In recent years Rayman has become pretty heavily associated with Nintendo, with the limbless hero even appearing in the most recent Super Smash Bros. games as a trophy. The very first Rayman game, however, never did make its way to a Nintendo system until a pared down port arrived 5 years later in 2000 for the Game Boy Color.
This first game in the series was, however, first planned for the Super Nintendo, with a two-player mode to boot. During development Ubisoft decided to move from cartridges to CD-ROMs for the superior storage and graphics capabilities, and after Nintendo cancelled the SNES CD-ROM adapter Ubisoft instead decided to launch Rayman first on the failed Atari Jaguar on September 1st 1995 with a follow-up release a week later on the original PlayStation.
Most assumed the SNES version of the game was lost forever, but now, 24 years later, the game’s original creator Michel Ansel has made a startling discovery – the original Rayman SNES EPROM cartridge, with a fully functioning ROM:
Here’s hoping we get some video footage of this piece of history in action soon!
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