Rayman (video game)

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Rayman
Developer(s)
Publisher(s)Ubi Soft
Director(s)Agnès Haegel
Producer(s)Gérard Guillemot
Designer(s)
Programmer(s)
  • Daniel Palix
  • Frédéric Houde
Artist(s)
  • Alexandra Steible
  • Éric Pelatan
  • Sylvaine Jenny
Composer(s)
  • Rémi Gazel
  • Didier Lord
  • Stéphane Bellanger
SeriesRayman
Platform(s)Atari Jaguar, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, MS-DOS, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DSi, iOS, Android
Release
1 September 1995
  • Atari Jaguar
    • EU: 1 September 1995
    • NA: 19 September 1995
  • PlayStation
    • NA: 7 September 1995[1]
    • EU: 29 September 1995
  • Sega Saturn
    • WW: November 1995[2]
  • MS-DOS
  • Game Boy Color
    • NA: 29 March 2000
    • EU: 24 July 2000
  • Game Boy Advance
    • NA: 11 June 2001
    • EU: 22 June 2001
  • Nintendo DSi
    • NA: 7 December 2009[5]
    • EU: 25 December 2009
  • iOS
    • WW: 18 February 2016
  • Android
    • WW: 17 March 2016
Genre(s)Platform
Mode(s)Single-player

Rayman is a 1995 platform game developed by Ubi Pictures and published by Ubi Soft for MS-DOS, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation. The player controls Rayman, who must recapture Electoons and the Great Protoon from Mr. Dark. The gameplay involves rescuing Electoons and gained new abilities throughout the game.

Rayman has been highly acclaimed by critics, who praised its visual, music and animations. The game has appeared in various other formats, including versions for the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation Network, DSiWare, and iOS and Android.

Gameplay[edit]

Rayman preparing his "telescopic fist" ability in Band Land

Rayman is a side-scrolling platform game which it features a two-dimensional graphics engine, incorporating hand-drawn animation, and multi-layered worlds with enemies.[6] The player controls as the titular Rayman, who his main objective was to rescue Electoons trapped in cages, with six of them hidden each of the levels. Throughout the game, Rayman gained new abilities such as the ability to fly, run and a "telescopic fist", an ability gained early in the game which allows him to punch enemies from a distance. Other abilities included a grabbing fist and the ability to hang on platforms.[7][8][9]

In each world ends with a duel with a boss with special abilities, and defeating them allows the player to move on to the next world.[7] After rescuing all of the Electoons in the first five worlds, the player can enter Candy Chateau which the player have to attacked Mr. Dark.[10] Hidden in a various levels, the player can interact with The Magician who can teleport the player into secret worlds where the player either earned Tings, a ring which the player will get a picture and an extra live.[11]

Plot[edit]

The people living in Rayman's world are harmonious thanks to the Great Protoon. However, Mr. Dark steals the Great Protoon in which causes the Electoons to scatter over the world. Betilla the Fairy, a guardian of the Great Protoon battles Mr. Dark to rescues the Great Protoon and Electoons by assigning Rayman to recapture them and defeat Mr. Dark.[12] Betilla the Fairy frequently interacts with Rayman as needed to give him additional magical powers along his journey.

After he rescues all of the Electoons, Rayman faces Mr. Dark, who attacks with various disorienting spells. Rayman arrives in a hall, where Mr. Dark traps him with walls of fire. At the last moment, Electoons retrieve Rayman's ability to punch after Mr. Dark disables it, with this latter continuing the fight by transforming himself into hybrids of the bosses previously fought by Rayman. Upon the defeat of Mr. Dark, Rayman rescues Betilla and recovers the Great Protoon, thus restoring balance to his world. Rayman then takes a vacation with friends and former enemies.

Development[edit]

Conception[edit]

Michel Ancel (2007), the lead designer and creator of Rayman

Rayman was created by French video game designer Michel Ancel, with additional contributions to the character's final design by programmer Frédéric Houde and artist Alexandra Steible.[13] Ancel had first drawn designs of Rayman in the 1980s when he was a teenager, at a time when he was learning to draw, compose music, and program in order to follow his dream of making video games. Ancel would later formally revisited his initial drawings and began to work on Rayman. During the development, he created a demo of the game for French software developer Lankhor.[14]

Rayman's styling came from sources in Celtic, Chinese, and Russian fairy tales in which served as a major source of inspiration. He was also inspired by his childhood, having spent a lot of time by rivers and chasing "strange" insects, climbing big trees. When Ancel started work on the game, he began with trees and "strange creatures."[14] In the early 1990s, Ancel became interested in the computer graphic technique of ray tracing and incorporated it into the character animations he was designing at the time. This resulted in the designs of Rayman himself, with his name alluding to the aforementioned technique.[15] Ancel originally envisioned the game's story to involve Jimmy, a human boy who creates an imaginary online world named Hereitscool. After it becomes infected with a computer virus, Jimmy travels into the world and inhabits the body of Rayman, his in-game avatar to defeat the virus. The idea was scrapped during later development.[16]

By 1988, French video game publisher Ubi Soft, founded two years earlier by the five sons of the Guillemot family, had hired around six developers and operated from Montreuil. Ancel was one of Ubi Soft's early hires, having caught the attention of the Guillemot brothers for his animation skills. Yves Guillemot encouraged Ancel to pitch ideas for new games, which led to a meeting between Ancel, Houde, designer Serge Hascoët, and Gérard, Yves, and Michael Guillemot, after Ancel and Houde had teamed up and worked on the Rayman concept further. Hascoet recalled the pair presenting a "totally strange" design of a "giant trombone and you had to imagine the player inside", and an animation system that Ancel had developed for roughly six months which he praised for its fluidity. Despite being in the research and development stage, Hascoet pushed for the game to enter formal production and Michel Guillemot agreed to take it on. After Rayman received the greenlight in 1992, Ancel said "everything changed."[17] Michel Guillemot realised that additional staff was needed to see the game through, and organised the company accordingly. He also injected money into the project, with Ubi Soft setting aside a budget of 15 million francs.[15] Development then split into two offices, with more automated tasks done in Paris and the artistic work completed by Ancel, Houde, and their team of designers at their own facility outside Montpellier. Founded in 1994 as Ubi Pictures, the studio became Ubisoft Montpellier.[17]

Completion[edit]

Rayman was being developed for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System before development moved to the Atari Jaguar.

Ancel initially produced Rayman for the Atari ST who he worked alone on every aspect of the game.[14] Following Houde's arrival on the project, Ancel noticed that public interest in the ST had started to wane and looked to the Super NES CD-ROM, a CD peripheral for the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System. However, in 1993, Nintendo abandoned the project before the hardware was produced. Ancel and Houde ruled out a release for the cartridge-based SNES, doubting its ability to handle the large amount of information they wanted to incorporate into the game. The pair switched focus towards newer and more powerful consoles, leaving the SNES version of the game unfinished.[18][19] This led to the decision to produce Rayman for the Atari Jaguar, a 64-bit cartridge-based system that the team felt could handle the graphics they wanted.[14] In late 1994, magazine advertisements announced the game as a Jaguar exclusive title.[20] Between 1993 and 1994, Rayman originally was submitted to Apogee Software by Ancel, however the publisher was scrapped.[21]

Ubi Soft decided to also make Rayman a launch title for the North American and European release of the upcoming Sony PlayStation, a CD-based console. Yves Guillemot said the PlayStation edition of Rayman was a way of "beat[ing] Japan on platforming games" by releasing it simultaneously with a new and powerful system.[14][17] Ancel recalled the number of developers working on the game began to increase, from Houde and himself at its conception, to 100.[17] Later in development, a version for the Sega Saturn was produced. Versions for the 32X and 3DO were also announced however, it was never released.[22] In October 2016, an early build of the prototype for Super Nintendo Entertainment System which has been considered lost was rediscovered by Ancel who he posted pictures of it on Instagram.[23] On July 2017, developer and programmer Omar Cornut released the build online with Ancel's permission.[24]

Release[edit]

Ubi Soft published a dedicated website for Rayman, where visitors could download a playable demo of the game. The website also contained a hints page if players had difficulty in completing levels.[25]

By the end of 1995, 400,000 copies of the game had been sold in Europe.[15] This number grew to 900,000 copies sold worldwide after two years.[26] It is also the best-selling PlayStation game of all time in the UK, beating popular titles such as Tomb Raider II and Gran Turismo.[27] According to Gamasutra, Rayman Advance's sales neared 600,000 units during the first half of the 2001–2002 fiscal year alone.[28] The game's sales reached 770,000 copies by the end of March 2002.[29]

Reception[edit]

Rayman has been highly acclaimed for its animated 2D graphics, atmosphere, soundtrack, and high difficulty. It was awarded both "Best Music in a CD-ROM Game" and "Best Animation" in Electronic Gaming Monthly's 1995 Video Game Awards.[47]

GamePro likewise praised the animation and music, as well as Rayman's many acquired abilities, and commented that "Rayman is a dazzling delight and ranks as one of the most visually appealing games of this or any year."[48] Next Generation though noting a lack of original gameplay elements, agreed Rayman to be an exceptional game, praising its clever design, depth, graphics, and sound.[38] Entertainment Weekly writer Bob Strauss felt that the game may be the title that ennobles the adolescence world of video games.[49]

Electronic Gaming Monthly assessing that it is an outstanding platformer on its own terms but pales against the PlayStation version due to the lower sound quality of the music and most especially the slow responsiveness of the controls.[34] GamePro also rated it slightly less than the PlayStation version. However, both magazines noted it as one of the best Jaguar games to date, with GamePro remarking "Finally, a game that shows off the Jaguar's capabilities."[50] Next Generation found the Atari Jaguar version impeccable, venturing that "there is little about the PlayStation or Saturn versions that will top this one."[39]

Sam Hickman of Sega Saturn Magazine remarking the Sega Saturn version that "if you were just watching somebody else playing the game you could be easily fooled into thinking this was the best thing to appear on the Saturn for quite some time. However, in reality, it's a bit too dull a bit too often, and at times, it's just plain irritating and damned difficult."[2] Japanese reviewers judged the Saturn version similarly, with the game receiving a praise score by a panel of four reviewers at Famicom Tsūshin.[35] GamePro writer Scary Larry however, called it "just what gamers are looking for on the Saturn", and compared it favorably to previous Saturn "hop-n-boppers" Bug! and Astal. They noted that while the graphics and music sometimes seem kiddie-oriented, the challenge is oriented to veteran gamers. They also highly praised the lush visuals and made particular note of the Saturn version's between-level effects.[51]

GameSpot writer Jeff Sengstack complained several issues in the MS-DOS verision such as the infrequent save points, but summarizing, "Take any good scroller like Donkey Kong or Pitfall, add scintillating colors, wonderfully clever gaming elements, engaging and humorous characters, terrific music, and heaps of whimsy and you have Rayman." They did, however, criticize the fact that one had to install a "ridiculous" 50 MB of data on their drive just to see the introductory animation, with the whole installation being a "sublime" 94 MB.[8] Next Generation's review praised the graphics, solid game speed even on low-end PCs, "multitude of challenges", and charming player character, and said the game made a good change of pace from other PC releases.[40]

Next Generation reviewed the Game Boy Advance version of the game, stating that "The familiar-yet-solid gameplay remains the same, with Rayman running, jumping, climbing, and punching his way through level after level of lush, colorful environments ranging from a jungle and a moonscape to a musically-themed wonderland. The sound and controls are solid, and the game's peculiar personality remains intact."[41]

Legacy[edit]

Further information: Rayman

The commercial success of Rayman helped spawn a franchise that spawned sequels including Rayman 2: The Great Escape (1999), and the Raving Rabbids franchise. Ubisoft would used some of the game's elements for Rayman Origins.[14] On 29 October 2018, Sony revealed that the game would be one of twenty games on the PlayStation Classic, which was released on 3 December 2018.[52]

References[edit]

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Bibliography[edit]

External links[edit]

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