Getting Serious About Rush E in Gaming: What Actually Works
Rush E started as an internet joke about an absurdly difficult piano piece, but somewhere along the way it became a legitimate benchmark in rhythm game communities and custom level design circles. The music itself is built on rapid-fire arpeggios and tempo that pushes well past what most players can comfortably track. People started building levels and systems around it because, frankly, it was the ultimate stress test for any input-tracking engine or player skill ceiling. There's no single definitive creator of everything Rush E-related. The original meme traces back to various YouTube composers and YouTubers in the mid-2010s who turned a trivial musical joke into a genuine compositional challenge. Over the years different people have built different systems around it. Some are Geometry Dash level editors pushing the engine to render thousands of objects per second. Others are custom charting tools for rhythm games that try to map the piece note-for-note at full speed. What I've found in practice is that the "revolutionary gaming system" people reference usually comes down to one thing: a custom charting or level-building workflow that lets you approximate the timing density of the piece without your machine melting. The core insight most people miss is that Rush E doesn't actually need every single note rendered at full resolution. The original composition is already heavily abbreviated in its MIDI form. You can get 90 percent of the feel with far fewer objects if you chart the rhythmic skeleton rather than every individual hit.
I spent about three weeks trying to build a full-resolution Rush E chart in a popular rhythm game editor, and what happened is pretty standard. The object count hit around 40,000 notes, the frame rate dropped to something unplayable, and the input tracking started dropping hits even on a decent PC. The workaround was to pre-quantize the chart in an external tool and use a hybrid approach where the fastest sections use pre-programmed combo patterns instead of individual note placements. That cut the object count down to roughly 8,000 and made the chart actually playable. It costs you a little authenticity but you gain the ability to finish the level without your system crashing every two minutes.
How to Approach Building a Rush E Chart or Level
Start by downloading the MIDI file of the piece. There are plenty of versions floating around. Pick one that's reasonably clean, not the ones that are already heavily edited or shortened. Then open it in a MIDI editor like MuseScore or even a DAW if you have one. Your first job is to separate the piece into sections by tempo and density. Rush E has slow intro parts that ramp up, then hits a wall around the main arpeggio theme. That wall is where most systems break. The technical approach that actually works involves reducing the effective note density in the hardest sections. Instead of charting every eighth-note arpeggio as individual hits, group them into streams. Most rhythm game engines handle streams more efficiently than scattered notes because the input prediction algorithms are optimized for regular intervals. Geometry Dash does something similar at the engine level by batching similar object types together during rendering. When I exported my chart from the MIDI to the game's native format, I also ran into a problem with object type conflicts. The editor was trying to place jump blocks and touch pads in the same frames because the MIDI had overlapping channels. I solved it by splitting the chart into two separate layers, one for each channel, and then merging them in the editor with a manual priority override. That took about four hours of tedious work but saved the chart from being completely broken on playback.
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What Most People Get Wrong
The biggest mistake I see is people treating Rush E as a pure accuracy test. It's not. The piece is so fast that even the best players in the world can't track every individual hit cleanly. The game or system you're building needs to account for this. If you're making a level or chart, leave breathing room in the transition sections. Let the player reset their hand position between the faster passages. A well-designed Rush E chart isn't one continuous wall of notes, it's a series of walls with actual rest periods built in. Another thing nobody talks about is the audio sync problem. When you push object counts this high, even a minor sample offset can throw the entire chart off. I've seen charts where the audio was just 12 milliseconds early or late, and it made the difference between a chart being passable and one being impossible. Always check your sync by playing back at different speeds. If the chart feels tight at normal speed but falls apart when you slow it down, your timing is drifting.
Downsides and Where This Breaks
Let me be clear about what this doesn't do. A Rush E chart or level will not run smoothly on lower-end hardware. Even with the optimizations I mentioned, you're still asking your system to process a dense sequence of events in real time. Mobile devices and older PCs will struggle regardless of how much you optimize. If you're targeting a broad audience, this approach is not suitable. The chart I ended up with also sacrifices musical fidelity. The fastest sections sound almost identical whether they're fully charted or compressed into streams, but people who actually know the piece can tell the difference. If your goal is a faithful recreation rather than a playable challenge, you're going to hit the same object count wall I did, and there's no clean workaround for that short of using a much more powerful system. For people who just want to hear the piece and play along at a reasonable speed, I'd recommend looking into existing fan-made projects rather than building your own. The community has already invested hundreds of hours into versions that balance playability with accuracy. My own project ended up being useful mainly as a proof of concept for the hybrid charting method, not as something I'd actually hand to a casual player.
Practical Steps to Get Started
Get a clean MIDI of Rush E. Open it in a MIDI editor. Break it into sections. Chart the easier sections fully and compress the hardest sections into stream patterns. Export to your target platform. Test on the lowest-spec hardware you plan to support. Adjust object counts until you hit a stable frame rate. Fix any audio sync drift. Repeat until it plays through without dropping frames or missing input events. The whole process took me about a month of part-time work. A lot of that was just iteration and frustration with the editor's limitations. But once you figure out the hybrid approach, the actual charting work is straightforward. It's the optimization and debugging that eats your time, not the creative part.
