released on the Virtual Console outside of Japan, but the rumors were ultimately proved untrue. In a Famitsu interview, Shigesato Itoi said that the amount of music that they fit into eight megabits of space, one-third of the total size of the game, would be enough to fill two Compact Discs if released as a full album. He ascribed the amount of music to the "disorderly", or broad, number of styles of music that were included by Tanaka and Suzuki. He also noted his belief that EarthBound was the first video game to include vibrato, or "string-bending", in its music, and described one of the differences between the music of EarthBound and Mother as that this game had more "jazzy" pieces. Suzuki has estimated that he composed over 100 pieces of music for EarthBound, including pieces that did not make it into the game, and says that his favorite was the music played when the player rode a bicycle in the game, which he had actually composed before starting work on the game. The soundtrack album for EarthBound was released by Sony Records in Japan on November 2, 1994. It was re-released a decade later on February 18, 2004 by Sony Music Direct. The album has 24 tracks, where many of these tracks are arrangements combining several pieces from the game into one piece. The final three tracks on the album consist of remixes of multiple tracks merged; for example, "Room Number (PSI MIX)" is a remixed version of several pieces of music played in different shops and hotels in the game combined into one song. The album was released again in 2016 by Ship to Shore as a set of two vinyl LP records; originally released in four character-themed color options, there exist eight different colorways as of 2018. The album, named Mother 2, uses the same tracks and artwork as the original soundtrack release. Vincent Chorley, in his review of the album for RPGFan, praised the original game music, applauding it for "conveying emotion and atmosphere, and then playing around with this mental image". As for the album itself, however, he was disappointed in the way that it merged tracks together and kept tracks based on a single song short, saying that "many of the tracks are so short that they are impossible to enjoy in their entirety". The vinyl release was praised by Jeremy Parish of USGamer