How I got into the rhythm game rabbit hole...

A couple of months ago, I set a challenge for myself: to get really cracked at rhythm games. I dove headfirst into that mission… and now, months later, I’m burning up to $120 a month just to chase notes.

It didn’t help that I have a few friends who are basically rhythm game insiders—cab mechanics, chart producers, and even musicians themselves. Being around them meant it was only a matter of time before I got pressured into hitting my local arcade and smashing buttons.

To be honest? I absolutely suck at rhythm games. I don’t really have that “sense” of rhythm. All I know is that I’m supposed to “catch” the notes—never actually play with them. On my very first day, I confidently stood up in Beatmania IIDX cab, picked the "Normal" difficulty chart… and missed 90% of the notes.

I felt crushed. My ego? Obliterated. 😅 I asked my insider friends for advice, and they all said, “Yeah… IIDX has a crazy learning curve.”

Oddly enough, instead of discouraging me, it lit a spark in my eyes.
“Ha… this would make a funny bragging rights story someday,” I thought.

And so, I kept playing… and researching.

What’s hilarious about IIDX is that there’s an entire website dedicated to theories and form, like you’re learning to shoot a bow or wield a gun. Hand placement, posture, where to focus your eyes, note speed, different techniques… it’s all there.

And somehow, it all clicked for me. All those obsessive details, the analysis, the tiny optimizations—it felt like this world was definitely made for me.

I’m the type of person that once I get started on something… I go all in. I obsessively research everything about it. I’ve done this with cars, archery, computers, server hosting—basically anything that sparks my interest.

So for rhythm games to offer the same deep-dive, obsessive learning… oh, it was like a dopamine jackpot. Every little detail, every technique, every nuance—it tickled something inside me and made me want to learn more.

It was brilliant.

Eventually, I kept playing… and playing… venturing out to try other cabs around town. I even branched out to SDVX and MaiMaiDX, diving headfirst into new challenges. Right now the game that I have been playing a bit too much is MaiMaiDX.

And now? Well… the rest is history.

I find it tad bit hard to describe how much joy rhythm games have been giving me for the past few months now. To be perfectly honest, I have never seen a genre of video games that got me this so passionate and heavily invested.

I want to say a special shout out to MaiMaiDX though. Maybe soon I will make a blog post why I think MaiMaiDX is the near pinnacle of rhythm games.