Was Rayman for children? Francophiles? Was it for people who like good games or utter shit? Without the steering hand of Ancel, Ubisoft came very close to throwing Rayman out on a Sonic-like meander towards irrelevance, shuffled from development team to development team (passing through studios in China, Italy, Morocco, Bulgaria, and Romania), and hitting all the genres that franchises call upon on their journey to death: party games, kart games, fighting games, remakes, remakes of remakes, remakes of remakes of remakes.Īfter years of fucking around, the personal, direct design of Rayman began to resemble a creative dissonance reflected in its position in the wider pop culture conversation.
It felt as if the designers didn't know who Rayman was for. The games started churning out mediocrity in weird, self-parodying ways. Without Ancel, it was a tough few years for Rayman fans. Sonic struck me as the kind of kid at school who'd de-pants you in the hallway, while Mario was Mario: ubiquitous, everywhere, boring. Over on Motherboard: Did you know they're remaking 'Turok' in HD? Well, they are.ĭirect connection was what I always felt toward Rayman, in ways that Mario and Sonic never evoked. It's not about storytelling it's about a direct connection between you and the character." All the animation and design is done so you understand the character just by looking at it. He's not talking, it's really about action. Ancel echoed these exact sentiments when addressing the Game Developers Conference in 2013: "He's a very simple and direct character. Even Rayman's design, a collection of floating limbs held together by nothing but our imagination, promotes the gamer to fill in the empty spaces with their own personalities. Ancel's direction guaranteed an experimental flair to the Rayman games he worked on it made sure they felt like a haven for the oddball player. Rayman started falling away the moment Ancel stopped working on the series, a period that stretched between Rayman 2 and Origins, comprising a 12-year absence. But between Rayman 2 and Origins, I think the truth is that Ubisoft lost the plot a bit, derailing its popularity and leaving both Origins and Legends with a mountain of unfortunate precedent to conquer.
#NEW RAYMAN GAME SERIES#
One argument is that side-scrolling platformers are done, which is entirely untrue, or that the series never had mass appeal. And yet nobody is really buying them, not in the numbers they deserve. They are probably better than the original, and maybe even 1999's Rayman 2: The Great Escape. Let me go on record here and say Rayman Legends and its predecessor, 2011's Rayman Origins, the two latest home-console entries in the series, are spectacular. Rayman, who started out as the outsider's platformer of choice but ended up a box-office smash, appears back on the commercial periphery. Five million people bought Rayman in the UK alone, while only 1 million or so copies of 2013's tremendous Rayman Legends were bought across the entire planet.
Nowadays, that's essentially not the case. Granted, there's some tripe in that list, like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but mostly it shows that gamers knew what was good and what was really fucking good.
The original Rayman is-somehow amazingly- the best-selling PlayStation 1/PSX game ever in the United Kingdom. It made Mario and Sonic look like childish doodles it was a Picasso burst within a genre so regularly rendered with average results.īack then, a lot of people felt this way. His world seemed like the crazy place someone who spent a lot of time on their own could conjure up: all psychedelic colors and cartoonish takes on reality. He seemed nerdish and weird-looking-in the way that I felt nerdish and weird-looking. He wasn't cool in the way Sonic was cool, or fun-for-everyone like Mario.
I was a reserved kid, thanks in part to head-to-toe eczema that required nightly rituals of creaming and wet-bandages to soothe, and I really bonded with the way Rayman seemed like a total dork.
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