COLUMBUS, OHIO ? Forget the image of paunchy video gamers holed up in a dark room, surrounded by sticky Twinkie wrappers and empty soda cans.

Dance Dance Revolution players burn extra pounds along with their quarters. Weight loss is an unexpected benefit of a game designed for dance music.

Natalie Henry, 14, was drawn to the pulsing techno songs, and she didn’t realize she had slimmed down until she went clothes shopping.

“I went to go buy pants, and the 14s were too big. The more I played, I gradually had to get smaller size pants,” said Natalie, who now buys size-8 baggy cargos.

The premise of DDR is simple: Players stand on a 3-foot square platform with an arrow on each side of the square– pointing up, down, left and right. The player faces a video screen that has arrows scrolling upward to the beat of a song chosen by the player. As an arrow reaches the top of the screen, the player steps on the corresponding arrow on the platform.

Sound easy? Throw in combinations of multiple arrows and speed up the pace, and the game is as challenging and vigorous as a high-impact aerobics class.

Most beginners look like they’re stomping on ants and are flushed in the face after one or two songs.

“At first I was playing it for fun, but when you see results you’re like, ‘Yeah!'” said Matt Keene, a 19-year-old from Charleston, S.C., who used to weigh more than 350 pounds.

Also aided by better eating habits, the 6-foot-5 Keene explained in a phone interview he had dropped to about 200 pounds.

Natalie Henry works out on the Dance Dance Revolution game at Magic Mountain arcade in Columbus, Ohio. Dance Dance Revolution players sweat away extra pounds as well as their quarters. The weight loss is a byproduct of a game originally designed to feature dance music.

More than 1 million copies of DDR’s home version have been sold in the United States, said Jason Enos, product manager at Konami Digital Entertainment-America, which distributes the Japanese game in the United States. About 6.5 million copies have been sold worldwide.

The home version, which costs about $40 for a game and $40 for a flat plastic dance pad, includes a “workout mode” that can track how many calories the user burns while playing.

The game was designed to be fun. But “what the creators knew is that this is a physical game no matter how you dice it,” said Enos, who says he has lost 30 pounds playing DDR. “At some level there’s going to be people who want to focus on that element of the game for their own physical health or for exercise.”

One pediatrician is so convinced of the health benefits that he’s planning a six-month study of DDR and weight loss among 12- to 14-year-olds, in an effort to give the game credibility among physicians.

Dr. Richard Adler, of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, said he liked the game because it “gets the kids off their butts, and they lose weight.”