Rabbids are nowhere to be seen.
Once upon a time, Rayman was going to be an SNES game. Alas, it never came to be. Michel Ancel and a colleague were the only ones working on it, but never finished it. Rayman went on to debut on the Atari Jaguar, of all systems, and the rest is history. Or so you’d think.
The original SNES work was not, truly, lost. A very early prototype still exists. And that ROM has been dumped, and is now available on the internet, thanks to Omar Cornut.
I've dumped a prototype demo of unreleased Rayman for SNES, here it is! (NB: very early dev build, not a full game) https://t.co/F3XB9XRhTA pic.twitter.com/oLhOdNDyHF
— Omar 🍋 (@ocornut) July 3, 2017
You might know Omar Cornut for his archival work. Moreover, his studio, Lizardcube, was responsible for the recent remaster of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap. And his acquisition of the ROM was fairly organic:
“There’s not a lot to it really, I borrowed the cartridge from Michel Ancel who kindly let me look at it and dump it.” -Omar Cornut
Ancel and his friend had recently found the cartridge, with Ancel posting a screenshot to Instagram along with an explanation. Cornut got in contact with them, and suggested dumping it for the sake of preservation. And now, some of it is actually playable.
The ROM is still a very early dev build, however. It’s mostly a single environment, with a few animations for the titular hero. You can jump, but there really aren’t any obstacles or flags. That walking animation is pretty smooth for an SNES game, though.
Omar has preserved the entire Sega Master System library in much the same way. He also hopes that larger legal entities understand that he’s doing as an act of preservation, rather than piracy. A not-incosiderable chunk of Sega’s 8-bit library might well have vanished into the ether were it not for such efforts.
“Effectively I have preserved the entire Sega 8-bit library this way, and i think people understand that the intent is preservation and not malicious nor commercially harming.”
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