ITG Resource Guide & FAQ

There are a lot of great informational resources scattered around the ITG community and I wanted to throw them onto one page.

What is In The Groove (ITG) in 2021?

Originally, In the Groove (ITG) was a 4-panel dance game created by Roxor Games based on the earlier (and much more popular) Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) game by Konami. ITG ran on a modified Stepmania 3.95 engine (an open source clone of DDR) and introduced features such as mines and hands and support for “mod charts”. ITG was sold as a PS2 game, an upgrade kit for existing DDR cabinets, and as an ITG dedicated cabinet (dedicab). Shortly after ITG gained popularity, it got into legal trouble with Konami and it went away in an official capacity.

Few play the original ITG arcade games anymore, and the game has mostly moved to the home audience, especially after the pandemic. Modern “ITG” is considered as Stepmania 5 or OpenITG running a theme such as Simply Love, Digital Dance, or Waterfall using ITG’s original lifebar and scoring mechanics.

The different playstyles of ITG

Tech/Fantastic Attack (FA)

FA players try to get perfect scores on charts that feature technical patterns like crossovers, brackets, and footswitches. It’s very similar to DDR, but has unique patterns that Konami seldom puts in their charts.

Video credit: Vincent N.

Stamina/Footspeed

Stamina players attempt to pass the hardest songs they can, which mostly feature long, unbroken 16th note streams. Think MAX 300, but for 10 minutes straight.

Footspeed is a subgenre of stamina charts where the runs are shorter, but go up to ridiculous speeds. The best players have passed songs that have runs of up to 23 notes per second.

Video credit: Vincent N.

Stamina FA

StamFA players try to get perfect scores on stamina-oriented songs.

Video credit: Bran