Dance Dance Revolution Extreme is a music video game by Konami and is the eighth release in the main Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) series. It was released on December 25, 2002 for Japanese arcades, on October 9, 2003 for the Japanese PlayStation 2, and on September 21, 2004 for the North American PlayStation 2. This game is the ninth release in North America, but despite having the same name as its Japanese counterpart, its gameplay and soundtrack is significantly different[1] and won the Video Music Awards in 2005 on MTV for Best Video Game Soundtrack.
While the PlayStation 2 version came out in North America, the arcade version was exclusive to Japan. Despite this, the arcade version was exported to many arcades in the USA (most of them being bootlegged). Dance Dance Revolution Extreme was the last game in the DDR arcade franchise for four years until Dance Dance Revolution SuperNova in 2006. The arcade release of the game contains one of the largest soundtracks of any DDR game, featuring 240 songs, as well as music from other Bemani music titles. Konami issued an in-game thank you to the fans of Dance Dance Revolution and announced a rejuvenation of the entire series, but did not go into details. Konami's announcement led people to believe that DDR Extreme might be the final DDR release or that the series might be on hiatus or rebooted in the same manner as Beatmania and Beatmania IIDX.
