1UP COVER STORY
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JUNE 25 | VIDEO GAME MUSIC FESTIVAL
Symphony Turns Your iTunes Library Into Your Worst Enemy
Cover Story: An interesting new indie shooter promises to pit players against their own taste in music.
O
nce upon a time, there was a PlayStation game called Vib-Ribbon. The concept behind Vib-Ribbon embodied simplicity: Players controlled a strange-looking rabbit on a journey through a landscape defined by music. The more complex the tune, the more challenging the level design. Best of all, the entire game (with its simple white-on-black vector graphics) fit entirely in the PlayStation’s RAM, so once it loaded into memory you could swap the game disc for your choice of audio CD and challenge yourself to complete the game with your own music library.
Vib-Ribbon never came to America, because we are not allowed to have nice things. Fortunately, more than a decade later, a team of two working under the name Empty Clip Studios — Francois Bertrand and Matt Shores — have translated the D.I.Y. music game spirit of Vib-Ribbon into something that will feel instantly familiar to modern gamers weaned on the likes of Geometry Wars: Symphony.
