Prototype of unreleased SNES Rayman dumped online

Game developer Omar Cornut has uploaded a playable demo of the unreleased Super Nintendo version of Rayman, making this freely playable by anyone.

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

 Cornut, co-founder of the studio Lizardcube, says that he gained a copy of the game’s early build after reaching out to the series creator Michel Ancel. Speaking to Polygon, Cornut stated that Ancel ‘kindly lent me the cartridge to dump it’.

Back in October, Ancel posted an image of the SNES game on his Instagram account. It was thought that the game was lost, but this recent finding changed that.

Pixel lovers … Did this 25 years ago , the game was playable on the Super nintendo console but was never finished + We’ve lost the build . All these pixels are lost , like tears in the rain …

A post shared by Michel Ancel (@michelancel) on Oct 18, 2016 at 1:18pm PDT

That’s not all. Apparently there is a more feature-complete version somewhere, but this is yet to be found.

According to old screenshots and reports it _did_ grow to a more fully fledged game but a later version wasn’t found yet.

— Omar (@ocornut) July 3, 2017

Cornut has previous when it comes to digitally preserving games; he previously focussed on Sega Master System games. This led to Lizardcube working on the recent remake of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, a remake of the 1989 Sega Master System classic. 

Cornut did note that although the Rayman prototype will work on most SNES emulators, it’s far from a complete game. The demo contains one area, with no enemies or collectibles. But it is a nice little insight into what could have been.