Dance Dance Revolution Roms
Midas Souza
Jenny Rom is an Italian bubblegum dance project known for her high-pitched, fast-paced dance music. She is produced under SAIFAM Publishing Group Italy.[1] Her songs have been featured in Japan's Dancemania music compilation series, especially its Speed sub-series, as well as Dance Dance Revolution.[2] Rom was first started by one of SAIFAM's DJ groups, DJ JAXX, starting with the song "Do You Want A Flirt?". The second song was "WWW.BLONDE GIRL". Rom and The Zippers are extremely close alias groups with the same sound used by SAIFAM. Recently, The Zippers have turned to doing covers instead of the Jenny Rom style.
A longstanding rumor originating in the DDRMAX era stated that Rom's first name in full is "Giovanna". However, in June 2023 the longstanding rumor has been disproved, with Melody Castellari stating on Instagram private messaging that she was the singer for "WWW.Blonde Girl."[3] The male voice was sung by Mauro Farina. Jenny Rom is a studio project, and her songs were sung by in-house studio artists at the time the tracks were made. Castellari was not told that this song she sang would be titled as Jenny Rom.
In the months after the release of Dance Dance Revolution on PC, Konami offered free downloads for the game on the product website. The free downloads consisted of additional dancing character that were displayed during gameplay. The characters ranged from general styles (Club DJs, trendy outfits) to odd and seasonal styles (Bondage gear, Christmas dresses, Halloween costumes, Robots). The download page displayed blank entries for up and coming downloads. The nature of the new dancers were revealed when the downloads were posted. Dancing characters were released as pairs (Usually a man and a woman when gender even applied), however the final blank entry was a lone dancing character instead of a pair. The final character was a bonus character named Jason, that replaced Guy, a previously-downloadable character.[2]
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This past fall, I was sitting in JOEY DTLA with my dear friends Dre and Mimi. The weather was getting cooler, and cuffing season was upon us, so naturally talk of relationships (or lack thereof) was top of mind.
After the uncontrollable giggles subsided, wide-eyed and channeling my best Bambi, I looked at him earnestly and asked him if he wanted to hear the highly specific dissertation that is my Prototype of a man, in true Outkast fashion.
You see, I had written up the facets of my version of Mr. Right about 10 years ago, and let me tell you, it is exhaustive and specific AF, down to the meet-cute of my dreams, a small window of preferred height, the values and pillars of truth he lives by, his food and taste profile, his style of Pinterest/mood-boarding, preferences in typography. The list goes on.
In any case, as you can imagine, as someone who has thought in painstaking detail about what those wants and nonnegotiables are (much of which are influenced by my love of rom-coms like Brown Sugar and When Harry Met Sally), the surprise and delight I experienced when stumbling on the magic that is Mr. Right, a quirky interactive rom-com.
Brought to life by Powderkeg Media in collaboration with Verizon, the premise of the Mr. Right is hella relatable and easy to get invested in: girl meets boy, things don't work out, boy invites girl to his wedding to someone else, and girl has to decide what to do.
So, originally I had the idea, just kind of the premise of a girl who gets invited to her ex-boyfriend's wedding and then she schemes to bring this very attractive, human-looking robot as her date. Paul Feig has a digital company called Powderkeg Media that encourages women and diverse voices. So I pitched it to them, and they just loved the general idea. At first, we kind of developed it in a traditional medium. Then, when Verizon caught wind of the idea, they were like: is there a way to make it interactive and incorporate some of the 5G lab experiences? So we put our heads together and thought this could elevate the project even more, and we redesigned it with that in mind.
Yeah, exactly! Ways that were thoughtful. We didn't just want to shoehorn in anything. So we were trying to think: what would make this story the most fun? Like, for example, we have a scene in a nightclub and we thought to ourselves, "Oh, this would be really fun to make this a human Dance Dance Revolution. So we have a scene where you the player can choose the dance moves that Rob the Robot does. It's like, is he doing a booty pop?
Same! I'm an elder millennial myself, so I'm totally right there with you. But yeah, that was our approach: what would make these more interactive moments the most fun? How could we incorporate the technology in a way that would be satisfying and elevate the story?
Was there any challenge with that on your end? When you think about it, it kind of mimics the way life happens, right? In romance, there are a lot of highs and lows throughout the process. Especially when it comes to exes. How did you map out your process into figuring out all these twists and turns that the story would go through? And do you feel some kind of way about consumers choosing one pathway over another? How did you relinquish control of the fact that you don't get to choose their ending?
Great questions! I think in this project, I started out very big picture: what's the beginning, middle, and end? I thought of it in a very traditional three-act structure. And then there was layering. So we knew in this experience, you're getting the robot. And again, the premise is this girl gets this very attractive human-looking robot, and your job as the user is to give this guy a personality. So the choices you make in this experience are giving him a personality.
It is really cool! We decided the five personality traits would be: woke, talented, nice guy, bro, and dud. So along the way, as you're playing the experience, you're making choices that reflect those archetypes.
So, I always went with the nice guy, however, the bro endings I think are the most fun, if I'm being honest. There are 17 different endings because you always have a first personality trait that you lead with and then pair with something else and it leads to a different story. Like, nice guy bro, or talented dud, and that unlocks something different.
Yeah, that's the bro. All of the bro ones are basically f*ck boys. There's one ending when the groom and the robot kind of bro out, and become friends and they leave, and they're like OMG, this guy's amazing, and she's like wowwwww, okay! That's bro nice guy. And then in bro bro, they totally get into a massive fight.
A hundred percent! So thinking about it, we're like let's approach this holistically, and then in each scene, what are the most fun choices if you were playing this experience? Things that affect his personality, but then also a dance move that would be cool to see. And it doesn't necessarily reflect a personality trait, but it's just a fun decision to make.
This is so innovative and amazing. There are only a few projects rom-com-wise that have really resonated with me lately that are kind of tapping into the digital space. Like 40 Days of Dating, have you heard of that project? I've been talking about that for the last decade because nobody's done anything like that before.
Yes, yes! That was something we definitely watched and read to get inspiration from. It was really helpful to see. And I think this project, Mr. Right, might be the only true interactive romantic comedy movie experience because most things, as you know, in the interactive space are very sci-fi-based and very male-driven. So that's something we also keyed into this project is to make it very female-based, which really hasn't been done before.
We were developing it with Powderkeg for quite some time, but then once Verizon came on board, things moved very quickly. Verizon had a very clear idea of what they wanted from this experience on their end. They really wanted to showcase 5G, so it had to be very quick to download. We wanted to see 5G calls, which the characters were able to have, as well as text messages and we used augmented reality. So we used a lot of the tools that the 5G Lab had in their toolbox. So once they got on board, it was fast.
Let's talk about gamifying the plot. Did that mess with your storytelling? Was it hard to do it that way? You had to anticipate so many different alternative pathways, but at the same time, given we are elder millennials, we've experienced dating for a while, so it might have come easily to you.
You know, it was actually challenging to think up the scenarios. We had almost a little decision tree: if you do this, then this happens. Getting you to move the story forward, like still getting the viewer and the user to get to the next scene, even if their scene is slightly altered, given the previous choices they've made. Keeping that consistent was actually more challenging than you would think.
I think it was challenging because there were definitely preferences that I have that I think are the funniest, you know? Like things I really wanted my friends and family to see. For example, in woke, if you make him super woke, then he becomes obsessed with saving the bees and becomes almost like a mini activist. I thought that if you're constantly making those choices, that was really funny. And I was like: Oh, I hope people make choices to see that version. We also wanted to reward people for consistently making choices and disincentivize them for not making choices. So it's like, if you really are as a user not interacting with the experience, you do get a dud ending, which honestly is kind of funny.
Dancing Stage EuroMIX is the 2nd release in the Dancing Stage series, the European version of Dance Dance Revolution series of music video games by Konami. The arcade version was released in 1999, followed by the Sony PlayStation version in 2001. An updated "Internet Ranking" version of the arcade machine was released later on, containing 6 new tracks (as advertised by a sticker on the game's name banner).
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