The graphics for Vib-Ribbon are simple, consisting of straight, white vector lines forming crude, angular drawings of the level and the player character, named Vibri.

Vib-Ribbon is a rhythm game in which players guide Vibri the rabbit across a line filled with obstacles tied in correspondence to the beat of the song, in a dimension called Music World.

[5] 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.

[7][8] 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.

[7][8] Mercedes-Benz dropped the concept after the car failed the moose test, resulting in the game's development continuing as an original project.

[10] 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.

[7] Vib-Ribbon's 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.

[7] 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.

[11] The soundtrack was composed by J-pop band Laugh and Peace, with vocals consisting of Toshiyuki Kageyama, Koichi Hirota, and Yoko Fujita.

When reviewing the visuals, GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann noted that the minimalistic style gives it a defining look and adds to the game's appeal.

[3] Hyper reviewer, Cam Shea, felt the minimalistic visuals were refreshing due to other video games attempted to outdo one another with graphic fidelity.

[27] Shea praised the visual concept of evolution to show progress, and thought the game was sending a philosophical message of "survival of the fittest".