[tecleandor]

Woooo! This was a simple but great game, and the music was just GREAT. Also, you could pop open the PS1 CD reader, and put whatever Audio CD you had around, so you could play with custom music that, more or less, was followed by the game levels.

[PhasmaFelis]

Which was fascinating, technically speaking, because the PlayStation was never intended to be played without a game disc in the drive. Vib Ribbon's graphics are so brutally simple because the entire game has to fit in 2 megabytes of RAM when you remove the disc. It loads it on boot and then never touches the data track again.

[EdSchouten]

There are actually a couple of games that were like that. I remember Ridge Racer 1 also allowed it.

[ascagnel_]

The custom music wasn’t followed the game levels — the game was designed for you to swap in your own CD, and the levels would be generated off of that music.

It’s why the digital re-releases have been somewhat lackluster — the default music is fine, but not notable on its own.

[goosedragons]

The PS3 PSN version still works with CDs at least. Kinda better because you don't need to swap discs. PS4/PS5 (and obviously Vita) can't read CDs.