![]() Just Dance started out as a separate project with a team of five or six people. Every song’s routine has to be fun to dance to, not beautiful to look at - rather like Just Dance itself, in the early days. Often the final choreography bears no resemblance to the initial plan. Initially the dancers and the choreographer will come up with a dance for each song, and then the level design team must work with them to figure out what can actually be tracked and scored, and what normal, often inebriated people can follow without feeling out of their depth. The thing is, it’s actually quite difficult to get professional dancers to dance in a way that the average person can imitate - a problem that the modern Just Dance team still has. That’s one of the advantages of using real people, rather than animations.” You’re performing exactly like the dancer is performing. You can feel that you’re doing it just like the dancer, because of the mirror effect. “The dancer on the screen is moving beautifully, but the basic movement is the same. “It’s what we call the power of perception, the fact that you can feel like it’s you in the TV,” says Alkis Argyriadis, Just Dance’s current Creative Director. Just Dance’s appeal hinges on a clever psychological illusion: because the dancers on-screen are mirror images of the player, and because they are real people rather than 3D models, your brain is tricked into thinking that it’s you - that you might actually look like the dancer on screen, rather than like a drunk person without full control of their limbs. That was close to the final game that became Just Dance.” We eventually had a game in Rabbids TV based on dance - we could impose some gestures to do, and some moves. We should liberate the feeling of moving. There was a feeling that we should get rid of all this crap about being sure that what the player does is exactly what they get on the screen. The idea in all of these games was to make sure that what the player wanted to do happened in the game as a consequence of the gesture - that you didn’t exactly have to do the gesture itself. “We took another approach, the approach that Nintendo also took with tennis ”, says Xavier. “If I remember, we had a game where you needed to hit the Rabbid’s head based on the rhythm of a song… that was the first musical game we had.”Ĭrucially, the Rabbids team understood the limitations of the Wii remote technology, and was accustomed to designing around it rather than pushing it to the limit like Ubisoft’s other ill-fated Wii launch game, Red Steel. Eventually we created Rabbids.” One particular Rabbids minigame prototype provided the inspiration for Just Dance. ![]() We started working in Paris here on a game for launch and, I brought the prototype to the team in Montpelier, where we were in the process of creating a new Rayman. We were very lucky, two years previous to the launch of the Wii, to be able to get the first prototypes of the Wiimote. “In the French studio, we’re used to embracing new technology quite early in the process,” he says. ![]() Xavier Poix, Managing Director at Ubisoft Paris, has been with the game since the very start, before the Wii’s release in 2006, when both the Paris and Montpelier Ubisoft studios were working on Raving Rabbids for the Wii. On the first Just Dance, by contrast, the level designer– a quiet chap in glasses called Damien Pousse - also had to work with the two original dancers to be the choreographer, figuring out what dance moves would be understandable to the Wii remote.
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