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On July 4, 2010, French retro-gaming magazine Pix’N Love revealed that, at the very beginning of its development, the first ever Rayman video game was originally intended to be released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). This version of the game is completely different from the final game, and is actually a 2-player game where one player controls Rayman (who, at the time was fat and had a red body) and the other player controls his unidentified female counterpart (who, like Rayman, also is fat but has a blue body).
When optical disc-based game consoles (such as PlayStation) were announced, the SNES version of Rayman was scrapped and cancelled while it was in final production, and now became the Rayman we all know today.
Findings[]
On October 18, 2016, Rayman creator Michel Ancel posted a couple of partial screenshots from the SNES version of Rayman, stating that the game had been long since left unfinished and lost forever. On the 23rd, he announced that a rare cartridge of the original SNES game itself, stated to be from 1992, was recovered and restored by Frédéric Houde. This cartridge contains only a short portion of a stage that takes place in a computer (more on that below).
Eventually in the summer of 2017, Ocurnut dumped an early ROM for a short gameplay segment of the SNES version (as previously shown by Michel Ancel) on Dropbox. In this stage, as stated by Ancel himself, the game initially took place in a computer, with Rayman being one of its employees, and the main villain was intended to be a computer virus. So far, this is the only part of the game to be found, it is unknown if the forest gameplay segment (with the swinging spikeball pictured to the right) still exists judging by the screenshot taken with a camera, and the rest of the game remains forever lost as confirmed by Ancel himself.
Ocurnut eventually removed the Dropbox link, making it undownloadable. Luckily, an alternative download link to the ROM has been backed up on MEGA.