My name is Naoki Maeda, and I’m the Music Composer and one of the creators of DanceDanceRevolution! If you’re not familiar with DanceDanceRevolution, it’s the cult favorite arcade game and pioneering dance game that started it all!

If you followed the franchise, you know that we’ve been a part of the PlayStation family for years now. In fact, we recently teamed with the SCEA and the state of West Virginia to bring DanceDanceRevolution with the PlayStation 2, to all of the public schools in the state of West Virginia. This program, designed to combat childhood obesity, was a big hit — with Governor Joe Manchin praising it and Michelle Obama even stating President Obama has DanceDanceRevolution.

With each year and each iteration of DanceDanceRevolution, we work to bring new and fun challenges to players — which leads us to today, where I’m happy to announce DanceDanceRevolution is coming to the PlayStation 3! The PlayStation 3 is a console that we’ve been developing on for over a year and now that we’re ready to show the game, we wanted to come on the PlayStation.Blog to tell you how excited we are!

In DanceDanceRevolution for PS3, players can expect the same high-energy fun that you’ve been accustomed to. Players can look forward to hearing licensed music from today’s top artists and also music from our team here at Bemani. And since players will be able to access DanceDanceRevolution on the PlayStation Network, you can be assured; there will be a lot of downloadable content coming down the line.

The best thing about bringing DanceDanceRevolution to the PS3 is that we can use the AWESOME PlayStation MOVE motion controller. This awesome new peripheral allows us to bring some really cool new aesthetics and challenges to the game. We took out the avatars to allow the camera and the MOVE controller to put the focus on the player.

As we speak, I’m on a plane coming to the US from Japan! That’s because today (Thursday, August 12), we’re hosting the very first ever DanceDanceRevolution community event. This event is the official launch party for our PS3 sku! I’ll be there, along with some of the other good folks from Bemani and KONAMI. And since the PlayStation.Blog is my family too, I’ve given them 25 invites! So if you’re in the LA area, let us know if you would like to come! For more information, head to our Facebook page! I hope to meet a few of you there!

We have a lot more news to tell you about DanceDanceRevolution PS3 in the future, but we wanted to come here first and give you a little taste! So look out for DanceDanceRevolution PS3 this holiday season!