A slightly more modern anecdote: I've played most of Konami's music arcade and console games regularly (e.g. Beatmania IIDX, Drummania) ever since I started middle school. The learning curve was relatively huge for me and it took a while to have build up enough dexterity and speed for the hardest difficulties. Fast forwarding to the present time, it's hard for me to consciously _think_ about the notes anymore. Doing so just causes my accuracy to drop drastically and/or cause me to lose all focus.