at the end of the run. Earning a high score will cause Vibri to sing a congratulatory song based on their position. The base game features six songs divided into bronze, silver, and gold courses containing two songs each. Once the game is loaded onto the PlayStation, players can remove the disc and insert their own music CDs to play stages generated from its tracks. Players have the option of selecting a single track from the CD or playing all tracks consecutively. Difficulty varying depending on the intensity of the music. Development Vib-Ribbon was developed by NanaOn-Sha with a team of ten people including Masaya Matsuura as designer and producer. The project began shortly after the completion of PaRappa the Rapper (1996) when Mercedes-Benz contacted Sony to promote their then-upcoming A-Class car. Matsuura was motivated by the concept of music-generated stages after fans repeatedly asked him to create games of their preferred music genre. The first prototype used polygon graphics with the player character represented as a living car. The levels were initially represented as roads taking the shape of audio waveforms created by extant music. Mercedes-Benz dropped the concept after the car failed the Elk test, resulting in the game's development continuing as an original project. During the initial prototype's development, Matsuura felt the levels were too similar for capturing only bass drum frequencies and was having difficulties with the levels synchronizing with the audio. This led him to stop developing the game after a year and a half in development. He decided to resume development after his team encouraged him to continue and one programmer discovered how to analyze CD audio using the PlayStation's hardware. Vib-Ribbon minimalistic wireframe visuals were chosen based on Matsuura's love of early computer graphics, and the technical requirements of the game's software being small enough to play within the PlayStation's memory after its initial load. The gameplay was designed to use both hands on the controller based on Matsuura's addiction to drumming and noted efficient drumming required using both left and right hands. The automatic music-generation concept was implemented when a programmer found a way to make the PlayStation analyze music CDs; the system looks eight seconds ahead of what the player is listening to and generates obstacles based on "interesting" frequency changes. Vibri's voice was produced using a NTT Communications' Speech Synthesizer. The soundtrack was composed by J-pop band Laugh and Peace,