Even something as seemingly plain as a guy taking a girl out on a date while kicking balls away from them could yield many a musical result. It could be said that WarioWare, a game that made it a common practice to make spectacular games out of the most mundane of activities, heavily influenced this. These scenes would often range from the fantastic to the mundane, yet they all had huge character.
To add even an even more surreal nature to the game, the songs would not take place in a rock stage, a concert, or even a karaoke session. If you could tap “shave and a haircut, two bits!” with your fingers or bob your head in rhythm to a pop song, Rhythm Heaven was for you. The concept is quirky, but allowed everyone to get into the game without the need of expensive peripherals or mastery of the game. This made for a test of reflexes and rhythm, as the songs would follow a pattern, and every once in a while would change tempo or add more challenges to overcome within the same piece of music. In other words, you weren't just pressing buttons in a timely manner but actually playing alongside the song. Rather than just following patterns and pressing buttons in order to hit preset patterns, players would actually have to closely follow the beat of the song and make the appropriate button presses to the beat. Rhythm Heaven, however, took a very different approach. Games like PaRappa the Rapper from Sony and Dance Dance Revolution from Konami pioneered this method of rhythm gameplay. Rhythm Heaven plays very differently from other rhythm-based games, which would consist of having players press a series of buttons, prompts for which scroll along to the speed of the song. The person credited for the creation of this series is Kazuyoshi Osawa, who also worked on the WarioWare and Metroid games.
The series is known as Rhythm Tengoku (or Rhythm Paradise) in Japan and was produced by Nintendo's internal studio Nintendo SP&D1, who also did work on the WarioWare and Metroid games. The Rhythm Heaven series has recently become familiar to North American shores, but Japanese players have been experiencing the musical legacy for years now.
As you read this feature, Rhythm Heaven Fever for Wii is grooving its way onto consoles around North America.
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