I was looking for an open source project to work on. I used to play DDR at my local arcade growing up, so I decided working on this would be the best way to improve the game I spent a lot of time playing.

I originally started as an osu! standard player, due to injury and lack of progression I decided to try mania. I was bad at mania, and didn't think anyone could play the charts I was trying until I saw Staiain playing StepMania at AGDQ. I instantly downloaded StepMania and was overwhelmed, found Etterna and a small community and started to learn and play. After some time I decided to give back, and this website was my way of doing so.

I was trying to join StepMania communities in 2013-2016 and someone told everyone in the SMO server that Etterna was new and had active development. I've played StepMania and DDR longer than I can remember, probably starting around 2003. I was just looking for the best way to experience StepMania on a keyboard and to be able to do it with other people.

I was in the Rhyhtm Gamers discord server around 2017 to talk about playing StepMania on the keyboard and someone told me about Etterna.

I was browsing the FFR forums whilst playing StepMania and found out about Etterna

I started out with guitar hero in 2008, then I found osu! 5 years later through boxbox' live-stream and discovered osu!mania afterwards. After playing for around a year I found StepMania through converts and word of mouth. A year and a half after that Etterna gained traction and I switched immediately because I got higher frames per second without any drawbacks.

Discovered FFR in a computer lab back in 2009 and here I still am, pressing 4 keys in varying patterns.

I took a long break from Stepmania around 2016-2017 because it was poorly optimized, and it literally took over a half hour to load the game every single time I wanted to play due to my 500 installed packs. I'd gotten into the habit of just closing the game because I wasn't in the mood when it finally loaded. When I decided to pick it up again later in 2017, I was made aware of The Etterna Project through FFR and tried it out. While it was rough around the edges, it was extremely compelling in all the places that mattered. The engine felt amazing, the scoring system was innovative, and the cache actually worked properly, along with powerful search options and QoL features that evoked the feelings I had back in early SMO days with online integration. I was thrilled, and had my interest for rhythm games rekindled in a way that made me excited to explore and experience new things for years to come.

A friend told me about a better branch of StepMania