a machine so curiosity sunk in and i went over to see what was going on and i saw this game which people were using their feet to play with so i just kept walking and played marvel vs capcom 2 (i first saw ddr at natick mall arcade)

APRIL 27TH 2003
i was at the Solomon Pond Mall in malboro and i went down to the arcade for a while to play some games. i saw that they had gotten a ddr 3rd mix so i looked on it. noone was on so i decided to go see how to play it. as i was watching the instructions i immediately figured out how to play so i started playing and i first chose paranoia rebirth because it looked cool and failed in 3 seconds. so i retyired and did upside down and passed it.

and that as they say is that....
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IANK - live it love it
Give me DDR or give me DEATH
2.5x speed for life

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[violently average]

Way back when I was 5, a girl named Amanda showed me DDR at Kid's Quest in Las Vegas. My first song was Somewhere Over The Rainbow. I really sucked at first, but I kept playing because it was free. When I got back to sweet home Connecticut, I was on standard. A few years later, I got an XBOX, and that's when I leaped onto Heavy. Nowadays, I can AAA Cartoon Heroes on Heavy with my hands tied behind my back...
...try me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[violently average]

Way back when I was 5, a girl named Amanda showed me DDR at Kid's Quest in Las Vegas. My first song was Somewhere Over The Rainbow. I really sucked at first, but I kept playing because it was free. When I got back to sweet home Connecticut, I was on standard. A few years later, I got an XBOX, and that's when I leaped onto Heavy. Nowadays, I can AAA Cartoon Heroes on Heavy with my hands tied behind my back...
...try me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[dance_with_me_37]

DDR...JUST happens to be very addicting and I have three of the games for x-box and play them constantly and also i play them live...I just once went over to my friends house and happened to see her playing ddr and thought it was just a bit ghey...turns out my dad heard and said that it would be kool to play and so then he bought it for me at christmas and then two more games at my birthday and now i have Dance Dance Revolution ultra mix 1,2,3 so yea...i know how much i get sick of the songs but none of this seems to stop me...Now my friend sux when i sucked and now i can own her azz...but i just can't seem to stop with this game and am totally addicted...i plan on to keep playing this game...
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dance_with_me_37

[DDRShadow111]

i am sure i had played a few times before this but i probably repressed the horrible memories . The first time i played that got my interest going was the arcade on catalina island in california. i wasnt too great at it and ended up completely bar-raping the songs. a couple of months later i started thinking about how i was gonna lose weight( i have to lose at least 30 pounds for a gnarly surgery i am going to have , but i am trying to lose up to 50 or 60) and i remembered how winded i was after playing the arcade machine for only three songs(i am really out of shape ) and then i saw an ad for DDRex2 in my game informer and i said to myself I HAVE TO GET THIS.
this was about december i think. so i asked my fazha to get it for me so we went to best buy and picked up a bundle and a RO Ignition 2.0 pad(
suckers top and down arrows dont work after only 7 to 8 hours of play) i played workout mode and dance master for about a week and a half
and stopped. and about 2 weeks ago i learned about my surgery so i went on weight watchers and started playing again. mostly workout but i played a bit of dance master. i have lost about four pounds and going already so i hope this works. That is my story thanks for reading.
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[goldfinger]

It had grabbed my curiousity for quite some time. I tried it in public on a dare once, and I was like frankenstein on that thinig...so once ddr mario mix came out I got it, because I thought it was the least embaressing one? Anyway, I got ultramix 2 and 3 immediatly afterwards pretty much.
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snoogans

[hanako778]

i've been playing for about 2 years now so i started when i was 8(im 10 now^^)
my cousin told me about this game, my very first song was boom boom dollar and i got like a D on it
Im still playing becuase its fun(well no duh)the excersise(damn i can't spell that word) and also because I was born to play^^ i think so any ways, eh maybe not, but mainly becuase its fun
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Potato farmers are cool.

[wcgold]

My first dancing game experience wasn't actually DDR; it was PIU. Back in 2001 or so, I only heard of DDR; I never played it. Same year, my mom's friend came from Korea to visit us, and she brought a game which she claimed was DDR, but it was actually PIU, because you know how them older folks are; they don't know the difference. Either way, a gift is still a gift, so I hooked it up to my PC and played for a few months until the Down-Left button got busted. That was the end of my dancing simulator playing days until 2005. Well, I played FFR during 2002-2004, but that was with my fingers, so that doesn't count. Anyways, back to 2005. My sister went to the movies with her friends. The theatre, which doubles as an arcade, had DDR Extreme, and my sister totally got into it. She downloaded the song "Butterfly" and wanted to play DDR at home. She and my dad tried to fix the broken PIU pad that I mentioned before (so she could at least play PIU again or find some DDR-ish game), but they failed to repair the Down-Left button. So, she bugged my dad to get a new pad off eBay. It was a piece of crap. It plugs directly to the TV with its AV cable, and it runs on four AA batteries. The graphics and sound quality sounded like an NES.

Sorry about the story of my sister, I get carried away sometimes. Anyways, summer of 2005, I had just learned that one of my friends play DDR. When we finally met at the same theatre-arcade that my sister went to many months before, we went over to the DDR machine and took turns playing (the 1P side was broken at the time). Well, it was mostly him, because I sucked at my first game and I was too embarassed to play more because I never played DDR and the closest thing to a DDR experience for me was PIU 5 years ago, and those two games feel different, despite their similarity.

Now, my DDR skills improved substantially. Okay, the most difficulty I can handle is 7-foot Heavy, but I would say that's good for someone who was a total noob about DDR last summer.

[Apu]

I hangout with alot of azns and sooner or later your in the Arcade spending $35 bucks a weekend. I love it ^^;
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Where am I?

[sakura06]

it will be 2 years this up coming new years. My brothers friends brought it over. i first played extreme for ps2. my first was kick the can. i progressed pretty quickly from beginner to light, and played on and off on extreme and ultramix 1. In may, i got ultramix 2 and two soft pads.
PROBLEM: no xbox. I didn't get one until about june of 04, and by then all my friends and their brothers and their friends were hooked. All because of that fateful new years party 2 years ago...Now i am on heavy with numerous AAs. Yet to get a AAA. I keep playing because of Captain Jack. He was my role model and my favorite artist. (and to get better that matt who is the ddr king around here)
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[Dave Rodgers]

I happen to highly enjoy Hi-NRG, Eurobeat, Eurodance, Happy Hardcore, Happy House, and J-pop, so DDR is just the thing.

[the_dance_rev]

i tried it at a friends house and really liked it and when we bought it i was very sick with strep throat so i stayed home for a week straight and played it all day

[SirDanceAlot86]

Well I remember going over to this one kid house named Wess, so Im over there and they pull out this interesting game and I see people trying it. So im like "Hey that looks like fun" So I get on it and I know next thing its hard to get me off of it. So after that I noticed they had it at the mall and I started pwning some of the songs and my asian friend Mike got on and he Pwned the h3ll out of it so im like "woah" o_o <--- my face was literally like that thru out all 3 songs and and since he triple A'd and doube A'd all his songs he got extra ones. So after that I was determined to get better and now after bout 4-5 months of playing im already on standard/heavy/challenge depending on the songs and DDR version. I think the story is somewhat interesting but hey like the topic say's "how did you get started"
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[-JOKR-]

Name: Aleta Lucretia Ewing
Description: DDR/ITG Freak
Alias: JOKR

DDR/ITG history: I started playing DDR in the summer of 2003 on June
27th at the Oh Wow Nickel Arcade in Merced.I got addicted and went
everyday for about 270 days after the day I started.When DDR was
replaced by ITG in October '04 I was pissed.I refused to play and was
about to quit going to the arcade until I heard someone play While the
Rekkid Spinz and Zodiac-I had to try those songs, just once.Then I got
hooked.It took some time to get used to this new game.I didn't like it
much at first cuz I wasn't good at it and I felt like playing it made
me a traitor.I was a hardcore DDR fangirl.Lol.Now I play DDR VERY
rarely(except when i travel, cuz the majority of machines are still
DDR)and ITG like..constantly.I still love DDR cuz thatz what I started
on-so I'm gonna get Extreme arrows tattooed on the back of my right
shoulder on my 18th bday-but I'd much rather play ITG.I usually play
ITG2 at the Nickel Arcade and sometimes play 4th Plus Solo at nickel or
DDR Extreme at Cyberstation at the mall.On the weekends I play outta
town and go to tourneys.

Locations played at in CA: 333 different DDR/ITG machines(count
original number of machines at first visit of location/pics of every one of
them)in 270 places in 144 cities: Alameda,Albany,Alhambra,Antioch,Apple
Valley,Arcadia,Bakersfield,Berkeley,Brentwood,Burbank,Camarillo,Carmichael,Castaic,Castro
Valley,Chatsworth,Chico,Citrus Heights,City of Commerce,City of
Industry,Clovis,Colma,Colton,Concord,Covina,Cypress,Daly City,Diamond
Bar,Downey,Dublin,Elk Grove,El Segundo,Fairfield,Fountain
Valley,Fremont,Fresno,Gilroy,Glendale,Glendora,Goleta,Granada
Hills,Grass Valley,Hanford,Hayward,Huntington Beach,Huntington Park,La
Habra,La Jolla,Lake Forest,Lakewood,Lancaster,Livermore,Lompoc,Long
Beach,Los Angeles,Madera,Manteca,MERCED,Milpitas,Mission
Hills,Modesto,Montebello,Monterey,Moreno Valley,Mountain
View,Newark,Newbury Park,North Hollywood,Norwalk,Oakhurst,Ontario,Orange,Oroville,Oxnard,Pacifica,Palmdale,Paradise,Paso Robles,Pinole,Pismo Beach,Pleasant Hill,Porterville,Rancho
Cucamunga,Redondo Beach,Redwood
City,Rialto,Richmond,Riverbank,Riverside,Rohnert Park,Roseville,Rowland
Heights,Sacramento,Salida,Salinas,San Bernadino,San Diego,San
Francisco,San Jose,San Leandro,San Rafael,Santa Ana,Santa Clara,Santa
Clarita,Santa Cruz,Santa Maria,Santa Monica,Scotts Valley,Selma,Simi
Valley,Shermen Oaks,Soledad,South El Monte,South Gate,South San
Francisco,Stockton,Studio City,Suisun,Sunnyvale,Tarzana,Thousand
Oaks,Torrance,Tracy,Tulare,Turlock,Upland,Vacaville,Valencia,Vallejo,Van
Nuys,Ventura,Victorville,Visalia,Walnut,Walnut Creek,West
Covina,Westminster,Westwood,Whittier,Woodland,& Yuba City.

CA trips: My goal WAS to play at all locations in California by May
8,2006-my 18th birthday-but due to lack of transportation and my work
schedule I've decided to complete this leisurely,with no specific
deadline.

Locations played at outside CA:
**July 2nd-5th 2005: Utah and Nevada,several locs incl. Circus
Circus,Harrah's
**January 13th 2006: Vegas(for NAT'05),2 locs: Circus Circus,Nascar
Casino
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[Iman]

I walked in and was inspired by my future friend chip. He was the best player at my arcade, and as I later found out, the top player in the state of Texas at that time. I started playing because I wanted to be like him.
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