Trivia / Pump It Up

• Bad Export for You: Sometimes songs will be excluded from specific regions' builds, usually for licensing reasons, although those builds may have region-exclusive songs to balance it out.
• Dueling Games: With DanceDanceRevolution, which uses the inverse of Pump's diagonals-and-center setup. DDR has the better brand name recognition in Japan and the United States, but Pump also has a pretty dedicated following helped by official global releases, to the point where in some countries, it is actually more popular than DDR.
• Fandom Nod: The games from Fiesta EX onwards (including Infinity) have 2x as the default speed modifier, a nod to players almost never using the default 1x speed except to challenge themselves.
• Milestone Celebration: Pump It Up XX, a celebration of the series' 20th anniversary (hence the Roman numeral for 20 in the title).
• Production Posse: BanYa, the team of in-house composers that is responsible for about half of the games' soundtracks (and yes, that includes the hardest ones too).
• Promoted Fanboy: The advent of Pro and Infinity got artists typically associated with In the Groove and general StepMania user-created content into Pump, including DM Ashura and Sanxion7.
• Revival by Commercialization:
  • "Cross Time" from O2Jam became significantly more popular when it was crossed over in Prime 2, thanks in part to the two catgirl mascots in the background video.
  • Same case with Yamajet’s "Cycling" from O2Jam, in a form of Memetic Mutation potential Japanese Ranguage of the song.
• Sequel First: The series would not start getting international releases until The PREMIERE. Its status as this trope is reinforced with the subtitle "The International Dance Floor".
• Similarly Named Works: Pump It Up is also the name of a chain of party activity centers.
• Troubled Production: According to a former developer named Vincent, Pump It Up Infinity had a turbulent production. The team was unorganized, lacked motivation due to not being paid, kept delaying and missing deadlines, and had trouble contacting their own head producer when needed. Vincent's family, who felt this was not a real job, even attempted to wipe out one of his hard drives to convince him to quit (fortunately, Vincent was able to recover everything).
• Uncredited Role: All of the PIU original BGAs didn’t have any visualizers credited until NX Absolute. Despite this, the visualizer for Hyacinth from Prime remains uncredited.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Psy's Right Now was originally announced as a song in the trailer of Pump It Up Fiesta 2, making his first credited song in the series. However, it was never featured in the game. In addition, Lexy's Greenhorn, a song that featured PSY uncredited, was also removed. Executive Meddling occurred due to the popularity of Gangnam Style. Even though Andamiro have strong relationships with the South Korean music industry, PSY signed a contract with U.S. company Schoolboy Records (Universal Media Group) the same month the trailer was released, making it much harder to sign PSY on future releases. Instead, PSY's Gangnam Style was featured as a DLC for Dance Central and Just Dance. His later popular songs were normally released on future Just Dance releases: "Gentleman" in 2014, "Daddy" in 2017, and "New Face" in 2018.
  • The Solitary series was once to be put in a unified form along with their own full song MV, but it was dropped later and the song was put into separate forms (Solitary, Solitary 1.5 and Solitary 2). The unused MV contains lots of unnatural graphics and Nightmare Fuel-induced animations, so watch it at your own risk.
  • The early concept of the Pump It Up M mobile game was a common idol-based Allegedly Free Game (similar to Love Live! School idol festival) with a Random Number God gacha system, according to the official closed beta-test release. However, it was dropped as a result of Executive Meddling.