Rhythm Games

Masaya Matsuura, who made PaRappa the Rapper (1996), had been a musician. He found himself drawn to the fun of treating a sampled human voice as raw material, wanted to make "a game that used the human voice," and chose rap — an account he has given consistently across many interviews. He has also said that game-like things for keeping time to music existed in the US before this, for educational purposes, but nothing built purely for entertainment. At the end of the following year, 1997, Konami's beatmania was planned by young staff aiming at the casual and female players already coming into arcades for print-club photo booths. In 1998, Dance Dance Revolution carried the play from fingertips down to the feet, and then to the whole body. Hitting, stepping, spinning. Of the four springs, this current draws most directly from To Spin. Note: I could not confirm when the shorthand otoge, "music game," took hold as a term.