Beatmania

Beatmania (ビートマニア) (styled as beatmania), initially localized as Beatstage or Hiphopmania, is a discontinued series of Arcade DJ simulation music video games developed and distributed by Japanese game developer Konami and first released in December 1997, With every Beatmania game having its own slogan (eg. beatmania IIDX 18 Resort Anthem: Blaze through the resort party!). It contributed largely to the boom of music games in 1998, and the series expanded not only with arcade sequels, but also moved to home consoles and other portable devices, achieving a million unit sales. The Bemani line of music games from Konami is named after the series, was first adopted in the arcade release of Beatmania 3rdMix and kept ever since. The series came to an end with the last game being Beatmania The Final, released in 2002. In the international market, the series competed with the South Korean-developed EZ2DJ, another 5-key DJ simulation game, which Konami sued for copyright infringement relating to its gameplay similarity to Beatmania. In 1998, ASCII Corporation, the former distributor of Microsoft in Japan, signed an exclusive agreement with Konami to produce third-party controllers for the PlayStation releases of Beatmania. The controllers, known as the ASC-0515BM were often bundled alongside the game. With Konami's official controller for the game, the DJ Station Pro positioned as a more premium option. Beatmania gave birth to several spinoffs, such as the Beatmania IIDX series (a more advanced version featuring 7 keys and higher difficulty levels, and to this day still receiving new version updates) and the other being Beatmania III, a remake of the 5-key series which featured a more modern hardware platform, a pedal for optional effects and a 3.5" floppy disk drive to save play records. While the series was never ported to home computers, there have been unlicensed hard-drive...