Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition

Ubisoft was founded by the five Guillemot brothers in 1986, and nine years later they had their first major breakthrough. On the cusp of the 3D era, it was surprisingly a 2D platform game, which, however, was technically very different from what had been seen at the time, and it featured a small, charismatic character without arms or legs, namely Rayman.

Rayman was created mainly by designer Michel Ancel and programmer Frédéric Houde. The first game was a launch title for the first PlayStation, which was released in September 1995, and it was also released the same year for Atari Jaguar and PC. With a little mental arithmetic, you can work out that Rayman turned 30 in September last year, and to mark the occasion, Ubisoft, in collaboration with the retro experts at Digital Eclipse, has created the story of the first Rayman game with Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition.

This tribute to the original Rayman contains five playable versions of the game for five different platforms, as well as a playable prototype for SNES, which Michel Ancel and Frédéric Houde created in 1992 when they were pitching the game to Ubisoft.

One part of the 30th Anniversary Edition is the five games, and the other is a thorough step-by-step documentary. Through a series of interviews with Ancel, Houde, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, animator Alexandra Steible (now Alexandra Ancel) and several others, you get a lot of exciting behind-the-scenes information about the creation of the game, why Rayman looks the way he does, the music in the game, the fierce battle between Nintendo, Sega, and the new kid on the block, Sony, and a lot of other things. You can also see lots of sketch drawings and artwork, and you can read an 85-page design manual created by Ancel and Houde, which describes the entire first game in detail, as well as an estimate of how long it would take to make, which was 58 weeks. This documentary section is really interesting if you are curious about how games were made more than 30 years ago.

The first part, as mentioned, is the five different versions of the Rayman game. The first two are Rayman for Atari Jaguar (1995), which was the game on which all the other versions were based, and Rayman for PlayStation (1995), which made use of the machine's CD-ROM drive, which was completely ground-breaking at the time and included FMV cutscenes, which the Jaguar version could not have as it was cartridge-based.

The third game is Rayman for PC/MS-DOS (1995), which is slightly different from the Jaguar and PlayStation versions. This Anniversary Edition also includes more than 120 extra levels for the PC version, created by the team behind the game, other Ubisoft designers, and dedicated players using the Rayman Designer editor, which Ubisoft released for PC.

The last two games are handheld versions. The first is for Game Boy Color from 2000, and although it was based on the story from the original, it was its own game with its own unique levels and slightly different gameplay. The second handheld game is Rayman Advance for Game Boy Advance from 2001, which is also based on the original game, but a number of changes were made to make the game easier. Among other things, Rayman was given more health and bosses were easier to defeat.

In these 30th Anniversary editions of the PlayStation and PC game, it's possible to use various modifiers for the games. It's also possible to play with unlimited lives, unlimited continues, and you can unlock all levels and all of Rayman's abilities from the start. All games can be played with different CRT or LCD filters (depending on the edition), with or without borders, or in the original screen ratio, in full screen or widescreen. It's even possible to rewind 15 seconds in all games and try a section again if you missed something or failed a jump or something else.

Of course, you can tell that the original Rayman is getting on a bit; the difficulty level can be brutal (by 2026 standards), but it still holds up and it's fun to experience it again - and it still looks good, there's not a single pixel out of place in the graphics. Especially if you remove the CRT/LCD filters, the pixel graphics appear razor sharp and beautiful.

It may well be that on paper it says that there are five Rayman games included in the 30th Anniversary Edition - and there ARE - but some of the differences between the various versions are so small that the untrained eye will have difficulty spotting them. So you could say that, in principle, there are only two games included, as it's only the Game Boy Color version that really stands out, as this version is somewhat different from the others. However, it's still fun to see the differences that do exist between the games from the different platforms. It's a shame, however, that the original soundtrack is not included in all the games, as it has been remastered for this release.

As always with Digital Eclipse, the documentary section is very well done and tells the whole story of Rayman, the people behind it, the many versions of the game, and it also explains why Rayman has no arms or legs. Digital Eclipse are now experts at making these game documentaries, and they have previously given us Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration with the history of Atari and more than 100 classic games from the company, as well as the story of both Karateka and the legend Jeff Minter. For me, the documentary section was probably the most interesting part of Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition.

If you remember the original Rayman and/or are interested in how the gaming industry worked 30 years ago, before it was actually an industry, but was instead driven by passion and enthusiasts who just wanted to make something cool, then Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition is a lovely little package that you can get for less than £18, which is a really good price.

After getting a taste of Rayman again in its original form, one can only dream that Ubisoft will one day make a full remake of this excellent and beautiful 2D platform classic.