Beatmania

Beatmania is a video game by the Japanese developer Konami. 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 computer.

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 his 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!