Rare Rayman Pictures

[Mace121]

Oh, hi. I don't think anyone has heard of me, but I'm a fan of Rayman since I was 5 years old.

Apologies that if you really meant pictures, and not video. This here is an old Rayman Junior commercial, featuring an old CG Rayman, from what I'm looking at. This is probably the same CG Rayman from Rayman 2 before 3D Rayman 2 took over.

[Elite Piranha]

I've never seen this commercial, thanks for sharing it. It seems that this was released 3 years before Rayman 2, in the same year in which the Rayman 2 prototype was being promoted in magazines.

[Cairnie]

Another fine golden nugget from the cave that is ina.fr. Well spotted

[Hunchman801]

Nice find! Given the Rayman 2 model used in the clip, I suppose the ad is much more recent that the game itself. Why they chose to advertise it so much later, I have no idea.

[Mace121]

Boom, more ancient Rayman ads unearthed.

Rayman Gold


Rayman 1


The two commercials show some familiar footage of Rayman, shown in the early trailers for Rayman 2.

If you want to look at more ads, including one where Rayman threw his demo disc out of the PC screen for a McDonalds commercial, you got this link.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0i_UH ... A1zN_hKoSg

[Hunchman801]

The two commercials show some familiar footage of Rayman, shown in the early trailers for Rayman 2.

Yeah, it looks like they reused that old content for the ads.

[PluMGMK]

"Créez votre propre jeu"
*shows footage of fighting a boss, the one thing you can't create in Rayman Designer, even with MLT hacking*

Yep. Also, the PlayStation version of Moskito in an ad for a PC game.

[Hunchman801]

"Créez votre propre jeu"
*shows footage of fighting a boss, the one thing you can't create in Rayman Designer, even with MLT hacking*

I wanted to do that so badly when I played Designer, though the kid I was back then probably wouldn't have been able to code it.

Yep. Also, the PlayStation version of Moskito in an ad for a PC game.

Could anyone draw some more Bzzit/Moskito wild theories from this?

[The Jonster]

No biggies about the videos, I just noticed these now. Really nice finds there!

[Mace121]

So I'm not sure if anyone owns a copy of the Pix N' Love biography of Michel Ancel, but this is one of their preview scans. This shows the familiar SNES Rayman screenshots (probably in better quality), but the top pic wasn't shown anywhere besides the book. An interesting part of it was that there's smaller scorpions as fist fodder.

I have a dumb theory: The Cave of Skops is the 2nd-to-last world in Rayman 1... BUT what if that the caves was going to be this subsection to the forest themed world shown? Okay, I haven't translated this page, but I think this is related to developing the SNES version before it got the boot.

[Steo]

Interesting, it seems to have an image of a Japanese Super Famicom in the upper left despite being a French article also.

[Mace121]

Then again, European SNES models looked the same as their Japanese counterpart. It's probably intentional as the game is likely started development before the SNES was revealed.

[PluMGMK]

I have a dumb theory: The Cave of Skops is the 2nd-to-last world in Rayman 1... BUT what if that the caves was going to be this subsection to the forest themed world shown? Okay, I haven't translated this page, but I think this is related to developing the SNES version before it got the boot.

The translation's not too interesting:

The arrival of the Super Nintendo marks a turn in the video-game existence of Michel Ancel. Upon its release in April 1992, this machine becomes his favourite console. He has great fun with F-Zero, Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Konami's Mystical Ninja…
"It was an exceptional machine… Zelda and Mystical Ninja were for me the most important titles of the era. The latter is a completely mad game, Adventure, Platform, Top-down… On YouTube, you can see there are still lots of fans. It's a really exciting game: you don't get to understand everything there is in there. One should know that at the time Konami were making lots of shoot-em-ups. But in Mystical Ninja, there are entire hidden levels of other games."
While he's not absorbed in the meanders of Mystical Ninja, Michel Ancel's attention is dedicated to the incubation of a new hero, a certain Rayman. It should be said that Ancel takes responsibility for Rayman's creation, from A to Z. To give him life, he unearthed from his sketchbooks a character he had conceived of in his teenage years. By the way, he started his career in a 2D world. A particular sign: this funny guy's feet and hands are not linked to his body, and have a telescopic function, while his hair can transform into a helicopter rotor. So many characteristics that appear attractive for the destiny that awaits him: a platform game hero. Nothing less.
"Rayman is a personal project, which was the fruit of an experience that I acquired as a programmer. I had ended up with a modular animation system which had done the job for my previous game, a specialized version to animate a cartoon-style character. I had programmed the main hero and you could move him around on an Atari ST."
The Rayman evoked here by Michel Ancel is a prototype which he drew himself.
"In that time, although video games had started to be industrialized, nobody had yet identified the different professions that comprise it. Because of this, there were still self-taught pixel artists, who hadn't necessarily been to art school. I was part of that lot."
After a good semester at Montpellier, Michel Ancel comes knocking on Ubisoft's door to present the Rayman project. He came with a demo but also with a 150-page dossier which took him five months to write, which describes the entire game: the story, the levels, the characters, the bosses.
During his presentation, the Guillemot brothers exchange meaningful looks. The same feeling is popping up in their psyches: here is a choice game for the Super Nintendo, which the French people approve of overwhelmingly. Once the presentation is over, a short deliberation ensues. The verdict comes:
"We are going to work on Rayman! You have two years to make it. It'll come out on Super Nintendo."
A contract is then signed between Ubisoft and Michel Ancel as an independent author. Before diving into the universe of Rayman, there's a formality left to be dealt with, that is much less "toonesque": negotiation.
"The discussions were quite rough. I found myself with a contract of which I understood nothing… As often happens on such an occasion, you end up signing when you can. In reality, what was important was having the budget to make the game."
Not having a lawyer, Michel gets help from a friend familiar with the law, who counsels him during the rights negotiations. He advises him to ask for regular advances so it'll be possible to work comfortably, and also insists that he demand a share of the profits from the sales. Wise advise, if ever there was such a thing.

From 1989, Nintendo spoke of the imminent release of a CD reader for their Super Nintendo. Because of this, per Ubisoft's will, Rayman becomes a project to go on a CD. Free from floppies and low-capacity cartridges, a visual luxury is opened to creators. At the same time, the creation of the game undergoes a sudden change of scale.
"The CD represented 600 MB of memory. From there, you weren't talking about one or two people working on it anymore. You needed to get bigger teams together."

As for the caves being a subsection of the forest, that might also explain the early screenshot showing Skops in the Dream Forest on Jaguar. I always thought that was a fake (albeit an official one) but maybe not… Note that I have yet to read the information dump RayCarrot posted in the Rayman 1 thread today on Jaguar prototypes, so apologies if I've missed something obvious here.

[Mace121]

As for the caves being a subsection of the forest, that might also explain the early screenshot showing Skops in the Dream Forest on Jaguar. I always thought that was a fake (albeit an official one) but maybe not… Note that I have yet to read the information dump RayCarrot posted in the Rayman 1 thread today on Jaguar prototypes, so apologies if I've missed something obvious here.

Well, thanks for translating. From my knowledge, I think the forest & mountain themes are ready to show for some early pre-releases; hence Skops being in the Dream Forest and Raycarrot from earlier today show that some Mr. Stone-related code was in the early Jaguar prototype.

[Steo]

Then again, European SNES models looked the same as their Japanese counterpart. It's probably intentional as the game is likely started development before the SNES was revealed.

Yeah true, it's the US one that varied wildly. Still an interesting find though.

[The Jonster]

Yeah this is neat what you found, and thanks for the translation Plum. I had no idea that the SNES was planned for reading CDs.

[Steo]

I do remember that it was supposed to be a SNES PlayStation, so this would have been the idea behind it.

[Hunchman801]

So I'm not sure if anyone owns a copy of the Pix N' Love biography of Michel Ancel, but this is one of their preview scans. This shows the familiar SNES Rayman screenshots (probably in better quality), but the top pic wasn't shown anywhere besides the book. An interesting part of it was that there's smaller scorpions as fist fodder.

Nice find! I reached out to Pix'n Love a few years back to request the SNES screenshots in their original quality but I was completely ignored. So much for showing interest in their publications.

[KB-Arts]

So I was looking around and searching for Rayman stuff on google, and I came across this! Apparently that special 10th anniversary pack with the stationary set had a few more designs. This was discovered on Behance by a user named R B. It was posted back in 2013.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/8748645 ... ction-2005

[Elite Piranha]

Nice find! The image in the wiki doesn't show the entire set, so this will be useful. Also, I found this video that shows the products inside their package:



Edit:

Here is a picture of a Rabbid inspector from FrameRater's gallery, I wonder if this is considered rare: