Captain Jack lived a short, but important, life.

Dance Dance Revolution is the flagship rhythm game franchise, but it has effectively become larger than the genre itself. From a once arcade-centric Japanese game, DDR has evolved into a fantastically popular franchise the world over, a pioneer in the good-video-game health movement, and a centerpiece for the latest Madonna music video. Though the entire series is responsible for the success of the game today, it's particularly the 3rd Mix that set up the most important foundations for the gameplay, and popularized many of the notorious DDR songs and artists.

Something should be said about the emergence of DDR as a whole, since the game has come to typify everything that the rhythm genre offers. There's a peripheral, there's a variety of songs, and there's a difficulty level that ranges from simple to impossibly hard. While the game holds great appeal for small (yet coordinated) children, it also provides challenge to the fiercest competitors, and this wide range of appeal has helped it to breathe its life into the dying arcade scene in North America. Finding some sort of niche with every gaming and non-gaming group on the market, DDR is so much greater than the sum of its parts (although they're pretty great, too).

DDR has appeal that lasts and lasts and lasts and...man there are a lot of DDR games.

The 3rd Mix never made it outside of Japan, but its legendary song list has been the stuff of every DDR since. Most notoriously, it features the higher beats-per-minute versions of DDR staples like Boom Boom Dollar and Butterfly, songs which have become synonymous with DDR gameplay. New songs like Afronova, and an outstanding number of tunes from DDR-great Captain Jack, continued to further diversify the list. Though some Japanese-based rhythm games lose appeal with too niche of a soundtrack, DDR 3rd Mix's anthems are universally catchy, and many of them fall more along the lines of good old-fashioned house than J-pop (although there's a fair share of the latter, as well). It was 3rd Mix that also expanded upon the length of the song list, ensuring that anyone who wanted to get their dance on was able to.

Though the difficulty levels in 3rd Mix were unchanged from the previous versions of the game, there was a new addition, in the form of nonstop mode, which effectively ramped up the challenge even further simply by not giving a player any breaks between songs. Of course, since the time of 3rd Mix's release, DDR has evolved that much more--perhaps most substantially with the 6th Mix and its addition of freeze arrows and other gameplay variations. But the 3rd Mix best typifies what makes the series so revolutionary, yet so classically entertaining at the same time.

--Carrie Gouskos, Features Editor

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