Chris Chike is, by most accounts, the greatest Dance Dance Revolution player in the world. Before he turned to DDR — before he could even vote — he spent time as the greatest Guitar Hero player in the world, too.
Being the GOAT at two video game simulations of real-life activities (both of which have all but vanished outside of Dave & Buster’s and Round1 arcades) is a “pretty niche” thing to devote your life to. It also requires a level of toil and coordination that approaches the superhuman.
Chike first tried DDR in 2005, after his older brother got him a copy of the game for his thirteenth birthday. “It wasn't anything serious,” he told Gazetteer SF over FaceTime from his home in Hayward. “I wasn't extremely good at the game or anything.”
That’s a bit modest. In fact, Chike began collecting followers as soon as he started uploading videos of his performances online, under the username iamchris4life. In 2006, he posted a YouTube clip of himself dancing perfectly to a song with his back turned to the screen. Multiple contemporaneous comments called him a “god”; one commenter heralded the task as “the pinnacle of human brain potential.”
His movements in these early videos are exact, almost clinical. His feet rise mere centimeters from the mat. At his mother’s request, many of those early clips are shot from the waist down, his signature basketball shorts swooshing around his lanky legs. Videos of his face, though, show a studied determination, the kind of intensity common to grindset wunderkinds.
“He's the GOAT,” according to friend Roger Clark, a San Francisco programmer and longtime DDR enthusiast. “Everybody knows it. No one would deny it.”
His first real brush with fame came once he started playing Guitar Hero. While juggling the demands of life as an ambitious suburban high schooler — he ran track and was on the soccer team — he also practiced Guitar Hero in his family den. And he started to get good. Really good.
When he started uploading practice videos in 2006, observers marveled at his skill. Soon, he was setting records; iamchris4life became a fixture at the top of Guitar Hero leaderboards. The legend was building.
In March 2008, less than six months after the third Guitar Hero installment was released, Chike did the near-unthinkable: He became the first person ever to achieve a perfect score playing “Through the Fire and Flames” by metal group Dragonforce on the game’s brutal “Expert” level. It’s a challenge that evokes terror for anyone who has touched a Guitar Hero toy guitar controller; for his prowess at pretending to play the song, the Guinness Book awarded him a record for best Guitar Hero player in the world. A sample comment on one of his practice runs, months before he made history: “that performance... no other way to describe it but... FUCKING LEGENDARY.”
He began earning endorsement deals, and was profiled in several mainstream news publications, telling the New York Times he wanted to buy a multi-thousand dollar DDR arcade cabinet. (“We’re learning to pay for things when we have the money,” his mom, who reportedly managed those deals, told the outlet.)
After scaling the Guitar Hero summit, it was time to go to college. Chike’s fixation on rhythm games evidently hadn’t affected his grades much; in 2009, he started at the University of Pennsylvania.
The larger cultural obsession with DDR began to fade. But the allure never quite went away for Chike, even as he joined a fraternity and began studying math and computer science. He was still active on online forums. He kept joining local tourneys, both to hone his skills and to find his people — a small but devout base of DDR players that still, today, celebrate these triumphs of coordination and footwork.
“I don’t think I would have any other reason to take it so seriously if it wasn’t for the community and the competition,” he said. “You discover this group of people who’s really like-minded. It’s a really rare thing, because out in the normal world, there’s not a lot of people who think like me or have similar hobbies or have the grinder mentality for video games like me.”
And grind he did. In between school and college internships, he would train and train and train. He visited online friends’ homes to practice on their arcade cabinets, and posted up at arcades for hours, dancing away.
By 2011, he was fully enmeshed in the competitive DDR world. Just before his junior year, he traveled from his home in Wisconsin to a waterpark resort in Columbus, Ohio for a national tournament of In The Groove (a close cousin of DDR). This was his first-time competing in a dance-based video game on a national level. Even though he lost by a hair, it was an impressive showing. “I had no idea he could do shit like that,” someone uttered in the crowd, in awe, in a video of his display. (He would go on to win the tournament two years later.)
After graduating in 2013, Chike moved to the Bay Area for work, starting out as a software engineer at GE Healthcare. Coming to the Bay, with its wealth of arcades with DDR machines and a plethora of elite players, allowed him to spend the vast majority of his free time living and breathing Dance Dance Revolution.
Clark had been following Chike’s meteoric rise from its early days. The two first met in person at the Ohio tournament, then grew close once they both lived in the Bay Area. But Chike has largely kept his on- and offline lives separate: Everyone knows about his other life, including his frat brothers at UPenn, but he hardly ever talks about his non-DDR life with his DDR friends, and visa versa.
“Whenever you meet someone who plays DDR, you kind of don't really care that much what they're doing outside of the game, right?” Clark said. In all of his years of knowing Chike, he could not recall a time when they'd talked about their jobs, despite both spending years working in the tech industry here.
For years, when he wasn’t at work, Chike’s near-monastic practice included studying charts. It's sort of like studying musical notations, with the added challenge of memorizing the exact millisecond you have to hit a note. It’s something that few other elite Dance Dance Revolution players really bother with, Clark said.
On regular live streams, he performs for six to nine hours straight, with limited breaks. His goal is generally to “quint” a song, which requires a dancer to hit every note of a song within a 10 to 15 millisecond range. It is a Herculean task — and one he's done hundreds of times.
In 2017, shortly after Chike won the Konami Arcade Championship (the World Cup of DDR), Clark accompanied him to an arcade in San Jose called Round1, where he planned to set a world record: Completing a level 19 DDR song, the highest level currently available, with absolutely perfect timing. Clark recalled the song required about 800 steps at 220 beats per minute for two minutes, a feat of agility not entirely dissimilar to an Olympic sprint. Chike spent four days doing eight-hour marathons, dancing the same song up to 75 times in a day. On the fourth day, he did it.
In a video of the game, he is leaning back against the railing, his black Nikes moving from one arrow to another so fast it looks like he's floating above the pad.
“How someone can even have the physical stamina to do that let alone have the mental fortitude to continue when one tiny mistake is the end of the run … it’s hard to even come up with words for this kind of thing,” Clark said. “It's literally Olympics level, astronaut level.”
At the onset of the pandemic, Chike got laid off from his tech job. He describes it as a blessing in disguise.
“I was, like, I get to quit and have severance at the same time — it was almost a win-win, ‘cause I was already a little bit checked out,” he said.
Today, he livestreams himself regularly on Twitch, an avenue through which many elite video game players show off their skills and make some revenue in the process. Chike told Gazetteer he’s saved enough to keep him afloat for a few years, helped along by the occasional brand deal. He did an ad spot for Taco Bell in 2021, operating at maybe a fifth of his full skill.
He’s still going hard, to put it mildly: A few weeks ago, he posted a screenshot of his Apple Watch readout after a 10-hour session in which he burned 7,800 calories.
Some sessions just be like that… pic.twitter.com/QQhyakhInc
— iamchris4life (@CHRS4LFE) August 20, 2024
At this point, he knows time is ticking. Even if he continues to train for hours on end, his body will give out eventually, forcing him to retire from the mat for good. Most top-tier active DDR players are in their late teens and twenties.
“I don't think I can physically do this forever,” he said. “I'm getting up there, I just turned 33 this week. So I'm just taking advantage of it while I can.”
For now, though, he keeps winning. Earlier this month, he won first prize for DDR at the Beast in the East gaming festival in Virginia. And, really, no one will ever be like Chris Chike. The mixture of talent, endurance, and the good fortune of coming up at DDR’s peak is a one-in-a-million combination, as his friend Clark proudly pointed out.
“This is the best that anyone in the human race could possibly achieve at this thing,” Clark told Gazetteer.
