In The Groove, or ITG, is the newest generation of dance gaming. It came to the Playstation 2 on June seventeenth, 2005, following a lawsuit with DDR because of plagiarism on the machines. Nevertheless, it attracted immediate attention and became the best dancing game of all, in many gamers' opinions. The gameplay is very similar to DDR, but expanded upon in arrow modifiers and difficulty. Many songs are considered impossible, and they may be for some players, but extremely hardcore dancers can clear every song when they put their mind to it. ITG2 Machines were released soon after ITG was released, but ITG2 home versions aren't yet released.

          Like DDR, many ITG songs aren't well-known, but unlike DDR, before ITG's release none of the artists were popular. The only actual poplular song before the release was "Torn" by Natalie Browne. Many songs by Kyle Ward have becaome popular, though. Some of his are "Delirium", "Xuxa", "Anubis", "Tell", "Kagami", "Oasis", "Infection", and "Liquid Moon". Other artists that have become popular because of the ITG realm are Digital Explosion, Missing Heart, Nina, and Machinae Supremacy. Some popular songs by these artists are "Queen of Light", "Fly Away", "Mythology", "ROM-eo & Juli8", "Bouff", and "Hardcore of the North".

          ITG consists of the same planar arrow idea as DDR, but it adds twists to it. For example, when set on boomerang, the arrows will actually do a boomerang by passing the sensors downward, disappearing at the bottom of the screen, then constantly accelerating back up for the player to step on them. Also, the dancing factor is much harder. This game is for only "uber" hardcore dancing gamers. Often the song will have at least ten arrows per second, or in some cases, the game will send small but dense blocks of arrows forcing the player to step about eighteen times per second. The warning, "Consult a physician before playing", has an obvious reason.

          Mines are also a welcome addition to the ITG gameplay. They quickly deplete the lifebar when stepped on and can cause players confusion and possible failure. The "Add Mines" modifier takes some arrows out and puts mines in where the arrows were. A course on Marathon Mode (ITG's response to DDR nonstop) is based on this modifier. Known as "Do you Mine?", it makes the gamer play consecutively harder songs with this continuous modifier, making the last stage extremely difficult. If you can manage to avoid these, however, you'll be easily able to advance in difficulty.

          Some of the other Marathon courses are "Breaking Point", the four hardest ITG songs with modifiers, "KeeL Over", Kyle Ward's songs with modifiers, "Energy", high energy songs with modifiers, "Trance", all of the trance genre songs with modifiers, and "Fractious", songs with accelerating and decelerating modifiers. The course "Caddywhompus" is the name of one of Kyle Ward's CD's, although none of the songs on the course are written by him. Each Marathon course and each song has a popularity meter based on how many times it has been played.

          In the Groove has modes of playing to provide for variety. Battle Mode is versus where the opponent, being human or computer, will try and mess the player up by sending modifiers at them based on how well they're both doing. This is vice versa, the player can send them at their opponent. Another mode is Survival, being even crazier than Marathon, with a smaller lifebar and more difficult modifiers. Fitness mode allows for tracking calories burned while going through other modes such as Marathon, Dance, and Shuffled, which is random mixed up songs.

After you've been practicing, the desire to show off your acquired skills is natural. You can buy a pad, such as the In the Groove official dance mat soft pad, or the Redoctane Afterburner metal pad. Also, if an arcade is more necessary or more wanted, you can often find one near to you. There is an ITG2 machine at Pitt University downtown, and there is one in the Arcade 2000 in Beaver Valley mall along with a DDR EXTREME machine.