Rayman 1 speedrunning

This guide is to serve as a central hub for all of the relevant knowledge needed to get started with and improve at Rayman speedrunning.

General tips

The American PlayStation release is the standard for speedrunning, and is the most well-documented.
If the player holds down a given button, Rayman will perform the corresponding action as soon as possible. For instance, if the player does not have the helicopter ability, holding down X will cause them to jump the first frame they touch a vine.
Jump-punching is approximately twice as powerful as a regular punch; it breaks cages and kills most enemies in one hit.
Getting a bigger tether off of a Ring allows the player to move farther and higher than would otherwise be possible.
If the player changes direction before they are hit by a non-moving object, they can change the direction they are boosted.
Jumping quickly to the left and right on vines allows the player to get up them more quickly than if they were to simply climb.
It is often advisable to commit suicide.

Important glitches

Rayman's midair momentum is programmed very strangely. Generally, Rayman's speed is stored in memory until it is reset by the game. This design quirk can be utilized by the player in a couple of ways:

Froot loop boosting

While on a Ring, Rayman's speed, as interpreted by the game, is exponentially higher than his standard walking or running speed. Ordinarily, the player is limited to the latter when jumping off of a Ring, at best.

However, if the player holds up or down, instead of left or right, the game will not reset Rayman's speed. As a result, if the player opts to hold up or down, instead of left or right, Rayman will happily rocket across the level.

This comes in especially handy in Bongo Hills; it allows the player to easily break the infamous "helicopter" cage on the fifth screen without revisiting the level, saving around three minutes of time.

Speed storage

Rayman's "ground" and "midair" speed values are actually completely separate from one another. Rayman's "midair" speed is reset only if his subsequent midair movement exceeds 2px/frame, Rayman's standard walking speed.

As such, if the player slows to a walk before jumping, they will not overwrite this "midair speed" value. This allows speedrunners to, effectively, "store" the large amounts of speed they can get from slippery platforms and Rings.

If the player runs or leaps off the edge of a sprite platform (such as a plum or cloud), the game will immediately switch to the "midair speed" value, causing Rayman to move at the "stored" speed.

One particularly noteworthy example of this is "Plum Skip Skip" (so named because it replaces a notorious trick present in earlier speedruns), which uses the momentum gained in Mr. Sax's Hullabaloo to get over to a vine in Moskito's Nest that would otherwise be impossible to reach.

Video tutorial

An in-depth video tutorial done by the speedrunner Shoteru. It is fairly comprehensive and covers most of the current strategies, despite being somewhat outdated.