The contest for which game spent the largest proportion of 2011 as the UK’s best-selling was not a close one. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and FIFA 12, with four weeks each, were a distant second place. Add on the five further weeks that FIFA 12 was #1 in 2012, and it still wouldn’t be the highest. 505 Games’s Zumba Fitness, in which you do dance routines to a selection of Latin pop music, spent a total of thirteen weeks at the top of the combined formats chart.
Its success, largely down to the version on Wii, is once again explained in part by game sales and release dates being absurdly concentrated into a couple of months at the end of the year. During the final nine weeks of Zumba Fitness’s summer run at the top, the only new release of note was Call of Juarez: The Cartel. Before that, though, it held off the 3DS version of Ocarina of Time, Zumba beating Zelda. And even accounting for how low a bar it often had to clear, there’s still something in the remarkable consistency with which it did so. It was a period of domination not seen since… well, since Wii Fit.
My starting assumption was that Zumba Fitness was so successful on the basis of working out a combination of the appeal of Wii Fit and Just Dance, working as both pop music party game and fitness aid. This turns out to only really be true as far as marketing goes, because it doesn’t live up to either of those. There is none of the tracking of Wii Fit, of weight or anything else. Later, less successful Zuma Fitness games would introduce pop songs by big name stars, but for this one the music is all anonymous and functional.
What this leaves is not very much. There are some tutorials which don’t so much teach dance steps as present them for you to copy, and have jarringly sudden visual and audio transitions when they speed up. There are a set of routines of different lengths which string together songs with dancers, rendered in lo-res, to follow along to. These routines are bookended with bits labelled as warm up and cool down. At the most advanced level, the dancer is Beto Perez, creator and co-founder of Zumba® Fitness (since rumba was un-trademarkable, he changed a letter). As a game, it makes Just Dance look deep and full featured.
I talked about how much Just Dance’s appeal was dependent on its mechanics not working. Zumba Fitness takes that a step further still. It comes with a belt to stick the Wiimote into, with the theory being that it will sense the movement of your hips. This self-evidently means that it can’t tell anything about most of the moves you’re doing, and realistically can’t be strong on any of them. It doesn’t even have the plausible possibility of working that Just Dance had. its on-screen indicators are more vague to match. There is no precise scoring, just the dancer being rendered in pixely red, orange or green to match how you’re doing, with quite a lag. (The green has a night vision resemblance that means that when you’re doing well, for a regular FPS player it comes with an air of trying to carry out a stealth hit on the dancer.)
Once again, the fundamental rubbishness feels integral to its success. No one in 2011 was going to one of the booming number of zumba workout classes to be judged on the precision of their steps or the exact number of calories burned. It was just a fun way to move around a bit. So is Zumba Fitness, but you can do it at home in front of the TV. It was basically a work-out DVD, with a bit of added novelty, at not that much higher a price, and on a console many people already had. If it feels very of its time, it’s less to do with anything in the world of games than with the rapid expansion of high speed internet connections (and eventually smart TVs), and of workout videos on YouTube and similar. In 2011 it was more easily accessible than other options by a bit of a wider margin, and that was enough for thirteen weeks as the country’s bestselling game.
Details of what was #1 in Japan’s game charts and in some of the UK’s other media charts during Zumba Fitness’s time at the top after the page break.
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