TITLE
Vib-Ribbon: An oral history
AUTHOR
James Tocchio
PUBLICATION
Design Room
YEAR
2026
ARTICLE TYPE
Interview
FROM THE ARTICLE
Shawn Layden remembers when he first saw Vib-Ribbon. In 1999, Layden was vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and was involved with deciding which Japanese games warranted release in Europe. Vib-Ribbon was still in development in Japan and wouldn’t be finished for another few months. To bring it to Europe would involve the usual work of localization, testing, and converting a Japanese game for European television standards.
None of that was too troubling, though. The immediate problem was that Sony Europe’s marketing department didn’t want the game.“We showed it to my colleagues in sales and marketing, and everybody hated it,” Layden says. “But I thought, This is Masaya Matsuura. He made PaRappa the Rapper. We respect him.
“But it was a tough sell. A strange game. Black and white, wireframe graphics, you put in your own music CD and it creates a different [stage] every time with different obstacles to get over, and if you do well you morph into a princess, and if you don’t do well you turn into a worm. Now, how many financiers would write a check based on that description?”
With the PlayStation 2 coming in less than a year, according to Layden, it was also an odd time to release an experimental, visually restrained title for Sony’s aging PlayStation. But there was something about Vib-Ribbon that he loved.
[…]
Over the past nine months, we tracked down six people involved with Vib-Ribbon to look back at how it all began.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
NanaOn-Sha
Sony
GAMES MENTIONED
Mojib-Ribbon
PaRappa the Rapper
Rhyme Rider Kerorican
Um Jammer Lammy
Vib-Ribbon
PEOPLE MENTIONED
John Belmonte
Anthony Carrico
Chris Deering
Yoko Fujita
Hidehito Kojima
Shawn Layden
Kiri Matsuura
Masaya Matsuura
Dave Thach
PLATFORMS MENTIONED
PlayStation [PSX]
PlayStation 2 [PS2]
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive