'Rayman' Playable Demo for Super Nintendo Leaked Online, Playable for Free
An early prototype for the Super Nintendo version of "Rayman" is now available online for free.
The developer and founder of the studio Lizardcube, Omar Cornut, took to Twitter and shared that he has successfully uploaded an early prototype of the unreleased Super Nintendo "Rayman" game to Dropbox. With that, the game is now available for everyone for free.
Apparently Cornut has gotten his hands on the prototype by reaching out to the "Rayman" series creator Michel Ancel and asked if he could have a copy of the game's early build.
"Just asked Michel who I know and he kindly let me borrow the cartridge to dump it," Cornut told Polygon.
In October of last year, the "Rayman" creator was able to recover the prototype that according to him has been lost for over 24 years, and shared some screenshots of the game on his Instagram account.
According to IGN, the "Rayman" prototype was just an early build of the game. It only contains a single small environment, with few character animations, and the ability to jump. Furthermore, the game can only be played with most SNES emulators. The game is far from completion, as the full download of the game could only take up to 1MB of space.
Being an early build of the game, Cornut expressed that the two-player mode that was shown in the screenshots are not available at all in the build. "Perhaps the ROM contains secrets in which case homebrew hackers will hopefully unearth them soon," Cornut added.
Moreover, Cornut has already engaged in the business of digitally preserving games in the past. One of Cornut's works is "Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap," in which Cornut and his studio Lizardcube has successfully re-mastered the game for current gen systems.
As far as legal concerns go, Cornut is hopeful that the prototype's release on the internet will be understood as an act of researching and preserving gaming history.