Rayman Pirate-Community

Back in 2024, a description of an unknown version of Rayman 3 was found by RibShark: the "Rayman 3: Download Edition". This was a special edition of Rayman 3 that Ubisoft distributed through various online platforms prior to its release date. The distribution company was a French startup called Boonty, and they made this version available on various online platforms such as Tiscali, MSN and more.

You can the description for this "Download Edition" here:

• Tiscali (German): https://web.archive.org/web/20030602192 ... dGame=1104
• Boonty (French): https://web.archive.org/web/20030802084 ... dGame=1060

What's interesting is this part of the description (translated from the French Boonty page):

Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc's new adventures include around thirty levels. For the first time and exclusively, you'll be able to buy the first 6 levels of this new game at the same time as its release. This is not the complete version (hence the reduced price).

So while the Download Edition had a demo available, the "full" version was not actually the full game, but an extended demo that you could buy for 9.95€. Does the "first 6 levels" part mean it contained the entire Fairy Council world? If so, this is a completely unknown and undocumented build of the game.

After more digging, I found an archived version of the free demo here: https://web.archive.org/web/20050801000 ... DEdemo.exe
However, it seems it wasn't fully archived and the download stops after 100MB.
This partial data can be extracted though. Unfortunately, the level data seems to be a match with the December 10 demo (contents: "Bad Sauce", "Dangerous Game" and "Special Invaders"). But for some unknown reason, the sound data is different, so this is a different build.

But wait! It gets more confusing. I found more info about the Download Edition by searching for "Rayman" here. This is an XML file containing configurations with exe paths for all Boonty games at the time. In this file, there are 2 different configurations for Rayman 3 Download Edition.
One is named "Rayman 3 France Telecom", and it has 1 executable "MainP5Pvf.exe". The other configuration had 3 different exe files, labeled Rayman 3 Volume 1-3.
Considering it's about 6 levels split across 3 different exe files (with one of them being the free demo), it seems likely that this might be a collection of different demos. If so, those were some expensive demos... a real scam selling 2 demos for 10€, and an official one too!

Anyway, this is where I lost interest years ago. I remembered this today and thought that despite all this, it's still worth posting about here and make people aware that this exists, in the hope that this strange version might one day be found and documented.

Wow, this is a really cool piece of research, Droolie! Thanks for bringing this back up. I don't know what they were thinking when they came up with this price tag. Hopefully someone out there has a full archive buried on a hard drive somewhere...

Wow! Another flash from the past! I still remember when Ubi tried including mini previews online around other websites, similar to how they shared previews in Le Menew or other CD's, specially with that price tag of 10€....let's hope someone brings more light onto it, thank you for sharing