"Beast in the East 6" (BITE6) DDR A20+ Tournament Credits and Acknowledgements
The success of any dance game event at scale is made possible by the direct and indirect efforts of a team of people, with each person contributing their time and effort in a unique way to make it happen.
As the lead tournament organizer (“TO” hereafter on this Substack) for the DDR A20PLUS tournament at Beast in the East 6 (“BITE6”), I had the honor and privilege to run my first “major” tournament attended by some of the world’s best DDR players for two days. And on my 2nd-ever in-person tournament gig, too! 56 players representing at least a dozen US states and five countries abroad is an internationally diverse body not seen in the American competitive DDR space since Upbeat Denver earlier this year.
This post is not a full-on retrospective. I have many things I want to write and say, but I’ll save such thoughts for future posts. For now, I’d like to give thanks.
The DDR Team
I’d first like to thank RGTM and Valgrind, my co-TO’s for this event, and PrimoVictorian, Dance Game Director at BITE, for their hands-on contributions toward the success of this event.
RGTM - Your day-of TO’ing was crucial to keeping things running on time. Your match reporting were invaluable “eyes” to the machines for me while I was sat beside the cabinets programming the tournament, and you did an awesome job “running” (looking for other players) when needed to keep pools matches on time, not to mention the positive energy you consistently radiated throughout the event that helped keep my morale up during more stressful periods of the tournament.
Valgrind - Besides a more-than-deserved commendation for your excellent performance during the In the Groove tournament, thank you for always being available to look things over, refine materials, and help me out when I needed it most. You bringing snacks for us on tournament weekend allowed me to stay fueled up and alert for the entire duration of the tournament, enabling me to be at 100 percent close to 100 percent of the time.
Primo - Thank you again for giving me the opportunity to TO and for being a great Dance Game Director and keeping me looped in with higher-level operation. Having effectively tunnel-visioned into low-level tournament preparation in the months leading up to tournament weekend, I lost sight of what other teams were working on, and your correspondence helped me to touch base with what I needed to know on a macro level to integrate DDR into the rhythm game tournament suite at BITE.
Other BITE Staff
I wouldn’t have been allowed to run this tournament without the blessing of top-level BITE staff. I give thanks to BITE founders like Blankman and Angel_Who who afforded me the opportunity in the first place, and to VivaLaMoo, last year’s BITE5 DDR TO, for catching me up to speed on the BITE ecosystem and to DDR at BITE so that I had a foundation to build upon for this year’s tournament.
Hardware
The tournament was run using two 2nd-generation Japanese HD “black cabinets”, which in the United States are hard to find. Special thanks to Eric H. for providing them, and to him, Maddy, and teejusb for servicing the pads to be suitable for competitive play during the tournament weekend.
Card Draw Localization
Localizing tournament materials into foreign languages is an important part of making dance game tournaments accessible to visitors from abroad. For this tournament, I prepared card draw materials in Spanish, French, and Korean, and used my Spanish-language skills to conduct entire card draws in Spanish.
I’d like to thank Angel_Who for looking over every Spanish-language written communication I prepared for this event.
I’d like to thank Koral for reviewing the French-language cards.
I’d like to thank Keri, BlazinCalf, and NDimensional for reviewing the Korean-language cards.
During the tournament, I’d like to thank Grant Siegel for lending his Korean-language talents to help the Korean-speaking players understand the rules. It’s motivated me to learn the language some day.
Miscellaneous Shout-Outs
I’d like to thank BamBam for personal support over the five-month course of preparing and running this tournament.
I’d like to shout-out Ranatalus, who ran Upbeat Denver, for setting the standard of an internationally accessible DDR tournament and accordingly inspiring me to meet that standard here as best as I could.
Finally, I’d like to thank the various attendees who kept me company during the slower moments of the tournament, including on Saturday night while the cabs were idle waiting for players in the bracket to finish meeting their other commitments, including but not limited to Turbo, DDRChad, and Kwuarter.
If I’ve missed someone who belongs on this list, or if I’ve made some sort of mistake, feel free to let me know. Otherwise, thank you all for making this tournament the memorable success that it was. I could not have done it without you.