BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO RHYTHM ACTION GAMES
In these Bluffer’s Guides, we sometimes end up complicating simplified narratives that attribute the origin of a genre to one or two particular games, but in the case of rhythm action, there really is one game that defined it. Yes, games existed before that had some relationship with music – Mario Paint on the SNES had a music composition feature when it released in 1992, Break Dance from 1984 on the C64 had you memorising sequences of dance moves that you had to repeat in the fashion of Ralph Bear’s famous call and response memory toy, Simon, and 1987 NES title Dance Aerobics made an early claim for innovating the genre, tasking you with matching your virtual aerobic instructor’s movements on the Power Play controller mat. But in terms of a game explicitly based on tying your interactions to the rhythm of music, a game that set the template for what we would today recognise as rhythm action, there is one originator: PaRappa The Rapper.
First released in Japan in 1996 before making it over to the West in 1997, this surreal PlayStation title about a rapping dog trying to an impress a flower-girl that he’s got a crush on was a huge hit, helping to set the stage for a host of titles that would build on the ideas it innovated. Similar to the likes of Simon and Break Dance, PaRappa had you repeating prompts delivered by characters, but the difference here was that you had to time your button presses to match the music to be successful.
Marc Flury, co-creator of self-described ‘rhythm-violence’ title and a former Harmonix developer who worked on the likes of and , was one of many for whom was his first encounter with the genre. He places its emergence in the context of an era of experimentation. “In that era of PlayStation and PlayStation 2, there were a lot of weird games, especially coming out of Japan. It seemed to me that the music ones were kind of the weirdest and they excited me for some reason. I think because it showed that games had more potential than I originally
