Rayman Pirate-Community

This is far too major to be confined to the Rabbids thread (as it has been until now).

For those who didn't see it already: Concept artist Guillame Bonamy has recently uploaded seven pieces of artwork which he created in 2005 for the then-upcoming Rayman 4. The site is at http://g-bonamy.com/, in case you wish to view it for yourself. Full credit to CoCoXo from RaymanZone for bringing this to our attention. Here are the images (click them to view the full-size versions):


R4 palais temporel 5 — I'm guessing "Temporal Palace" was going to be an R4 level, perhaps something akin to the Sanctuaries in Rayman 2. The knowledge that Rayman receives from the Yellow Lums in R2 says that Polokus went "to the place where all the gods of all the worlds meet" so that together they could dream up time; I think that the Temporal Palace may be this place, or at least have some connection to it.


R4 monde organique 5 — "Organic World"; this world, as many of you are aware, made the final cut of the Game Boy Advance version of RRR1, and now it seems quite clear that dingodile555 was on to something when he suggested that RRR1 GBA was close to the original R4.


N Room3 — This image shows Rayman in a cavern in Picture City — another world that turned up in RRR1 GBA. I'm guessing that river is made of ink, and those pencils are meant to evoke stalacmites, stalactites and columns.


R4 Background cite image 4 — This Picture City image has a huge amount of R1-originating detail in it, from the thumb-tacks to the flying pencil sharpeners to the mountains in the background. The books shown in this image were not present in R1, but they did turn up in RRR1 GBA.


R4 Background Ciel — This Band Land image also has some excellent little details, such as the bongos and wrong notes in the distance and the cymbals from Mr Sax's Hullaballoo. And look at those little shining, floating objects littered around the picture — they're obviously meant to be pickups of some sort. Tings? Lums?


R4 Background Ciel Color — An amazing colour rendition of what Band Land was to look like.


R4 Jouet 03 cl 2 — A world of toys, in a style that would not look out-of-place in R1. This world was merged with Picture City to create the "Child world" seen in RRR1 GBA. The presents in the background seem to recall the Candy Chateau.

~Now, it has become clear that, at some point in its development, Rayman 4 was intended to be very similar in style to Rayman 1. An R4 that gave this much attention to the continuity of the series would have been a very good R4 indeed. A shame.

I already posted these in teh Rayman Rayman Rabbids thread.

OK I unlocked it. Don't do this again, I'm in a bad enough mood as it is.

It's quite awesome indeed.

Here's what I wrote in the wiki about it:

In 2009, artworks from 2005 were published on Guillaume Bonamy's portfolio. They feature three-dimensional versions of Band Land and Picture City, as well as new environments called le Palais Temporel (the Temporal Palace), le Monde Organique (the Organic World) and an unnamed world of toys. While the last two were eventually adapted for the Game Boy Advance version of Rayman Raving Rabbids, the first one was seemingly abandoned.

At this early stage of the development, it is very likely that the Rabbids were not invented yet.

spiraldoor wrote:Now, it has become clear that, at some point in its development, Rayman 4 was intended to be very similar in style to Rayman 1.

I don't really agree with you on that one: all it proves is that such a game was among the various possibilities considered at the time. At such an early level of development, we can't tell much about what the final game was gonna be like.

Also, the file names lead me to believe that several others were made, and that Guillaume Bonamy only published a few. That's why I think we should try to contact him as soon as possible.

As much as I love these pictures, and would like to see more, it would be brilliant if we managed to get background information about this game as well, like who the enemies were going to be, for example.

Got locked again? I apologise for the whole trouble I caused, everything's just pissing me off.

I seriously do find all this just amaze, especially the one with the clocks.

Acarr wrote:As much as I love these pictures, and would like to see more, it would be brilliant if we managed to get background information about this game as well, like who the enemies were going to be, for example.

As I said in my post above, such information probably didn't even exist at such an early stage.

spiraldoor wrote:This image shows Rayman in a cavern in Picture City

It's not Picture City.

Well, if Band Land were to be in the game, then I have one thing to say to Ubisoft. In case there are some eight-year-olds on this forum, I will type it in small letters.

Fuck you right in the ear you cock-sucking dickheads! You wouldn't know a good game idea if you were a week from publishing it, you cum-sucking shitstains! I hope Osama Bin Laden and his band of pyromaniacs bomb all of your studios and everybody who was working on Rayman Raving Rabbids! Loic Gounon can eat my shit with his shitty motion-control minigame gimmick shit and Ubi Paris can suck my balls if they're gonna do this to what may be the only reason they're as big as they are! Nintendo should buy the rights to Rayman and give him REAL games with REAL characters and actual fucking VOICE ACTING!!! You can screw your own testicles if you think you're gonna turn Rayman into another generic shitty "silent protagonist" like Crash Bandicoot and Mario! Ok, maybe they got it right, but it's ten years too late for Rayman, so fuck off! You're almost as bad as the fucking High School Musical movies with your "Family Fest" "Imagine" "Pets" donkey shit. You try so hard to be cool with your new shit logo but the truth is you started going downhill as soon as you started using it! Fuck you, Ubisoft, so hard that Barack Obama will hear it and pass a new law that prohibits shovelware shit to be released on any consoles!
That is all.

Sabertooth1000000000 wrote: Fuck you right in the ear you cock-sucking dickheads! You wouldn't know a good game idea if you were a week from publishing it, you cum-sucking shitstains! I hope Osama Bin Laden and his band of pyromaniacs bomb all of your studios and everybody who was working on Rayman Raving Rabbids! Loic Gounon can eat my shit with his shitty motion-control minigame gimmick shit and Ubi Paris can suck my balls if they're gonna do this to what may be the only reason they're as big as they are! Nintendo should buy the rights to Rayman and give him REAL games with REAL characters and actual fucking VOICE ACTING!!! You can screw your own testicles if you think you're gonna turn Rayman into another generic shitty "silent protagonist" like Crash Bandicoot and Mario! Ok, maybe they got it right, but it's ten years too late for Rayman, so fuck off! You're almost as bad as the fucking High School Musical movies with your "Family Fest" "Imagine" "Pets" donkey shit. You try so hard to be cool with your new shit logo but the truth is you started going downhill as soon as you started using it! Fuck you, Ubisoft, so hard that Barack Obama will hear it and pass a new law that prohibits shovelware shit to be released on any consoles!

Gangster Globox wrote:

Say what you want, I had to get that out.

I'm with Matyuv on this.

Sabertooth1000000000 wrote:

spiraldoor wrote:This image shows Rayman in a cavern in Picture City

It's not Picture City.

Why not?

PluMGMK wrote:Why not?

Because if it were Picture City, it would be called Picture City. The world in RRR GBA is called "Child" therefore it isn't Picture City. The world shown here was planned on being the same world as in that game.

Typical teenaged American boys.

Remember that this was an early stage, Sabertooth.

Sabertooth1000000000 wrote:Because if it were Picture City, it would be called Picture City.

The name of the file only mentions a “room”, which means it can be anything, including Picture City which it looks like a lot. Maybe it's the entrance to Picture City or something...

Hunchman801 wrote:

spiraldoor wrote:Now, it has become clear that, at some point in its development, Rayman 4 was intended to be very similar in style to Rayman 1.

I don't really agree with you on that one: all it proves is that such a game was among the various possibilities considered at the time. At such an early level of development, we can't tell much about what the final game was gonna be like.

Yeah, I guess you're right about it only being one possible 'avenue' that they were considering. But it's still comforting to know that they haven't entirely forgotten about the original. If the R1 worlds were already scrapped by the time they invented the Rabbids, I wonder how the GBA version ended up having them and the organic world anyway (if that question makes sense)? It's almost as if they were doing substantial work on the GBA version before they had even finalised what the console version was going to be.

Sabertooth1000000000 wrote:Nintendo should buy the rights to Rayman and give him REAL games with REAL characters and actual fucking VOICE ACTING!!! You can screw your own testicles if you think you're gonna turn Rayman into another generic shitty "silent protagonist" like Crash Bandicoot and Mario!

The Freeman would like a word with you...

Hey, you all say that selling Rayman to Nintendo would be godawful, but do you really know that? Other than the games just being on Nintendo systems, why would it be so bad? They've done a good job preserving their own series, what would they do to Rayman? They respect Rayman more than any other company does right now.

Sabertooth1000000000 wrote:Hey, you all say that selling Rayman to Nintendo would be godawful, but do you really know that? Other than the games just being on Nintendo systems, why would it be so bad? They've done a good job preserving their own series, what would they do to Rayman? They respect Rayman more than any other company does right now.

The matter of the games being made exclusive to the Nintendo systems is more than enough for us to want Rayman to remain third-party. I want Rayman 4 to be on current-gen systems, not last-gen ones. Being made by Nintendo would also make it impossible for ANY of the R1, R2 or R3 developers to be involved whatsoever without leaving their jobs and hoping that Nintendo will hire them, Michel Ancel being particularly important here. And what do you mean by Nintendo "respecting" Rayman? Four Rabbids games and counting, and they've given us nothing but a inferior port of a fifteen-year-old game.

~Now, on to more important matters. Some time ago, Drolpiraat managed to extract some R4-related information from the RRR1 disc. (link). Does anyone think some of the information he uncovered may be related to this concept art? Could the "Land in the Sky" be related to Band Land, a world nestled in the clouds? Is is possible that the "Temple" mentioned in the R4 files is the Temporal Palace? Am I the only one who thinks the caves from the R4 prototype look sort of like Guillaum's "Organic World" artwork (after all, the caves were merged with the organic in RRR1 GBA)?

(Another thought: the Picture City cavern image could be a passageway between Picture City and the Caves of Skops! After all, those two worlds are right beside each other in R1, and given the nature of the image, it would make perfect sense.)

spiraldoor wrote: And what do you mean by Nintendo "respecting" Rayman? Four Rabbids games and counting, and they've given us nothing but a inferior port of a fifteen-year-old game..)

The Rabbids games weren't their decison. They were happy to have Rayman 4 as a launch title for the Wii, plus they even featured Rayman Advance in a Nintendo Power issue once. They definitely respect the series more than Ubisoft does.

And the reason being sold to Nintendo would be a good thing is that Nintendo would actually make games. Face it, even without great developers such as Ancel, it's better than absolutely nothing.

Sabertooth1000000000 wrote:

spiraldoor wrote: And what do you mean by Nintendo "respecting" Rayman? Four Rabbids games and counting, and they've given us nothing but a inferior port of a fifteen-year-old game..)

The Rabbids games weren't their decison. They were happy to have Rayman 4 as a launch title for the Wii, plus they even featured Rayman Advance in a Nintendo Power issue once. They definitely respect the series more than Ubisoft does.

And the reason being sold to Nintendo would be a good thing is that Nintendo would actually make games. Face it, even without great developers such as Ancel, it's better than absolutely nothing.

The Rabbids games were a direct result of Nintendo's interference. And Nintendo would clearly rather have a Rabbids game than Rayman 4; they had already made the launch title agreement for R4 with Ubisoft, so they must have known what was going on when Ubisoft switched R4 with RRR1, and they must have condoned it (or RRR1 wouldn't have taken R4's place as a launch title, and they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of securing exclusivity for RRR2, RRR3 and RGH).

Nintendo featuring a Nintendo-exclusive shit port such as Rayman Advance in one of their magazines doesn't impress me.

Nintendo making a slew of mediocre titles for Rayman like they've done for Mario is far worse than nothing. In fact I think the series's current situation (in which it has some chance of an actual future) is greatly preferable to being whored out by Nintendo. And the Wii is simply not capable of delivering a Rayman game up to current-gen standards. This discussion is completely off-topic, by the way. I don't know why you brought it up here.

spiraldoor wrote:
Nintendo featuring a Nintendo-exclusive shit port such as Rayman Advance in one of their magazines doesn't impress me.

That's exactly my point. Why would they feature such a bad game in Nintendo Power if they didn't respect Rayman? They also featured Rayman 2, but not on the cover.

spiraldoor wrote: Nintendo making a slew of mediocre titles for Rayman like they've done for Mario is far worse than nothing.

So what you're saying is, Mario games are bad?

And they're not gonna do that, they would make about one game every three years like they do with Kirby or Star Fox. That's balanced enough.