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2000

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2000

The year 2000 might have been KONAMI's biggest year ever with BEMANI. In addition to all their previous series of the following years receiving brand-new games, which all had several new installments this year, KONAMI released three new BEMANI series: Dance Maniax, KEYBOARDMANIA, and ParaParaParadise. They also released another spinoff of beatmania; beatmania III.

2000 also saw the year of KONAMI slowly transitioning to more powerful consoles for their BEMANI series. With the exception of Dance Maniax, all of the year's new BEMANI series ran on the more powerful BEMANI FIREBEAT HARDWARE, which allowed for more space and better graphics. pop'n music even began using it this year, beginning with pop'n music 4. Curiously, KONAMI continued to run the original beatmania series on BEMANI DJ-MAIN HARDWARE, and beatmania IIDX, DanceDanceRevolution, and GUITARFREAKS/drummania would continue to run on PlayStation-based hardware for a few more years. (Dance Maniax ran on KONAMI BEMANI SYSTEM 573 DIGITAL, the same hardware used for DanceDanceRevolution 3rdMIX through EXTREME, as well as GUITARFREAKS 3rdMIX & drummania 2ndMIX through GUITARFREAKS 11thMIX & drummania 10thMIX.)

For the first time ever, beatmania did not receive a numbered sequel this year, opting instead to do another compilation game and a few spinoff games. KONAMI experimented with the franchise both in the arcade and at home. beatmania ClubMIX focused mainly on licensed club music, beatmania featuring DREAMS COME TRUE focused on the Japanese band of the same name, and beatmania CORE REMIX's songlist almost exclusively contained remixes of songs from beatmania and beatmania 2ndMIX, along with their original versions. Home exclusive title beatmania APPEND GOTTAMIX2 ~Going Global~ featured a wide variety of genres, as well as longer songs than the typical beatmania series standard, with several songs running up to two minutes long.

DanceDanceRevolution, meanwhile, saw expansion into Korea, with two Korean versions based on DanceDanceRevolution 3rdMIX: DanceDanceRevolution 3rdMIX VER.KOREA and DanceDanceRevolution 3rdMIX Ver.KOREA2. These games contained brand-new licenses, the former game's licenses even appearing in a later Japanese arcade release.

pop'n music had its own spinoffs with two games containing popular anime licenses: pop'n music アニメロ and pop'n music アニメロ2号. It also received a Disney license spin-off game, pop'n music MICKEY TUNES.

GUITARFREAKS & drummania didn't receive any spinoff games, though they did get something quite big by the end of the year; full session connectivity. GUITARFREAKS 3rdMIX & drummania 2ndMIX were the first games in their respective series to have Session Mode, allowing as many as three players to play together: one on drums, one on guitar, and one on bass. While limited originally, the sequel GUITARFREAKS 4thMIX & drummania 3rdMIX allowed Session Play for all of its brand-new songs, a tradition that is still followed in the series to this day. Future big-name BEMANI artist Tomosuke Funaki made his debut in drummania 2ndMIX, adding to the series his own unique sound of lounge and house to the series.

drummania also marked a big milestone for KONAMI as a whole. Its whole port, drummania CS, was actually one of the launch titles for the Japanese PlayStation 2 launch in Japan, making it the first (and so far only) BEMANI game to be a launch title for a video game system.

beatmania IIDX also didn't receive any new spin-off games, but instead two new arcade games. It also followed drummania in that it also received a console game on the then new PlayStation 2; beatmania IIDX 3rd style CS, which boasted a then record 81 songs, the largest of any home BEMANI title at the time of its release.

The newest spinoff to beatmania, beatmania III, used only five keys much like the original beatmania, but it also had a foot pedal to add difficulty to certain songs. It also featured something no other arcade BEMANI game at the time had; the ability to save your game scores, through usage of a 3.5 inch floppy disk drive. In addition to featuring near every new song in the arcade beatmania series at the time of its release, beatmania III also featured 23 brand-new songs to play. While beatmania III never had an official sequel, KONAMI released APPEND counterparts for the series, released about a month or so after its beatmania arcade counterpart, for the rest of the series' history.

Dance Maniax was the first BEMANI game to use motion sensors for gameplay, as opposed to the traditional button/pad hitting gameplay of other BEMANI games at the time. By waving your hands above or below four sensors, you danced along to music. Like DanceDanceRevolution, Dance Maniax's licenses were also from the Dancemania series, though it also boasted a large amount of original songs, too. Many of the originals eventually found their way to DanceDanceRevolution over the years.

KEYBOARDMANIA was a keyboard simulation game that used 14 white keys and 10 black keys on both sides to simulate a keyboard. It was even possible to play Double charts with this set-up, resulting in 28 white keys and 20 black keys to hit! Despite a high difficulty curve, the game became a minor hit, and even received ports on the PlayStation 2. Most of the soundtrack to the series was composed by in-house and commission artists, many of whom were also contributors to pop'n music at the time (or would be in the future).

ParaParaParadise, like Dance Maniax, used sensors for its gameplay. Compared to Dance Maniax's selection of dance music and KONAMI originals, ParaParaParadise near exclusively featured Eurobeat licenses from avex trax, along with remixes of BEMANI songs to sound more like Eurobeat. The game was created to take advantage of the Para Para dancing craze that was huge in Japan in the late 1990's through the early 2000's, even featuring Para Para dancers in the background. A few of the series' licenses would also appear in beatmania IIDX the following year.

If that wasn't all, KONAMI also made even more Game Boy Color BEMANI games, this year introducing new DanceDanceRevolution and pop'n music GB games.

This year also saw the release of the very first non-Japanese home BEMANI game - beatmania European Edit, released only in Europe. KONAMI also released Dancing Stage EuroMIX in Europe, as well as DanceDanceRevolution USA in North America, the first North American-exclusive DanceDanceRevolution arcade title.

But what goes up must eventually come down, as they say. While 2000 was a huge year for BEMANI, 2001 would see some slowdown, as well as not one but two reboots to two of their biggest music game series.

January

February

March

  • March 2nd:
  • March 3rd: pop'n music 3 V.S. pop'n stage album released.
  • March 4th: drummania CS is released in Japan for the Sony PlayStation 2. It was one of the system's launch titles in Japan.
  • March 8th: beatmania III is released to Japanese arcades.
  • March 16th:
  • March 18th: pop'n music 4 is released to Japanese arcades.
  • March 27th: drummania 2ndMIX is released to Japanese arcades.
  • March 28th: beatmania ClubMIX is released to Japanese arcades.
  • March 29th:
    • beatmania 5thMIX ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK released. Unlike previous beatmania soundtracks, this was published by Toshiba-EMI, due to its having Dancemania licenses on it.
      • It is also the first beatmania soundtrack to have a second disc with a megamix of the first disc's songs.
    • pop'n music ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK MICKEY TUNES album released. Due to its licensed music, the soundtrack was published by Walt Disney Records and distributed by avex distribution.
  • March 30th:
    • pop'n music GB is released for Nintendo's Game Boy Color.
    • BEMANI debut of Tomoaki Hirono, who would become a major in-house composer for BEMANI about a decade later.
  • Unknown date: pop'n music MICKEY TUNES is released to Japanese arcades.

April

May

June

  • June 1st: DanceDanceRevolution 3rdMIX CS is released in Japan for the Sony PlayStation.
  • June 7th: pop'n music Animation melody フル! ANIMELO FULL album released.
  • June 16th: beatmania III // new songs collection album released.
  • June 21st:
  • June 28th: Dance Dance Revolution Solo 2000 ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK album released.
  • Unknown date:

July

August

September

October

  • October 6th: KEYBOARDMANIA 2ndMIX is released to Japanese arcades.
    • Long-time BEMANI notechart designer Tomoyuki Uchida starts composing music for BEMANI as of this game.
  • October 12th: pop'n music 4 CS APPEND DISC is released in Japan for both the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Dreamcast. It is the last BEMANI game released on the Sega Dreamcast.
  • October 18th: beatmania Club MIX Original Soundtrack released. This soundtrack was published by SMEJ Associated Records as opposed to KONAMI, due to its licenses.
  • October 24th: ParaParaParadise V1.1, an updated version of ParaParaParadise with more songs, is released to Japanese arcades.
  • October 25th: beatmania IIDX 3rd style Original Soundtracks album released. It also contains the missing KONAMI originals from 2nd style that weren't in beatmania maniac-tracks.
  • Unknown date:
    • DanceDanceRevolution USA is released to North American arcades.
    • Reo Nagumo leaves KONAMI to work at Sony Computer Entertainment. He would still occasionally contribute to BEMANI up until 2008, though.

November

December

Unknown date

  • Dancing Stage EuroMIX INTERNET R@NKING, an enhanced port of Dancing Stage EuroMIX that adds six more songs and Internet Ranking, is released to European arcades.
  • DanceDanceRevolution music producer Naoki Maeda holds auditions for vocalists for his new music group he is forming, who would be revealed the following year to be BeForU.
  • KONAMI holds a Musicianship Trial for beatmania IIDX to find new talent to add songs to the series. The winners were the then 16 year-old Kosuke Saito and 20 year-old Ryutaro Nakahara, whose debut songs clione and starmine respectively appeared in beatmania IIDX 4th style. Both artists would return to BEMANI in 2003 by request of Takayuki Ishikawa for beatmania IIDX 9th style. Both artists still contribute to beatmania IIDX, as well as other BEMANI series, to this day.
  • KONAMI signs a deal with Universal Studios to make video games based on their properties, as well as grant them access to their music library. The latter would extensively be used for the European Dancing Stage arcade and home releases, not unlike the Japanese DanceDanceRevolution series with Dancemania.
    • Ironically, on April 1st, 2013, Universal Music Japan bought out Toshiba-EMI, the publishers of the Dancemania series, under the new sublabel name of EMI Records Japan.
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