312 MB, 43, 2018-Aug-16. Lofty Minipack 4 (Paradise Loft), 351 MB, 58, 2018-Aug-16. 120 MB, 20, 2018-Jul-11. Advent Originals, 12 MB, 0, 2017-Apr-23.

Hey guys, I decided I wanted to compile in a thread, and possibly later, have some sort of a scripted story reading of the history behind stepmania and ffr posted to youtube. We're a very historied community, going as far back as 2002 and there have been events, mindset shifts, metagame shifts, community members that come and go, stories for days, cheaters, liars, drama, and many many good things that persevere throughout that keep this game alive and thriving, such as community projects, packs, website developers, the forums in general, our connections with each other, and our passion for smashing arrows. I feel it'd be a darn shame if we let some notably large events, successful and/or failed projects, players, and contributors become nothing more than a thought of the past. This thread, though I may not see it to its completion, I want to kick things off with a lot of my findings throughout the digging i've done in the forums, and any help i've received from directly asking you guys, what things were like. Most importantly, I feel this is a very good opportunity to work together as a community to help put our history into a consumable manner for other people who are new, or us oldies that want some nostalgia. I personally feel from my observations through searching the forums, that we are not a dying community, we are not a dying game, and in fact we have more activity than ever. So without further adieu, here's everything that I've compiled so far, in spoilers because it's big: I have found this story from an old timer named Tyra over on zenius I Vanisher that I found interesting!

The earliest DDR simfiles pre-dated Stepmania by a few years. BM98 came out in 1998, and gave birth to the.BMS format.

The progam could be skinned to play DDR, but this wasn't really a thing people ever bothered to do, since Beatmania was several times more popular than DDR, and it made no sense to create songs that only used 4 lanes of notes. Delight Delight Reduplication came out in 1999. It was given a DDR skin later that year, and custom DDR charts for it came out right around the end of 1999. It used also used BMS, but also MSD files. The release of Delight Delight co-incided with the release of both official and bootleg home DDR controllers onto the market, and so all of a sudden, DDR could be played at home, and re-skinning BMS simulators to play 4-lane DDR songs made complete sense. The earliest custom simfiles were definately in 1999, but were almost certainly just shoddy 'conversions' of custom Beatmania simfiles, with 2 lanes of notes either deleted, or moved into other lanes.

There's no way to tell who made them or what they were, because all of the websites that hosted them are long gone. The first arcade simfiles I remember seeing were early 2000. There was no Youtube, so people would usually only put them together for songs they wanted to memorise, either for PA or freestyle routines. The music and steps could be copied from the Playstation games, but Japanese fans didn't really bother - they just played them on the Playstation, unless they had some specific reason to play the chart in a simulator.

The first real concerted effort to publish a 'complete pack' was in 2002, when we put the original DDRUK arcade packs together. I'm sure that people collected sets of MSD files before this, and people probably had complete arcade-perfect collections, but they were never shared in public. There's no way of knowing, because the internet was a different pace back then. Instead of having online services like Facebook and ZIV giving everyone a portal to communicate on the internet, everyone pretty much just had an EMail address, and a small website on a service like lycos or geocities. Geocities was huge in Japan (it actually still exists), and pretty much everyone had one. The only way to find simfiles was if somebody hosted their simfiles on their Geocities site, and then made an effort to join a Webring. A webring was essentialy a massive HTML page of links to sites with similar interests.

In this case, there would be a dozen or so webrings dedicated to people who liked Beatmania, and a maybe a handful of those pages would post their own DDR.MSD files. You really had to trawl through them to find stuff, and the vast majority of sites that were around in 2002 have now been deleted, to free up space on the Geocities server. The DDRUK packs came about when Lawrence wanted to create a full set of files for Dance With Intensity, and contacted me at first, because I'd collected a full set of.MSD files for all of the DDR games that existed at that point. The thing is, I have no idea where any of those MSD files came from.