i solved a mystery! not a very good one, but a personal one.
here's the backstory: when i was a kid, i had a dance mat. i have very fond memories of this dance mat, i was obsessed with it. it was a plastic thing, plug-n-play tv game, and was so obviously a shitty knockoff ddr game. it also had pinball on it! you played by stomping on the bottom two arrows to control the paddles. i owned this in the early 2000's, i'm unsure of the exact time but it had to be prior to 2006 as i remember getting rid of it during a big move we had that year.
ANYWAY. there was one particular song on there that i was deeeeply in love with. it was called AFRICA. just that, no artists or anything. i think i liked it because it might have had pixel animals on the bottom of the screen during the song that i enjoyed, but also i just thought it was the best song. there were loads more, but i literally would only play the AFRICA song. this, of course, is an NES style 8-bit song that is just beeps and boops and barely sounds like a song, uncredited artist, found on a mystery bootleg ddr dance mat in the 2000s. i thought i'd never hear this song again. every so often, i'd hear the beginning of MGMT's Time To Pretend and would go holy shit, that sounds SO much like my mystery song! but alas. i couldn't find anything about it.
until this month. i was looking for old crt monitors on facebook marketplace and i saw someone selling a "retro dance mat 2003" and a photo of my childhood dance mat! never clicked so fast. i zoomed in on the photo looking for a brand name, but there was NOTHING. i started googling '2003 dance mats' and scrolling through a bunch of shitty ddr knockoffs before i spotted it: dance master (2003). it had a bootleg games wiki page that included a song list. my eyes were drawn to it immediately. number 5. africa.
obviously, first thing i did is go to youtube and looked up 'dance masters mat songs'. didn't find any at first, until this video, which immediately confirmed that this is what i was looking for. i recognised that intro screen so fast, so i swapped my search to 'dance masters 3 songs' and lo and behold: a playlist of all of the games songs, uploaded 3yrs ago.
AFRICA, it turns out, is a heavily modified bootleg rendition of AFRICA by Toto, which is actually one of my favourite songs today! it sure as hell doesn't sound like that's what it is, but it's very cool to know that some rendition of the song has been around and dearly beloved by me for literally as long as i can remember. the dance mat is easily amongst some of my earliest childhood memories.
now. allow me to share with you the shoddiest bootleg of AFRICA by toto that you likely will ever hear.