When Michel Ancel isn’t teasing fans with concept art for a Beyond Good & Evil sequel that was announced eight years ago, he’s apparently searching for a long lost build of Rayman for the SNES. His efforts seem to have paid off earlier today when he discovered an EPROM (erasable programmable read-only memory) of the ancient, never released game.
The creator of Rayman uploaded images to Instagram showing both the ROM inserted into an SNES and a screenshot from the game. This came several days after Ancel posted an image mourning the lost build of the game, saying “All these pixels are lost, like tears in the rain.”
It’s unclear where Ancel discovered this gaming artifact, or what he plans to do with it, but he didn’t hide his excitement at finding a work of love and passion he thought he’d lost forever.
The first Rayman was released on the PlayStation and Jaguar in 1995, but was apparently originally intended to come out on the SNES. According to Unseen64,
“The game featured a 2 players coop mode and different graphics. It seems that Ubisoft decided to move the project to the new CD-Rom consoles and they hired animators from a cartoon company which has considerably improved the graphics.”
Screenshots from the SNES game that originally appeared in a French magazine, via Unseen64
The last game in the series was Rayman Adventures, a mobile game released for iOS and Android. It’s unclear at this point what’s next for the French platforming icon.
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