The spinal shark collective is a team who work on various projects. Our past projects include StepMania themes and our own fork of StepMania, sm-ssc, which has become the official StepMania 5.
StepMania is "dead" but all the other solutions suck in one way or another by freem on 2026/06/09
  • ITGMania is open source but leans so much into ITG that it's damn near impossible to do anything else with it.
  • Outfox will never be open sourced, despite likely using GPL'd code.

"Smug" isn't just short for "StepMania Underground" after all.


"making it better" by freem on 2026/05/18

Dear reddit by freem on 2025/03/09
Someone on the internet is wrong. Again.
Kyzentun Keeslala, the former leader of Spinal Shark Collective
Kyzentun was never a member of SSC, much less a leader. I don't know where people on reddit get this information.

poke by freem on 2022/02/04
poke 53280,2

moonlight v1.03 (official) by AJ on 2015/02/21
moonlight was updated again, check the changelog in the download for details, I'm going to bed.

moonlight v1.02 by AJ on 2014/12/27
(insert introduction from that one Celebrity Jeopardy skit on SNL involving Regis Philbin).
moonlight needed another patch update, which is disappointing. I just want to work on neo geo software.

ultralght r13, moonlight v1.01 by AJ on 2014/10/06
ultralight r13 is out, for people who don't like tracking "unstable" releases on github. It's compatible with StepMania 5 beta 4, which was released at the tail end of September (Steptember?) 2014.

Also, I finally released an update to moonlight, so it shouldn't error in StepMania 5 beta 4 anymore.

old habits die hard (ultralight, PROJEKTXV, DDR 5th updates) by AJ on 2014/07/23
At some point, I quietly switched ultralight over to a rolling release, similar to what shakesoda did for Optical. I didn't update the projects page to reflect that, however. I've also fixed a few bugs in my port of k//eternal's PROJEKTXV, bumping the version number up to r6.
Update: I've also released r7 of the DDR 5th Mix theme port, because I've been sitting on it for about a year at this point.
Many more battle scenes
will soon be available!

Optical moving to rolling releases; new version available by AJ on 2014/05/05
Happy get drunk day. shakesoda decided that putting Optical on Github so that he can make rolling releases is a good idea. I agree. Both the Projects page and the page for Optical have been updated to reflect this. Also, there's a new version of Optical out, go get it.

DDR 5th Mix r6, PROJEKTXV r5, ultralight r12 by AJ on 2013/08/08
I normally wouldn't be doing this, having decided to spend my time better and all, but an update to StepMania 5 has broken a few themes of mine.
The themes in question are DDR 5th Mix and PROJEKTXV, both of which case problems due to looking for a "Remove" option that no longer exists. (It was split into two options, in case you care.)
I've released updates for these themes, as well as a silent update to ultralight two months ago that I might as well tell you about.

StepMania 5 alpha 3, moonlight v1.0 final by AJ on 2012/07/11
StepMania 5 alpha 3 has been released. Along with the new version of SM5 is the final version of moonlight. After four years of development (including the dubaiOne stuff), freem is done working on the theme. Grab moonlight from its usual spot, and be on the lookout for the sequel, "moonlight midnight".