What is ITL Online?

ITL Online (International Timing League Online) is a competition among players who play 4 panel step game similar to the arcade classic, Dance Dance Revolution. Arrows are timed to music and the player must try to be perfectly in time if they hope to get a good score.

This was the first year I heard about this competition, but at-home rhythm dance games really blew up around lockdown (for obvious reasons). I also bought a hard mat around this time as well (that I still own and use), but I was only focused on playing solo.  Here is a link to someone shipping out of the US, though I originally ordered all the way from Poland, and shipping was incredibly expensive.

But what about the event?

Anyway, about the event! Here’s the event website if you are interested. It started on the 14th of March and ended June 14th of 2025. Not to toot my own below-average horn, but there were 1703 players who submitted scores and I was ranked 1225. There’s no way I could get all the way to the top difficulty of 15, but this event was advertised as starting at difficulty 7 so since I was comfortable regularly doing 6, I figured I could give it a shot and really push myself.

Throughout the event, even though I had to take a couple of breaks for vacations and resting sore muscles, I genuinely found myself really improving over time. I doubted it would happen as smoothly since comparing myself to others’ performance online seemed like an insane impossibility (and sometimes still is), but the longer I spent on it, it was very apparent how easily I could improve if I pushed myself a bit. Just after the event ended I even passed my first difficulty [10], which was a huge milestone for me! 🎊 I loved watching streams of other players in addition to the fact that they often had their live heart rate on screen. It was fun comparing the difference in heart rate I had (which indicates a general fitness issue I’m determined to resolve), but seeing others hover around 160bpm while I hover around 188bpm during hard gameplay was fairly revealing.

I played and passed songs 103 songs (including duplicates I was trying to get a personal best on). Not including duplicates, I passed and submitted 50 unique songs, 2 of which I got a full combo on (meaning I missed 0 notes).

Extras

The songs in this event were also great!  If you are interested, BreakfastPM made a playlist on spotify so you can check them out.. I’m looking forward to next year’s event just to see how much I can improve if I continue to play between now and then.