@@deftbeck1669 LMAO omg of course! my bad for putting you on blast the truth had to be heard 🙏 jokes aside tho, did you play 3ddx and "gennie" (lol) in a bottle wasnt in the game? do u remember if it was like DSS or something?
This is probably the most interesting gaming niche I've ever heard about. In an era where games were mostly separated from the internet it's super cool to see how proprietary cabinet/console arcade games like this were preserved. Super well edited and awesome video too!
@corsactcds thank you so much!! thats why i love making videos about it, arcade history is not always taken into consideration especially as ive seen in america so its always so cool to dive into like this!!
Fun Fact: In 2011 or 2012 I was offered a 3DDX machine from a game warehouse in Illinois. I had absolutely zero clue what it was at the time. It was bizarre... It had pump it up pads and the cabinet from pump it up, but the decals referenced NGG and the marquee just said "Dance Station Stepper". Apparently this was the non-deluxe version of the game and I have no idea if it was sold as an "upgrade" kit for pump it up or if the company was buying Pump it up machines and putting their game in them. I never went forward with the purchase (I regret this to this day) and have looked for hours for the pictures of it with no luck. Unfortunately it would have stayed lost media regardless of if I got it because the CD the game ran on was destroyed. I am sure the game is in a dump somewhere now.
@@omg_kon i actually looked this up yesterday and it looks like NGG had an exact ripoff of pump they created before 3DDX called Dance Station Stepper (i think, i forget the specific name but im pretty sure thats it) so that could be what it was!
@@Smqll_Fry That sounds right. I did a bunch of research on that game before I ultimately decided not to buy it at the time. During your video you showed the NGG website and I remember being on that website via the wayback machine back then seeing the exact same stuff.
round1 is always up to date bc every game is connected to the official servers. in america Round1 is the only arcade chain that is allowed to connect to konami's official eamusement servers. starting when DDR A came out in america Dave n Busters was also allowed to be on official eamusement and up to date with japan, but when A3 rolled around the contract between Konami and DnB ended, resulting in all DnB cabinets being stuck on A20+, the mix that came out before A3. Despite the contract ending between the two tho, Konami hasn't shut down A20 Plus' servers, when normally they shutdown the previous mix's servers around a year after the next mix comes out. This means the cabinets are still online and can have scores submitted to them, but theyre just all stuck on a mix thats now twice-outdated
I play this all the time for warmups before playing Dance Cube (another Chinese rhythm game with a deep rabbit hole)! Translating it as "e-five" isn't quite accurate, because e5 is just some wordplay/abbreviation for written Chinese. In spoken Chinese it's e舞, where 舞 means "dance", and this character and "5" have the same pronunciation (wǔ). So when you want to write it quickly it's easier to write e5, but when speaking it out loud people are intending to say "e-dance". The majority of people play freestyle, and charts are often written in a way that allow players to perform the official dance routines for songs. New songs are still being added every month. These machines are everywhere in Beijing and during weekends it's not uncommon for the queue times to be 1 hour+. There's often a giant crowd of passerbys watching and a lot of people will play it while cosplaying. There's a HUGE element of performance involved.
Great vid! Ive heard of 3ddx but i didnt know the rabbit hole went this far. Funny to see caution there, kinda a jumpscare when you started doing hand gestures. Cheers!
I have a funny story with DSS (Dance Super Station) went to the arcade only to play that game and the coin slot was broken, the attendance did not have the keys, I was about to give up when the operator arrived in front of the arcade, begged him to open the machine up and he agreed, he actually was suprized how much I knew about that stuff so he gave me some plays on his behalf, Unfortunately the motion sensors weren't working
14:07 After taking a look at this part of the video I can read "SM" written on the top right of the screen (on the button with chinese text on it), and I think that's something about .sm files, *as we know .sm files are used from stepmania 3 to the last version (5.1 i think)* , and in my theory I can say that E5 is most likely a Stepmania 5 custom distribution (yes stepmania custom distros are actually a thing, there's lots of them on the stepmania archive website)
ohh good eye! not too surprised its stepmania based, as like u said theres a lot of custom sm distros (like itg has been a stepmania fork since its inception! and im pretty sure piu infinity runs on sm5)
I’ve been down this rabbit hole and yes it is. There’s a custom editor client you can download on PC (it’s a random wechat link lol) to play custom sims on the arcade cab, and it’s straight up SM
Incredible. We had a few 3DDX cabs here in England back in the day. I've recently managed to get a working ez2dancer here in London. (The arcade is Freeplaycity). But I'd kill for an E5. There is one in my area but it's for kids only and feels super weird when you go in. Having been through the whole dancegames era since day 1, this is an amazing video that really hits my nostalgia fix haha
Great video! I’ve shared some personal experiences and info regarding 3DDX D-Tech over on the both the Project Outfox and SPV discord. I think Squirrel might’ve used some of my info in the wiki… I believe they said they would. Anyway, something interesting to note about 3DDX is that it seemed to come in both single pad and dual pad configurations, but it does seem to be the same base unit. Our unit was located at a Pocket Change. We had it sometime around 2004 for about 6 months. It was replaced with a Para Para Paradise cab and then a DDR Extreme (refitted crap-o-cab, but I could be wrong on the order. Still trying to find old photos of the cab. I only have one of the pad.
@@nay10 woahh thats so cool that you were there while the original game was going! thats also interesting that d-tech came in a solo and duo form like e5 currently. do you remember anything specific that was funny or interesting about the gameplay? was the game even any good or was it a little rough around the edges lol
Sick video! Great to see interest in 3ddx/e5. I was down the rabbit hole last year talking to people on bilibili and WeChat. I meant to make a video about it, I still might. It seems like people in China don’t even like e5 all that much (they call it “goose dance” lol) but they still play at a high level and have national tournaments. Very interesting scene that unfortunately we can’t learn much about sue to Chinese internet restrictions
@@SPVLaboratories thank you, so glad you liked the vid!! thats super cool you got in touch with ppl on the chinese internet. id love to see you make a vid as there is a lot more that i didnt cover and it would be rlly cool to see more input from people in the e5 community!
@ there’s basically no DDR there, only a handful of cabs exist and I don’t even think they’re public. Some people play pump but it’s not as big as E5. From what I’ve gathered it seems like gaming in China is very normie-centered, like super broad appeal. If you look at the e5 marketing it’s advertised as a general purpose fitness machine for all ages, kind of like the vision of DDR in middle school gym classes back in the day. The vast majority of e5 players are “fancy”, basically the equivalent of freestyle here where girls dress up as pop idols and mimic choreography. The hardcore community that plays “racing” or basically stam charts is much smaller. I think people realize the cab build is not very good, it’s possible to “cheese” hard songs without moving much, and the charts are not as good as pump.
I live in China and arcades here almost always put E5 cabs together with maimai and set E5's volume to very loud that people have to wear headphones to play maimai lmao Nevertheless it's still fun to look at pro players playing while waiting for my turn for maimai
@@tweakydied lol in the us we have the opposite issue, the dance games are always for some reason put next to the carnival-like games and games that drown out the sound of the dance game's music
While not in arcades, EZ2ON and DJ MAX Respect V are available on Steam, effectively Worldwide, with DJ MAX Respect V being particularly very very popular. I appreciate the nod to Technica, and the acknowledgement of EZ2DJ and this topic at all really. Damn... Technica... that was one HELL of a game. Those were the DAYS, dude!
@@8saiharamasukoi yess i love respect v and ez2on looks rlly cool too, i was talking about specifically the arcade games but i think that was just a shortcoming in my script lol ive never played technika but it seems rlly fun! unfortunately there are no cabinets near me 😔
Apparently when watching the first half of the video I thought it was going to be 2x more confusing than Chrono Circle but ig I kinda understand it now
from playing on my makeshift home setup its definetly weird at first using arm movements to react to the arrows but you get used to it after a bit! chrono circle is still like a second language to me lol, but i appreciate it for being different
The 3.9 version of DSS is not the actual thing that runs on the machine, the 3.9 build was hosted on ez2dancer website and it's built off the 3DDX theme for stepmania,
I always like finding weird chinese rhythm games. It's like a hybrid of japanese games but also some interesting unique ideas out there. Muzibox being an example.
I found weird dance cover remixes of old pop songs in the song list (like Lemon Tree) hahahahaha. There's even hidden songs, although you can listen to them in the site (you can't see their names though)
Yo i have 2 3DDX games dumped on my PC on keyboard they're neat as 8k practice but on dancepad it's a nightmare since some notes go on the same lane i can't really play 3DDX on a genuine cab myself since it's far far away. (Nearest cab is in in germany near the ocean and im in poland)
I also have noticed through places like zenius i vanisher that 3DDX is spread out around the world with D-Tech/Passional and E5 being all around the world
also if you want to do more research on 3DDX from Passional to E5 (Data from around 2007-2010) then i recommend looking it up on baidu, china's equivelant to google with a lot of data
Also E5 and Passional aren't by Ez2Dance. It's by AAM, a different chinese company responsible for an arcade just dance/dance evo clone that i forgot the name of. Ez2Dance from what i can tell was a distributor that handled the 3DDX games and their soundtrack as well as OSTs for Ez2dancer.
@@bombu3ddx ohh i see my mistake on the company names! ive seen the AAM logo on passional and e5 stuff before (attract mode for passional, physical logo on E5's cabinet), but i ended up using the developer name that was mentioned on the Outfox wiki. also thats so cool you have 2 of the games dumped!! how did you find them?
I played the original 3DDX once back in the day but wish I'd been able to play more. I remember it being a fun experience though. (This would have been the original Korean version)
thanks for the lizard feature
@@deftbeck1669 LMAO omg of course! my bad for putting you on blast the truth had to be heard 🙏
jokes aside tho, did you play 3ddx and "gennie" (lol) in a bottle wasnt in the game? do u remember if it was like DSS or something?
@@Smqll_Fry i have played neither
This is probably the most interesting gaming niche I've ever heard about. In an era where games were mostly separated from the internet it's super cool to see how proprietary cabinet/console arcade games like this were preserved. Super well edited and awesome video too!
@corsactcds thank you so much!! thats why i love making videos about it, arcade history is not always taken into consideration especially as ive seen in america so its always so cool to dive into like this!!
Fun Fact: In 2011 or 2012 I was offered a 3DDX machine from a game warehouse in Illinois. I had absolutely zero clue what it was at the time. It was bizarre... It had pump it up pads and the cabinet from pump it up, but the decals referenced NGG and the marquee just said "Dance Station Stepper". Apparently this was the non-deluxe version of the game and I have no idea if it was sold as an "upgrade" kit for pump it up or if the company was buying Pump it up machines and putting their game in them. I never went forward with the purchase (I regret this to this day) and have looked for hours for the pictures of it with no luck. Unfortunately it would have stayed lost media regardless of if I got it because the CD the game ran on was destroyed. I am sure the game is in a dump somewhere now.
@@omg_kon i actually looked this up yesterday and it looks like NGG had an exact ripoff of pump they created before 3DDX called Dance Station Stepper (i think, i forget the specific name but im pretty sure thats it) so that could be what it was!
@@Smqll_Fry That sounds right. I did a bunch of research on that game before I ultimately decided not to buy it at the time. During your video you showed the NGG website and I remember being on that website via the wayback machine back then seeing the exact same stuff.
3DDX CONTENT!?!? 2025 already starting off strong. i'm bout to send this to as many rhythm game ppl i can
omg thank you so much!! i hope they enjoy the vid as well 😼
12:09 why dose round1 have literally ALMOST every rhythm game up to date istg (also the ddr world logo reminds me of a certain brands logo)
round1 is always up to date bc every game is connected to the official servers. in america Round1 is the only arcade chain that is allowed to connect to konami's official eamusement servers. starting when DDR A came out in america Dave n Busters was also allowed to be on official eamusement and up to date with japan, but when A3 rolled around the contract between Konami and DnB ended, resulting in all DnB cabinets being stuck on A20+, the mix that came out before A3.
Despite the contract ending between the two tho, Konami hasn't shut down A20 Plus' servers, when normally they shutdown the previous mix's servers around a year after the next mix comes out. This means the cabinets are still online and can have scores submitted to them, but theyre just all stuck on a mix thats now twice-outdated
I play this all the time for warmups before playing Dance Cube (another Chinese rhythm game with a deep rabbit hole)!
Translating it as "e-five" isn't quite accurate, because e5 is just some wordplay/abbreviation for written Chinese. In spoken Chinese it's e舞, where 舞 means "dance", and this character and "5" have the same pronunciation (wǔ). So when you want to write it quickly it's easier to write e5, but when speaking it out loud people are intending to say "e-dance".
The majority of people play freestyle, and charts are often written in a way that allow players to perform the official dance routines for songs. New songs are still being added every month. These machines are everywhere in Beijing and during weekends it's not uncommon for the queue times to be 1 hour+. There's often a giant crowd of passerbys watching and a lot of people will play it while cosplaying. There's a HUGE element of performance involved.
Great vid! Ive heard of 3ddx but i didnt know the rabbit hole went this far. Funny to see caution there, kinda a jumpscare when you started doing hand gestures. Cheers!
@@TheDuke_007 yess i had to become a 2020 cosplay tiktok real quick
I have a funny story with DSS (Dance Super Station) went to the arcade only to play that game and the coin slot was broken, the attendance did not have the keys, I was about to give up when the operator arrived in front of the arcade, begged him to open the machine up and he agreed, he actually was suprized how much I knew about that stuff so he gave me some plays on his behalf, Unfortunately the motion sensors weren't working
14:07
After taking a look at this part of the video I can read "SM" written on the top right of the screen (on the button with chinese text on it), and I think that's something about .sm files, *as we know .sm files are used from stepmania 3 to the last version (5.1 i think)* , and in my theory I can say that E5 is most likely a Stepmania 5 custom distribution (yes stepmania custom distros are actually a thing, there's lots of them on the stepmania archive website)
ohh good eye! not too surprised its stepmania based, as like u said theres a lot of custom sm distros (like itg has been a stepmania fork since its inception! and im pretty sure piu infinity runs on sm5)
yup!
I’ve been down this rabbit hole and yes it is. There’s a custom editor client you can download on PC (it’s a random wechat link lol) to play custom sims on the arcade cab, and it’s straight up SM
Incredible. We had a few 3DDX cabs here in England back in the day. I've recently managed to get a working ez2dancer here in London. (The arcade is Freeplaycity). But I'd kill for an E5. There is one in my area but it's for kids only and feels super weird when you go in.
Having been through the whole dancegames era since day 1, this is an amazing video that really hits my nostalgia fix haha
@@7ten thank you!! im noticing that the UK had a lot of the obscure dance games back in the day lol, especially EZ2Dance!
I don't play dance games at all, but I can tell you really put a lot of effort into this! I think your channel has a lot of potential 🙌
thank you!! hopefully more content is on the way soon :)
Great video! I’ve shared some personal experiences and info regarding 3DDX D-Tech over on the both the Project Outfox and SPV discord. I think Squirrel might’ve used some of my info in the wiki… I believe they said they would.
Anyway, something interesting to note about 3DDX is that it seemed to come in both single pad and dual pad configurations, but it does seem to be the same base unit.
Our unit was located at a Pocket Change. We had it sometime around 2004 for about 6 months. It was replaced with a Para Para Paradise cab and then a DDR Extreme (refitted crap-o-cab, but I could be wrong on the order.
Still trying to find old photos of the cab. I only have one of the pad.
@@nay10 woahh thats so cool that you were there while the original game was going! thats also interesting that d-tech came in a solo and duo form like e5 currently. do you remember anything specific that was funny or interesting about the gameplay? was the game even any good or was it a little rough around the edges lol
Sick video! Great to see interest in 3ddx/e5. I was down the rabbit hole last year talking to people on bilibili and WeChat. I meant to make a video about it, I still might. It seems like people in China don’t even like e5 all that much (they call it “goose dance” lol) but they still play at a high level and have national tournaments. Very interesting scene that unfortunately we can’t learn much about sue to Chinese internet restrictions
@@SPVLaboratories thank you, so glad you liked the vid!! thats super cool you got in touch with ppl on the chinese internet. id love to see you make a vid as there is a lot more that i didnt cover and it would be rlly cool to see more input from people in the e5 community!
why do people in china not like e5 by the way? is it anything specific, or is there just more love for games like pump and ddr?
@ there’s basically no DDR there, only a handful of cabs exist and I don’t even think they’re public. Some people play pump but it’s not as big as E5.
From what I’ve gathered it seems like gaming in China is very normie-centered, like super broad appeal. If you look at the e5 marketing it’s advertised as a general purpose fitness machine for all ages, kind of like the vision of DDR in middle school gym classes back in the day. The vast majority of e5 players are “fancy”, basically the equivalent of freestyle here where girls dress up as pop idols and mimic choreography. The hardcore community that plays “racing” or basically stam charts is much smaller. I think people realize the cab build is not very good, it’s possible to “cheese” hard songs without moving much, and the charts are not as good as pump.
@ ahh i see, thx!
@@Smqll_Frye5在游戏里收录他们没有使用权的曲目
I live in China and arcades here almost always put E5 cabs together with maimai and set E5's volume to very loud that people have to wear headphones to play maimai lmao
Nevertheless it's still fun to look at pro players playing while waiting for my turn for maimai
@@tweakydied lol in the us we have the opposite issue, the dance games are always for some reason put next to the carnival-like games and games that drown out the sound of the dance game's music
i actually remember seeing that at a local arcade, i even took a picture and posted it on ziv iirc lol
@@zach9999 thats awesome!! what arcade was it?
@@Smqll_Fry it was called sportime usa but i think they got rid of their cab after moving locations..
While not in arcades, EZ2ON and DJ MAX Respect V are available on Steam, effectively Worldwide, with DJ MAX Respect V being particularly very very popular. I appreciate the nod to Technica, and the acknowledgement of EZ2DJ and this topic at all really.
Damn... Technica... that was one HELL of a game. Those were the DAYS, dude!
@@8saiharamasukoi yess i love respect v and ez2on looks rlly cool too, i was talking about specifically the arcade games but i think that was just a shortcoming in my script lol
ive never played technika but it seems rlly fun! unfortunately there are no cabinets near me 😔
there's one of these cabs at a local arcade and it's one of the weirdest experiences ive had on a rhythm game
Apparently when watching the first half of the video I thought it was going to be 2x more confusing than Chrono Circle but ig I kinda understand it now
from playing on my makeshift home setup its definetly weird at first using arm movements to react to the arrows but you get used to it after a bit!
chrono circle is still like a second language to me lol, but i appreciate it for being different
I play this a lot when in China, it’s so hard to find info about this game though. Thank you for making the video
This a rare topic to see.. It seems most of the teens in Chinese arcade right now are there to play MaiMai DX though
this is so interesting.. i have never heard of this game before
W video
Really underrated content, would watch more,
keep making content ! you will go big in TH-cam
just discovered your channel, great vid! definitely keeping an eye out for future content
thank you so much! hopefully ill be a little more active when it comes to videos from now on
I ALMOST CLICK OUT DURING THE DREAM MASK REFERENCE /pos
also OMG ACTUAL unknown rhythm game ??? banger
Ongeki mentioned 15s in 🥳 subscribed
@@mia_2043 yes of course 😻 one day we will get performai outside of japan (and not just offline chunithm)... heres hoping!
lol just imagine having one of the Bemani games having at least 5370 names atp
lol
This is crazy awesome
Played some dance super station in china and it was pretty fun
0:50 jonx #1, baby
I played and enjoyed that many times.. 3DDX is a game in old memories 20 years ago (I am South Korean)
sorry about the audio issues near the end, that specific clip was exporting really weird during editing 😔
The 3.9 version of DSS is not the actual thing that runs on the machine, the 3.9 build was hosted on ez2dancer website and it's built off the 3DDX theme for stepmania,
@AdamKasiukKszrzrtof ohh interesting! that explains a lot actually, like why it comes with only 2 songs
1:17 Originally, Dance Station 3DDX was made in Korea, but was popularized by the Chinese. Talk about confusion on where the dance games came from!
yes i say that at 2:58 ! theres a whole section of the video dedicated to the korean part of 3ddx's history
I always like finding weird chinese rhythm games. It's like a hybrid of japanese games but also some interesting unique ideas out there. Muzibox being an example.
I found weird dance cover remixes of old pop songs in the song list (like Lemon Tree) hahahahaha. There's even hidden songs, although you can listen to them in the site (you can't see their names though)
only 2:30 in and i already understand why no one talks about this game lol
Yo i have 2 3DDX games dumped on my PC
on keyboard they're neat as 8k practice
but on dancepad it's a nightmare since some notes go on the same lane
i can't really play 3DDX on a genuine cab myself since it's far far away. (Nearest cab is in in germany near the ocean and im in poland)
I also have noticed through places like zenius i vanisher that 3DDX is spread out around the world with D-Tech/Passional and E5 being all around the world
also if you want to do more research on 3DDX from Passional to E5 (Data from around 2007-2010) then i recommend looking it up on baidu, china's equivelant to google with a lot of data
also all DSS games run the same version which is based on SM3, except with different note skins that you can change just like on SM.
Also E5 and Passional aren't by Ez2Dance. It's by AAM, a different chinese company responsible for an arcade just dance/dance evo clone that i forgot the name of. Ez2Dance from what i can tell was a distributor that handled the 3DDX games and their soundtrack as well as OSTs for Ez2dancer.
@@bombu3ddx ohh i see my mistake on the company names! ive seen the AAM logo on passional and e5 stuff before (attract mode for passional, physical logo on E5's cabinet), but i ended up using the developer name that was mentioned on the Outfox wiki.
also thats so cool you have 2 of the games dumped!! how did you find them?
I played the original 3DDX once back in the day but wish I'd been able to play more.
I remember it being a fun experience though.
(This would have been the original Korean version)
You should make a video about Cyber Groove 2000
@@n3onf0x yeah i saw someone else mention that! i might have to look into it idk 👀
this has criminally low views for the effort put in
i remembered that theres an e5 cab in vietnam
yooo this reminds me of cybergroove 2000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nice video! I know nothing about this topic, this just popped up in my recommended =3
@@benisputterr nice!! glad the algorithm decided it was time for you to learn about obscure arcade dance games lol
It's been 74 years.....
ikr 😭
caution don’t bother me mentioned ftw
E舞成名是垃圾，跟我一起說。
你不懂。
L
Yo holy shit you're not dead?
@@sideoffries3203 im alive!! it looks like the battle for the sideoffries name remains stagnant... (jk)
@@Smqll_Fry Just realized how similar channels we are. Same name, made different kinds of content, and are somewhat niche genres
@ ohh yea true!