The following text was originally written as part of a larger essay about rhythm game history that I never ended up finishing. I have decided to publish the first part of it in order to help others with their research. Several sections have been altered, but it may still read awkwardly at times, divorced from its original context. Also, I removed the last section due to lack of relevance and replaced it with a new conclusion.

Introduction

I'm mainly going to talk about rhythm gaming in the context of video games (e.g. Dance Dance Revolution, osu!, Pump It Up, etc.). If you have not played rhythm games or are not familiar with them, the following information will probably be less accessible to you.

The first rhythm game

Generally, you will find that one of three Japanese games; Rock'n Bark (1976), Dance Aerobics (1987, although it was originally released as Aerobics Studio), and PaRappa the Rapper (1996); is variably considered the "first" rhythm game. Rock'n Bark was released as an arcade cabinet by Sega, while the other two were released for the NES and Playstation respectively.

The way Rock'n Bark worked was that one or two players would use tommyguns mounted on the cabinet and, according to segaretro.org^[1]:

Gameplay involves shooting colorful targets on the 26-inch monitor to match the rhythm of the rock music. Game modes include shooting black parts in check patterns and shooting red and blue "dragons" in one- or two-player modes. Time is extended when the player(s) achieve 6000 or 8000 points, depending on the machine's configuration.

The game derives from Sega's earlier Bullet Mark (1975), with the Rock'n Bark cabinet having its branding on the cabinet, which itself derives from the earlier Balloon Gun (1974). However, these are not considered rhythm games, and the gameplay description on segaretro.org^[2] has no mention of any rhythm-based elements for any of this series of games until Rock'n Bark.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any gameplay of Rock'n Bark. Still, according to this description, it does seem to roughly fit the general idea of what a rhythm game is: you fulfill a certain activity to some gamified rhythm system. Probably due to the lack of preservation and age of these kinds of arcade machines, combined with the much higher barrier to entry when it comes to storing them (i.e. it is much easier for most / all copies of old arcade machine to be disposed of when they stop being profitable to the arcades than for home-system based games, as their use case is not profit-dependent to their owners), finding detailed accounts of playing Rock'n Bark is hard - at least on English-language sources.

When it comes to arcade rhythm games, it's possible that there may have been an even earlier example, although it's unknown and not described by name. In a shmuplations.com interview^[3], Kenji Nagata describes how the founder of KASCO, Kenzou Furukawa, supposedly came up with an idea for a game where "you'd lift girls skirts in time to some rhythm":

President Furukawa would come up with an idea. For example, you know the Oh! Mouretsu commercials? He had an idea for a game where you’d lift girls skirts in time to some rhythm. Next some design blueprints would be drawn up. There were only two or three engineers then—not many, right?! And President Furukawa did most of the work himself, the others were more like his assistants.

Given the time period in which this was likely to have been thought up (the post-war period of 1964-1974), this upskirting-based rhythm game may very well have been the first arcade rhythm game. The Oh! Mouretsu commercial referenced in the interview was released in 1969 by Maruzen Sekiyuu, featuring Roza Ogawa, who is pictured getting upskirted, so the date range is further restricted to 1969-1974. It's possible this game idea was a joke, but frankly, I'm happy it's lost to history. Regardless of whether or not it was a joke, it still demonstrates - in conjunction with Rock'n Bark - that these earlier rhythm games and rhythm game ideas were relatively simplistic with respect to the later home-system games, and indeed, modern rhythm games. Also, whether these were "rhythm games" or just "games with rhythm" is up for grabs.

Dance Aerobics (1987) was developed by Human Entertainment (founded in 1983) for the NES and published by Bandai in Japan, reaching the American market in 1989 when it was published by Nintendo. In Japan it is also known as Family Trainer No. 3: Aerobics Studio, as it was released as part of the Bandai Family Trainer series of games^[4].

The way Dance Aerobics gameplay works is by interacting with a dance mat, the Power Pad (released in 1986 by Bandai and 1988 by Nintendo, who bought the rights to it), known as Family Trainer in Japan and, briefly, Family Fun Fitness in the United States. The Power Pad is a 3x4 flexible dance mat with pressure sensors in it, on one side there are twelve buttons arranged in a matrix formation (side B) - on the other, eight buttons arranged in the same way but with the corner buttons missing (side A). According to strategywiki.org^[5], side A is rarely used for games - and, indeed, side B is used for Dance Aerobics, which can be seen when looking at gameplay^[6].

The main gamemode consists of watching the movements of an instructor on screen - who is displayed as standing on the same Power Pad - and mirroring their movements. The more interesting part is that, as is written on mobygames.com^[7]:

Any missed movements are recorded on a mistake counter and 10 missed movements will fail the level. The routines (a set of repeated movements) start slow and simple with a bit of no-penalty practise time however as the player gets better the routines get more complex with less practices time. Each level has a set number of routines that increase with each level from 4 at the start to a total of 32 on the final level (level 7).

The reason this is interesting is that it parallels some of the more modern features we would expect to constitute a rhythm game. Namely, a mistake counter (somewhat of a precursor to judgement counters in general) and a difficulty-based leveling system. Rock'n Bark was timer-based rather than leveled. Also, when you beat a level in Dance Aerobics, you receive a "pass stamp", which visually shows itself in a similar manner to how modern rhythm games would display a letter grade. The main difference between Dance Aerobics and something like Pump It Up or Dance Dance Revolution is that Dance Aerobics is explicitly exercise-based rather than dance-based. The "rhythm game" aspect of it is much more literal than we are used to today: you do certain actions to a rhythm, rather than a musical composition. Instead of following musical cues, you follow a steady beat with relatively repetitive gameplay. Although music does play during gameplay.

There are two other modes apart from the main one, Aerobics Studio and Pad Antics (which is itself divided into three minigames, Tune Up, Mat Melodies, and Ditto). In Pad Antics' Mat Melodies, each of the pads on the dance mat make a melodic note when the pressure sensors are activated, and "the player is given a song to play and the player must memorise to play the notes as they come as every missed note loses points"^[7]. Which is also quite interesting, as it demonstrates the idea of symbolically mapping certain inputs to certain pitches; a core tenet of charting for games like Stepmania and osu!mania, where mappers will usually try to have some sort of pitch-relevancy, as it makes for a more intuitive experience when played.

Thus, we can see that, at least compared to Rock'n Bark, Dance Aerobics is much more obviously a "rhythm game" rather than a "game with rhythm", having multiple hallmarks that have persisted within the genre, even until the modern day.

Unlike the prior games, PaRappa the Rapper was a genuine, bona fide, capital R, Rhythm Game - at least in the context of our contemporary expectations. Releasing in 1996 in Japan and 1997 globally, it centers around set-execute-style gameplay. In gameplay sections (as opposed to story, which I'll touch on in a bit), the player is placed alongside an adversarial character who performs a rap that the player (as PaRappa, the main character) must perform. The adversary sets a pattern, the player then executes that pattern.

But that's actually just visual, it could be entirely removed and the main gameplay would still be functional. The gameplay-critical element is the bar at the top of the screen - which is basically a staff on which notes are placed, divided horizontally into dotted sections which each represent divisions (large dots) and subdivisions (smaller dots) of a beat. During the set and execute periods of gameplay, an indicator runs across the bar at the appropriate tempo until a division determined by the time signature of that part of the song. The timing of set notes on the staff is determined by their position relative to the dots. See gameplay^[8].

The main and most interesting thing about PaRappa the Rapper, at least compared to Dance Aerobics, is that it is explicitly music based. I said earlier that Dance Aerobics was a rhythmic exercise game, which makes it the first "rhythm game" on basically a technicality, but PaRappa the Rapper genuinely bases itself on musical rhythm. So, in terms of chronology, PaRappa the Rapper is the first rhythm game, and is the root of the "direct lineage of the modern music game"^[9].

Conclusion

In conclusion, the question "what was the first rhythm game?" is answered in the same, disappointing way that so many other historical questions are answered - it depends. If we include hypothetical ideas that never gained traction, then the first rhythm game was the KASCO upskirting game (probably 1969-1974). If we include games which utilized a rhythm aspect, but didn't strongly rely on it, then it was Rock'n Bark (1976). If we include non-musical rhythm games, then it was Dance Aerobics (1987). But if we only include explicitly musical games with ties to the modern state of the genre - it's PaRappa the Rapper (1996).