It's a little funny how much we've come to expect dance emotes in 2018. Obviously /dance doesn't top our lists of demands like 4K support or unlocked framerates, but it's honestly hard to imagine an MMO without a diligently programmed jig. It's a tradition at this point, and one that's expanded beyond massively multiplayer games to practically everything with avatars and a chat box. It's just part of the culture, at this point: if you see a Night Elf, you can bet they'll know the "Billie Jean" dance.
So we decided to tell a brief history of the dance emote in PC gaming, recorded through the power of 11 gifs. Considering that most of the world's teens communicate exclusively through Fortnite tangos in 2018, I imagine that we've only scratched the surface of video game dancing tech. But that just goes to show how deeply /dance has absorbed into gaming.
Everquest - 1999
Everquest was ground zero for the modern MMO, and also the /dance /dance revolution. If Sony Online Entertainment wasn't the company responsible for first letting our avatars dance with each other, they're at least in the picture. Enjoy the above gif, of a squat Froglok raging against the primitive engine to get down. It's a far cry from the smooth pop, lock, and drops of the Fortnite generation, but we had to start somewhere.
Star Wars Galaxies - 2003
Star Wars Galaxies will always be remembered as one of the great missed opportunities in the history of video games. But it did enable our Han Solo-surrogates to air guitar. That alone probably forgives for the whole NGE debacle, right?
World of Warcraft - 2004
This was my first experience with a /dance emote. Blizzard, in their constant efforts to make sure you never took the Warcraft universe too seriously, programmed unique dance animations for every race, and every gender, in Azeroth. More specifically, they made it so you could do the macarena if you were playing a female human mage. Shout out to the Night Elf lady samba, too. That thing alone probably earned the game its T rating.
Runescape - 2004
You gotta hand it to Jagex. The British company was permanently hamstrung by an engine that needed to work in a browser window, and the programmers still managed to will a chintzy jig from the low-res knights and mages of Gielinor after a patch in 2004.
Lord of the Rings Online - 2007
In 2007 I breathlessly installed my free trial of Lord of the Rings Online and emerged dewy-eyed into Middle-Earth to find some of the absolute worst dance emotes I've ever seen. I don't know if it was the engine, or the relative solemnity of the Tolkien fiction, but Turbine gave us a truly morose, joyless waltz. It actually kinda won me over; it's like they fed all the elves in Rivendell some ketamine-spiked lembas.
Mass Effect - 2007
I get that this might be stretching the definition of a dance emote, but honestly, no documentation of the history of video game dancing would be complete without a mention of Commander Shepard's terrible, extremely self-conscious moves in the Milky Way's neon clubs. The animation became a meme almost instantly, and Bioware leaned all the way in to the joke in Mass Effect 3's epilogue DLC, where Shepard once again looks like a goober in front of all his friends.
League of Legends - 2009
League of Legends made the community-driven MOBA genre the biggest in the world. Where everyone was once trying to ape WoW and strike it big with an MMO, League kicked off the MOBA boom and inspired a wave of imitators. So it was only natural for it to keep the forms of expression MMOs had popularized and bake them into the MOBA, too. Every one of LoL's champions has a unique dance, and Riot eventually added an entire emote system with purchasable icons.
Final Fantasy 14 - 2010
Of course Square Enix would load up its characters with more dance emotes than anyone could ever possibly need. To this day, I don't think an MMORPG has touched Final Fantasy 14 as far as modular dancefloor potential goes. And honestly, that's why we play these games in the first place.
Destiny - 2014
Bungie got itself embroiled in a stupid controversy when it tried to sell emotes for real money, but thankfully, the catalogue of tangos the company put together was pretty solid. I can't hate a game that attempts to be so deathly serious, while also letting you drop your candy-colored robot-man to his knees for the "Hotline Bling" dance.
The Elder Scrolls Online - 2014
This might be the only game on this list that adds a few funny curveballs to the traditional MMO /dance formula. For instance, if you decide to indulge in some tipple during your journey through Elder Scrolls Online, your character will give you awesome, catatonic-white-guy-at-the-club moves when you instruct them to get down. They look so confident! Just like you do after enough vodka-cranberries at a wedding reception.
Fortnite - 2017
Perhaps the first time video game emotes have gone truly mainstream; Fortnite's ridiculous popularity means that the game's dances have been replicated on basketball courts, soccer pitches, and football fields constantly over the past six months. The dances themselves are adopted directly from the sort of Vine-ready memes that pass through YouTube (looking at you Backpack Kid), which has actually caused Chance The Rapper to petition Epic to offer some sort of financial kickpack to the choreographers who come up with the jigs themselves.
Monster Hunter: World - 2018
Monster Hunter made its long-awaited debut on PC this year with World, and quickly revealed itself as a franchise that's far goofier and more self-aware than its ornery reputation. I mean, just look at that player bust a move while hauling around one of those ridiculous, character model-dwarfing swords.