Tell me more about this chapter
This is going to be super long and ridiculously off-topic... but you asked:
I had started playing DDR on one of those terrible pads that felt like a napkin beneath your feet. This continued, by myself, for a couple years until I met a group of people in high school who were into throwing massive LAN parties. This group was composed of many excellent gamers and, oddly enough, a bunch of girls who had no real interest in games but had simply been childhood friends with the guys in this group. Initially I attended these LAN parties as a "school friend" because I was never much of a PC gamer.
Despite the core being largely composed of PC devouts, the group always wanted LAN parties to have a ton of unique setups--not just computers and PC games. One time I brought Steel Battalion for everyone to check out, which was a lot of fun, and eventually I brought DDR. As a result of that one night, DDR ended up becoming this phenomenon in our town. All the guys and girls got obsessive about it. Within a month everyone had a PS2, even if they hadn't before, and a copy of DDR. This changed everything because, until then, we were on slightly different gaming wavelengths. Once we started playing Smash and DDR (I showed them the joys of competitive Melee) we'd meet all the time, guys and girls alike, just to play these games. Many of us became inseparable.
This became the standard for a while until someone told me there would be a small, local DDR tournament with metal pads for first and second place. By this time I was playing on one of the expensive hard-foam pads but this opportunity was too good to pass up. It was such a small, local tournament that wasn't advertised, so I figured these pads were essentially mine.
I get to the tournament, enter, play a bunch of my friends, and advance to the final four. I ended up learning about a cosmic rule of DDR that day: someone better
always shows up. Some guy drove all the way from central New Jersey--I live in somewhat-eastern Pennsylvania for reference--to come and win the tournament. We had no idea how he had even known, and I didn't even get second because a local guy was there with his own group of friends and he happened to be a complete deity at the game. I got a paltry t-shirt for my 3rd place. Despite the initial disappointment, we learned that these new players, sans the New Jersey player, weren't far away and met regularly at the DDR machine in our local mall.
Until this point I hadn't known there was even a DDR machine there. After this tournament our groups sort of did an odd merge and we'd all regularly hang out at this arcade. Funny story actually: this arcade ended up growing exponentially over the course of months because of our business. Our groups would bring people to this arcade all the time, prompting them to order a Para Para Paradise machine, a second DDR machine, and so much more. Every week we'd be at the mall, play some DDR and go party somewhere. In fact, one of the "other group" members ended up becoming somewhat of a third musketeer to myself and another friend of mine. Our shenanigans were ultimately short-lived, but once again, that's another story. Eventually the group sort of broke off as everyone went to college and this was sort of prior to Facebook still so, once again, I've lost contact with almost all of them. It was an odd time because out of nowhere our already sizable group grew by double (or more) and it seemed like rhythm games were becoming absolutely massive all around... then it just abruptly ended.
During one of my first visits home from college I went to the mall and the arcade had already shut down. I still live in the general area so every once in a while I'll walk past where that arcade used to be. Guitar Hero would rise and fall, but I was never too interested in that. I guess, for me, it was particularly memorable because, as a period of my life, the shift was so dramatic and everything was so self-contained. We all met, merged, partied, tons of friendships and relationships formed, we played games and then it just immediately stopped with nothing to prove the other group existed. None of us really know what happened to them and I'm sure they think the same thing of us haha.
In retrospect though, DDR was definitely one of the things that allowed me to become extremely close with the people who became my best friends in highschool and college. They moved away too but I'm still in contact with them. I mean when something changes your life this dramatically there are so many other side effects but I've already typed far, far too much. My apologies to everyone else in this thread haha.
