Whatever Happened To… Rayman
Nick Thorpe investigates the long-lost SNES version of Michel Ancel’s popular platformer
Some videogame characters have a simple journey from concept to creation, but Rayman wasn’t one of them. Michel Ancel’s first ideas for Rayman were artistic designs he’d drawn as a teenager. At this point, Michel hadn’t yet made it into the videogames industry, but he wouldn’t have to wait long – at just 17 years old, the same artistic talent that inspired those character doodles gained him employment at Ubisoft. After a few years of working on the visuals for games like The Intruder and Pick ‘N Pile, he revisited those earlier sketches to begin work on his directorial debut, Rayman.
When Michel Ancel began work on Rayman in 1992, he did so as something of a one-man band, tackling everything from sound design to graphics and programming. What’s more, he was doing it all on the Atari ST. This changed when programmer Frédéric Houde joined the project. The Atari ST was a format in decline by the early Nineties, and consoles were taking over the gaming world, so the decision was made to target the game towards the forthcoming CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. The logic behind this move was sound – Michel Ancel had lofty ambitions when it came to the visual quality of Rayman, and with a 32,768 colour palette and 256 simultaneous colours on-screen, the SNES had more graphical grunt than other consoles of the time.
Unfortunately, as time went on it became clear that there would never be a SNES CD-ROM format. The agreement that Nintendo had signed with Philips wasn’t bearing fruit, and by 1993 Sony had abandoned its plans to manufacture the SNES/CD hybrid Playstation, instead setting out to create a powerful next generation console. Rayman subsequently moved to a standard SNES cartridge, and development for this made quite a bit of progress despite the development team still being limited to just Michel and Frédéric.
The first public look at a SNES version of Rayman came courtesy of French retro gaming magazine Pix ’N Love, which was given exclusive screenshots by Michel Ancel. These showed some interesting differences compared to the final game – a twoplayer co-operative mode was planned at this stage, and a prominent HUD
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displayed ‘Shield’ and ‘Power’ bars. Early versions of the Dream Forest and the Caves Of Skops are shown, and an early version of Mr Skops even appeared. Michel Ancel would later post versions of these images on Instagram in 2016, lamenting that although the game was running on the SNES (at 60 frames per second, as he was keen to note), the prototype had been lost. This prompted Frédéric Houde to dig through his archives and within a week, he’d found a bare ROM board featuring a barebones proof-of-concept demo of Rayman for the SNES. This was sent to
Omar Cornut, who took a break from developing the Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap remake to dump and release the ROM for preservation.
examining this early ROM, it’s clear that a number of Rayman’s characteristics were locked down.
His appearance isn’t far off from the final version, though he’s a bit pudgier and his torso is red instead of purple, and his walking animation works similarly, too. It’s possible to wind up a punch and even charge to a second level, but it’s not possible to actually release an attack – so it’s a good job there are no enemies present. The stage itself doesn’t resemble anything from the final game, and is a small area with no coded hazards. One item, a lightning orb, and one bug-like enemy exist in the data of the ROM, but aren’t implemented at any point.
The SNES game definitely progressed beyond this point, but no further builds have been unearthed at this time. Development was later switched away from the SNES, since Michel Ancel felt that Nintendo’s machine couldn’t do justice to his vision for the game. In a previous interview with Retro Gamer, Michel Ancel explained, “When the Atari Jaguar was released, I felt it was the first console that was capable of displaying our graphics.” The game went on to release on Jaguar, Playstation and Saturn in 1995 and achieved critical acclaim and enormous sales – in fact, it was the best-selling Playstation game of all time in the UK.
While the fragments of Rayman that exist for the SNES prove that it would have been a beautiful game for the 16-bit sysem, we can’t help but feel that the decision to move it to the new formats was a helpful one in the long run. The additional colour capabilities on the more powerful systems allowed for Rayman to look almost as if it were a painting that had sprung to life, rather than simply an exhibition of excellent pixel art. What’s more, 16-bit console owners had more than enough choice when it came to platform games, and moving Rayman into the less-crowded nextgen market gave the game a better chance to succeed. Still, that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t love to see more of what might have been – let’s hope that a more complete SNES build turns up in a forgotten dusty cupboard one day.
“Michel Ancel felt that Nintendo’s machine couldn’t do justice to his vision for the game”