Interview Styled blog post.
Interviewer: When did you become familiar with Beatmania/BMS?
Admin.Rich: *fuzzy memory* between 1998 & 2000.
Interviewer: Do you remember why you took a liking to VSRG’s / BMS?
Admin.Rich. I love to create! The second I figured out what the game was about, which is at its basics, creating a song on the fly with a ‘cookbook’ in front of you.A t certain points of the song I could choose to doubletap a note or freestyle somewhat – I was a lot younger back then, so I thought I was cool 8).
One of my alltime favourite songs of that time was DJ Watari – Popcorn ( https://tinyurl.com/DJwatari )
Followed by OverDoser by SLAKE ( https://tinyurl.com/Slake-OverDoser )
Interviewer: So what about the platform? Did you have any arcade-cabs? or did you use an emulator of the time like MixWaver / BM98?
Admin.Rich: Both actually! I lived near a Mall called Northlands Mall. It was a pretty large mall for a city of 380,000 people. Inside this mall was New Zealands largest Arcade franchise, TimeZone Arcades. This is where I first played on a Beatmania 4th Mix! Arcade cabinet. I remember that it was in good condition and extremely loud! people would look at me play a lot wondering what it was all about? maybe that or I was just playing so badly someone had to see what the noise was all about.
Interviewer: So why BMS or emulation then over the arcades?
Admin.Rich: Sadly TimeZone soon stopped having Beatmania Cabinets in circulation around the stores 🙁 – I made the most of it though! They would have a 20$ powerplay session where all the machines were free to play for 2 hours. I whored that cabinet so hard you could call it my b*%$^
Then it all went away never to-be-seen again.
During this time at the arcades, I was working – obviously as I’d have a hard time convincing the parents why a 15 year old should be paid to spend 4 hours a day there…
Interviewer: But you didn’t answer the question “why BMS over the arcade cab’s?”
Admin.Rich: Quite right. Interesting. That was quicker than the others….. With the disappearance of the arcade cab’s, I turned to Emulation thanks to a good friend. He introduced me to the emulation scene and I was hooked.
- I had own time to play
- I had my own room to play
- I had my own sounds – and at this point, I had an 18″ Rockford Fosgate Subwoofer in my bedroom powered by a car audio amp 😉
He burnt a CD-r the emulator and a small handful of about 16 songs. At the time he said to me something that’s stuck with me ever since.
“Good luck finding any BMS on the internet – it’s quite hard to find – – – – – – – *dramatic pause*- – – -good stuff anyway”
Now I’ve always been a severe techie, so I took this as a challenge. 8 Months later I had amassed 200 songs and I was the envy of my mate….
Interviewer: So you got hooked on collecting BMS, why?
Admin.Rich: I don’t know really – I’ve always been a caring person that develops a passion on something and follows through with it. I am very dedicated and if I have a good cause, I’ll champion that till the bitter end as in this case, it was the creation of BMSworld and its library of 5800 songs (so far)