Dance like millions are watching: The new TikTok craze at your local arcade

Even on a quiet day in the Kingpin arcade, when no one is in the Daytona driving seat and the basketball games have no takers, Caroline “Kazie” Lim will be dancing to a crowd of millions.

The 23-year-old from Melbourne is part of a growing community of gamers building a following on social media as they play the arcade game Dancerush Stardom.

Arcade dance game player, 24-year-old Kazie Lim. Credit: Joe Armao

Lim props her phone on the machine, hits record, and starts dancing. When the machine tells her where to move she obeys, her sneakers gliding across the flashing trackpad at her feet. When she’s done, she uploads the video to TikTok. Before she gets her breath back, the views and likes start pouring in.

Lim works in marketing and started her TikTok account as an experiment. She now has 2.3 million likes on the app for videos of her playing the dance game.

Released in 2018 to mark the 20th anniversary of its predecessor Dance Dance Revolution, Dancerush Stardom features a different dancefloor to the infamous arrow-embedded earlier model.

It places greater emphasis on expression rather than precision. And as the number of fans grows on TikTok, so does the community of players in real life.

“A lot of people are intimidated by the game because you get people watching [in the arcade],” Lim says. “But we don’t care what you look like or who you are, we’re just here to play the game and have a good time.”

In the background of some of Lim’s videos is Jacob Djaelani, awaiting his turn to jump in. One video on his TikTok account, featuring him and Lim and some other friends dancing, has hit 27.7 million views.

When Djaelani, 24, first saw one of his videos go viral, he was stunned by the volume of comments, and painstakingly went through them all (and deleted the negative ones). Now there are simply too many to read.

But one viewer did catch his eye: a woman in Germany who reached out at the end of 2022, and is now his girlfriend. “She found one of my TikToks and messaged me, and it just kind of went along from there,” he says.

For Lim and Djaelani, Dancerush is a social hobby that offers a respite from their office jobs. For others, there is a more competitive side.

Last year, 35-year-old Joshua McKinnon was flown to the US to represent Australia in the Dance Dance Revolution World Championships. The tournament pitted 48 of the world’s best players in a dance-off with a prize pool of $10,000.

McKinnon, who uploads videos of him playing the Dance Dance Revolution machine in Belconnen, Canberra, to YouTube, finished equal 13th.

McKinnon started playing the game in 2005. When the rest of the world grew tired of it and stopped playing, he remained loyal to the original. Of its lingering appeal, he says: “It’s a confluence of great music, a physical activity and then also a really fun game.”

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