Dancing With Myself

He ran the first part of the scam solo. Twenty-year-old Wayne Giles started working inside the 6,000-square-foot, black-lighted video cave at the Great Wolf Lodge near the Kansas Speedway last August. As an arcade tech, his job was to walk the parlor floor, collecting tokens from more than 100 machines and fixing tilted games. The scene was familiar. Over the previous year, Giles had worked at the Independence Center Fun Factory (a now-defunct gaming storefront near the mall's food court) and at the Ameristar Casino's Hi-Vi Arcade. With its scattershot lighting and repetitive electronic soundtrack, the den at the Great Wolf Lodge was as chaotic as every other geek outpost in the city. In the back was a glass booth offering token-for-ticket prizes. All day, frantic kids ran the floor, peering into each lighted machine.

Dressed in a black-and-blue polo shirt and khaki chinos, Giles stood behind the counter and skimmed tokens from the refund pile. He had committed similar petty thefts at the other arcades, and when none of his supervisors commented, Giles realized that the "system" for collecting and counting tokens was bogus. So he expanded. As a tech, he knew which games were always unlocked and he'd open them, shoving handfuls of coins into his pockets. At first, Giles took 200 tokens a day. Then 240. Then double that, stuffing coins into a small paper sack. The exchange rate was four tokens for a dollar; he was grabbing at least fifty bucks' worth of merchandise a day.

For the second part of the scam, he created demand. At home, Giles repackaged coins in the arcade's brown paper sacks, marking them in five-, ten- or twenty-dollar increments and throwing a little extra change into each. Off-shift, Giles would return to the Lodge with two or three bags tucked into his cargo pants and sell them on the game floor.

A few times, he took an accomplice, twenty-year-old Daniel Liberty, who also worked at the store. Using his set of store-issued keys, Giles opened the token dispenser by the front entrance, pretending to clear jammed tokens. As kids walked by, he'd offer to exchange their money for tokens. He'd hide the cash inside a plastic dish inside the dispenser's metal guts. Later, Liberty would return on a routine maintenance check and pocket the money.

"It was like second nature," Giles says. "If you do something wrong too much, it doesn't even feel like it's wrong anymore."

The puny rip-offs yielded a few hundred dollars total -- enough to buy fast-food, gas and cigarettes. But for the most part, Giles hoarded the gold-colored coins. He needed them to fuel his habit.

A year earlier, he had been nothing. At Truman High School in Lee's Summit, he'd been invisible to the letter-jacketed mainstream. As a senior, he'd worn all black and listened to Marilyn Manson's anthems. His dad had died in a work-related propane explosion years before. His mom had used the insurance money to buy a nice spread in suburban Independence. She was blue-collar, worked nights. When she remarried, Giles' stepdad spent most of his free time working on his antique Chevys and the set of Harleys in their Confederate flag-draped garage. Each spring, Giles worked as a computer-support tech at H&R Block. The rest of the year, he'd park his '89 Eagle Premier outside the Barnes & Noble in Independence and smoke cigarettes with all the other goth kids.

A few months before graduation, Giles walked into a party where there were fifteen or twenty kids, most of them fresh out of high school. A few of them had crowded around a small TV wired to a Playstation that was, in turn, wired to a pad on the floor. He watched a kid shuffle-step on the makeshift stage. He recognized the game: Dance Dance Revolution.

Arcade DDR machines were 8 feet tall, with lighted, hopscotch-style dance pads outlined in yellow caution tape. On their video screens, arrows matched arrows on the dance pads. Players stepped on the dance-pad arrows in response to on-screen commands.

The game hit U.S. arcades in March 1999 and soon sparked a cult following. Since then, it has become a pop icon, showing up in an episode of King of the Hill, making a cameo in Lost in Translation and appearing in a Skechers shoe commercial.

Developed by Konami and released in Japan in the late '90s, it's been called a physical extension of karaoke. To date, Konami has released 11 "mixes" -- machines with new song-and-dance combos -- for arcades, movie theaters, bowling alleys, laser-tag arenas and bars. Spinoff versions for home gaming systems such as Xbox and Playstation have sold more than a million copies. The game has been marketed as simple fun for all ages and as a weight-loss tool; home versions now have a "workout mode" that counts calories. (It's been incorporated into some high school gym classes.)

"A whole group of stars is being created," says Walter Day, author of Twin Galaxies Official Video Game and Pinball Book of World Records. Since the early '80s, his publication has been the handbook for video-game statistics. "There are star players, and when they get up there and dance, the crowds get bigger. And that's the bottom line," he tells the Pitch.