Vib-Ribbon Developers Reveal How One of PlayStation's Strangest Games Almost Never Happened

A newly published oral history featuring Masaya Matsuura, Shawn Layden, and the NanaOn-Sha team reveals the untold development hurdles behind PlayStation vector classic Vib-Ribbon.

A newly published oral history has revisited the creation of Vib-Ribbon, one of the original PlayStation's most inventive and least conventional releases. The extensive Design Room feature brings together members of developer NanaOn-Sha, including founder Masaya Matsuura, programmers John Belmonte and Anthony Carrico, Sony project manager Hidehito Kojima, vocalist Yoko Fujita and former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden. Their recollections explain the difficulties of persuading Sony to support a game whose graphics consisted largely of stark white vector lines and whose central attraction involved generating playable levels from ordinary music CDs. Released in 1999, Vib-Ribbon allowed players to insert their own audio discs and guide the rabbit-like Vibri through obstacle courses generated from the music. It was a wonderfully strange concept at a time when the industry was enthusiastically advertising increasingly realistic three-dimensional graphics. The development team describes the challenge of securing approval and the disappointment surrounding the game's limited international release. Vib-Ribbon eventually reached North American players through a later PlayStation Network release, helped by sustained fan campaigning. The new interviews provide valuable first-hand documentation of how experimental commercial games were developed during the original PlayStation era. Preservation involves more than keeping the software executable; it also means recording the decisions, arguments and personalities behind unusual creative achievements. Vib-Ribbon remains a reminder that sometimes the most memorable game on a console is the one that looks least interested in behaving like everybody else.