It's fair to say that there are certain racial or at least regional trends in sports and games of all kinds. Basketball players tend to black and video game champions tend to come from Korea or China. That goes doubly so for Dance Dance Revolution, but not this year. In 2017, the DDR World Champion is American.
Chris Chike, who goes by the handle iamchris4life, won the 6th annual Konami Arcade Championship trophy, by beating out 2015 and 2016 champion, South Korea FEMEMZ, with a score of 6,005 to 5,974.
Dead End, Paranoia , and Egoism 440 were the songs chosen for the final tilt between the top competitors. They are punishingly difficult, but Chike did recently set the world record on the last track on that list, so he came into it feeling confident.
That was a good thing too, as after the first two songs he was down by 35 points. FEMEMZ took the lead in both Dead End and Paranoia and other top four competitiors were hot on his heels throughout those first two tracks.
It was in in Egoism that Chris was able to finally pull ahead, dominating the competition by several hundred points in some cases and took the championship home.
To top it all off, fellow American Jeff Lloyd came in third place, beating Japanese standout o4ma, who took fourth place in the end.
If you want to see some of the DDR action in real time, the Konami livestream was recorded for posterity. It is eight hours long though, so skip through to five hours and seven minutes in.
