Best foot forward.

Byline: Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard

It was an unusual dance contest that drew nationally ranked competitors two weeks ago to a rural property in the hills southwest of town. It attracted teenagers and twentysomethings, who came clutching bottles of Gatorade and Mountain Dew.

To be fair, nobody claimed it would be a dance contest in anything other than name. Based on the sound, it seemed to be a competition for who could make the most noise with their feet.

Anyone who's ever seen gamers go sole-to-sole playing the Japanese video game known as Dance Dance Revolution, aka DDR, is familiar with the rat-ta-tat-tat of shoes hitting metallic foot pads. If you've spent any significant amount of time in front of the blinking pink lights of a DDR machine, you may never get that sound out of your head.

But there was more than just a whole lot of racket taking place. Although it looked nothing like dancing, there really was some finesse in the way the top players followed the patterns of blinking lights and arrows, taping their feet on footpads to the rhythm of the music.

The contest featured a higher level of DDR play than the kind of friendly stomp-off you might see in an arcade or pizza parlor. A bracketed, double elimination tournament spanning two days, the event drew well recognized players, along with a few dark horses - such as Matt Johnson of Corvallis, the guy who eventually won it and walked away with the grand prize of $140.

It all went down in Tyler Harding's dad's garage. A 23-year-old information technology consultant at the University of Oregon, Harding was once, himself, ranked among the top DDR players in the world. He's now more of a supporter of the slowly fading DDR scene. This was the second major tournament Harding hosted at his family's house, located inconspicuously at the end of a long gravel driveway.

The footwork displayed by top DDR players can be blazingly fast. Serious competitors develop DDR specific muscles in their legs and walk away from matches visibly winded. At Harding's tournament, one of the most heavily used pieces of equipment was the cleaning spray, which players used to wipe sweat from the footpads.

"If you get seriously into it, it's incredibly physically taxing, so in a lot of ways, it does kind of border on a sport," Harding explained. "You need to exercise (to keep up). There are things that I can't do anymore, (since) I'm not in as good of shape."

Still well known in gaming circles, Harding no longer competes at the national level, but his love of the video game and his desire to keep the scene alive motivates him to organize tournaments.

"It's a little bit strange not to be playing, but it's also nice to be able to make this happen," he said. "I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. It's a lot of fun to hang out with everybody."

The frequency of such national tournaments has decreased since the heyday of the game several years ago. The Northwest, Harding says, used to boast a strong DDR community, and tournaments were a regular occurrence. Although Eugene had a fairly serious community of players, Harding says, Seattle was known as the capital of the regional scene.

Harding advertised his tournament by word of mouth. He drew 31 competitors, slightly more than the two dozen he expected. A handful of spectators also showed up to watch the two-games-out-of-three game format.

While players tried to keep up with the arrows being thrown at them, the machine tabulated their accuracy as a percentage displayed on screen, making for an easy-to-read scoreboard for the audience.

"I would not call it dancing," said Bryant Brownwell, 22, a competitor from Corvallis. "(To be good, it takes) hard work, talent, having friends who play, I don't know, God's blessing."

Unlike other tournaments that are played on standard arcade machines, Harding's event offered an extra challenge. A so-called "sight read" tournament, it was set up so that players didn't know which songs would be coming at them.

Harding and co-organizer Mendal Lee hacked into a $3,500 DDR machine and connected it to a desktop computer.

Instead of playing the 250 or so songs that come pre-programmed on the unit, the modified machine could play, essentially, anything - provided the beats per minute of a particular song lined up with the footsteps programmed into the computer.

Using a program to create original "step charts," the pair came up with a new mix of music that included everything from contemporary club hits to Michael Jackson's "Beat It."

"It's a combination of a couple of different things, like how well you write the steps to the rhythm or how you contrast them," said Lee, 33.

Lee and Harding's tournament, which was being called Arrow Smash, drew players from as far away as Washington, D.C. Many of them crashed on the floor of Harding's basement.

"Seeing really close matches between really good players is a lot of fun," Lee said.

"We had a couple of matches where two people were just neck and neck and you could see the percentages going (up and down)," he said.

When tournament play came to an end for the day, the gaming didn't stop. DDR games went on until about 4 a.m. after Saturday's contest.

Most players dressed casually for competition, wearing shorts or jeans, T-shirts and baseball hats. They sported a wide array of different shoes. New Balance trainers seemed to be popular, along with run-of-the-mill white court shoes.

Harding expressed his preference for shoes with minimal tread in the arch of the foot, so he doesn't get hung up on the DDR footpads.

Although most of the competitors were male, there were a few young women in the mix. And along with the players, there were spectators who enjoyed watching the footwork and the dueling accuracy meters lighting up the screen with percentages.

"It's definitely a very random crowd," Harding said. "Any sort of stereotype that might come up when you think of DDR players falls flat."

As a general rule, DDR gamers do not have the chiseled physiques of, say, Miami Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor, but neither are they the kind of lazy schlubs you might imagine chained to some dragon slayer video game in the basement. And the fact that many other video game enthusiasts look down upon the game - with its incessant foot stomping and oh-so-Japanese aesthetic - makes the world of DDR a necessarily thick-skinned subculture.

Even the geeks make fun of these geeks.

"I respect it because of the following that it has," said Justin Ravenwood-Field, owner of Big City Gamin' in Eugene. "But at the same time, it's one of those things that's kind of on the fringe. Not a lot of people are going to play it."

Stereotypes aside, Harding's tournament was, by his estimation, a success.

It drew a larger crowd than expected, provided the arena for some exciting match-ups and maybe, just maybe, helped put some wind in the sails of a gaming subculture in danger of being eclipsed by all the other socially-based video games cropping up in this era of Wii.

"There is this great demand for this," Harding reiterated. "We didn't even really promote (this event) and all of these people just showed up."

To see a video of Tyler Harding's Arrow Smash Dance Dance Revolution tournament, go to www.registerguard.com/video