It contributed largely to the boom of music games in 1998, and the series expanded not only with arcade sequels, but also moved to home consoles and other portable devices, achieving a million unit sales.

[1] The Bemani line of music games from Konami is named after the series, was first adopted in the arcade release of Beatmania 3rdMix and kept ever since.

Beatmania gave birth to several spinoffs, such as the Beatmania IIDX series (a more advanced version featuring 7 keys and higher difficulty levels, and to this day still receiving new version updates) and the other being Beatmania III, a remake of the 5-key series which featured a more modern hardware platform, a pedal for optional effects and a 3.5" floppy disk drive to save play records.

The player is a club DJ who must manipulate the controls according to the instructions on the screen to win the praise of the audience.

The bars indicate the path which rectangular icons cascade down towards a horizontal line near the bottom of the screen.

The player must hit the corresponding key or rotate the turntable when the icon matches the line, which will trigger a preset sound sample and recomposes the song properly.

The game may end prematurely if the bar is completely depleted, but this depends on individual machine settings.

Various game modes are available, with different rule alterations that provide suitable challenges for players of various degrees of skill.

The best example of this was Gottamix 2, which contained consumer-exclusive songs in addition to the "Complete Mix 2 Anothers" that was released months earlier as an arcade exclusive.