i just keep admiring the art direction in this game. it's old, but it doesn't look dated at all. it looks intentionally simple. the low res textures don't look blurry, they just look stylized (and pleasantly so). everything is just so well made and go together flawlessly. timeless art direction. kinda miss this stuff with newer games.
I wouldn't say it doesn't look dated, because it certainly lacks detail in some areas and/or aspects. However, i say that as someone who absolutely *adores* this style! And i, too, very much miss this kind of technique to create games. It has so much style and life. Almost every single texture just *oozes* character! Rayman Revolution, the remaster for PS2, gets quite close to making it look truly timeless, with a lot of small details added to make some areas feel much more... well, detailed! (even if some areas got more love than others) Some areas really do hold up almost perfectly! I often replay some levels on an emulator with texture filtering turned off, just to appreciate not just the atmosphere, but even the textures themselves. The art really is fantastic! It's just not the same nowadays... And anyone who calls that "nostalgia" is simply blinded by their own rose-tinted glasses for the "new" and "modern"...
every now and again I come across an indie game with a certain quality to its art direction that makes me think 'these devs for sure played rayman 2 as a kid' 2D games like Donkey Kong Country and the console ports of Street Fighter 2 get a lot of praise for how good they looked within the confines of their respective hardware limitations and I think Rayman 2 is similarly on that level, untouchable by other 3D platformers of the era.
@@lovofofo the PS2 version is focused on combat to such a degree that it feel much less fun. The changes to level order/progression are annoying too but that might be just me loving the original version.
holy crap, this has been buggin me for 20 years! I had a perfectly legal copy of this game and the pirate face happened to me, every single time at the exact same point, me, my brother and my parents were so confused, we thought the game originally had 2 discs or something and we needed to switch, but we only had 1 disc, we even had a big fight at the store because we wanted our money back, because it made the game unplayable for 12 year old me, and we didn't had internet back then, so we didn't know about a patch, this is such a revelation to me, the big conundrum finally solved
@@xelda1990 Wow, that's disgusting... "What's that? Our product doesn't work...? Well you already paid so *f*ck you!!!"* And this is also why anti-piracy is such a horrible idea, because more often than not it only hurts the consumer... Which is *never okay.*
Imagine getting a pirared copy from a relative or something for your birthday when you where a kid without knowing it is pirated and getting relatively far into the game just to get stuck because of a missing platform you don't even know is supposed to be there. That must be so frustrating.
for a regular player that part with the platform would have actually been impossible to get to lol. you need to break the first cage you encounter in order to access the hub world to get to that level. so there would have been no way to get there without hacking using a pirated copy.
@@El_Fabricio I bought a Spyro 3 CD as a kid from this shady store and I was so excited because I have played and 100% Ripto's Rage. I was so mad because random eggs from different worlds would just disappear from the Atlas or freed characters would randomly be locked again even after freeing them. I played through it for a number of times each with different outcomes. Little did I know my CD was a pirated one :(
As many protections this game contains, I think they kinda missed the opportunity to make a specific one for Cave of Bad Dreams by removing the option "No Treasure for me!" and have only "I want the treasure!" available.
Rayman's face next to the health bar creeps me out. The normal one looks like he's gonna light my cereal on fire just because I didn't share. And the near death one looks like he's sorry for accidentally setting your placemat on fire after trying to light your cereal on fire.
Crazy how they went through the hassle to modify parts of every maps. They really didn't want you to make ANY progress as soon as a copy was detected as pirated
honestly i just think the game outright disables some entities and deactivates level stuff like triggers and events when the anti piracy check gets tripped, i don't think someone on the team went all their way out to put these irregularities in the game one by one
it's way easier to program something to not work than to edit the maps. Like if someone wanted to stop the headlights on a car working, it would be way easier to disconnect a wire that controls them both than to physical remove the headlights. So in a game, anything that is related to cages, just turn off the ability for cages to be destroyed instead of editing every cage.
@@EndlessDelusion Several cages were destroyed in this video, though. And many of the changes were specific edits, like turning a platform into a wall. They really did go out of their way.
@@SimpleAmadeus I'd wager they went for a mixed approach. For the most part the anti-piracy protection probably simply breaks the scripts and game logic, but they also added a few things here and there manually for good measure.
I dont think they went through each map to add anti piracy stuff to it. Certain things can be effected to all maps by tempering with the game's logic. Like the breakable cages, lvl/map exits, etc.
Yeah, I was wondering if these measures were what caused the web to break in the 3DS version, but I guess not. Also I wonder if they realised the anti-piracy was triggering on legit copies, so they added in the pirate head at the last minute, since to most people they'd think the game was extremely broken and buggy for no reason.
Okay, this actually solves one of my childhood experiences with the game since my dad just pirated the PC version. The Head never popped up and the only effect that triggered was broken exit #7 around 6:19 Naturally that was the end of my playthrough but it's nice to finally have closure on that.
i think an important thing to highlight here is why a team or someone on the team would go through this effort. a great game to compare to is spyro: year of the dragon, which had many layers of anti-piracy which pirates had to gradually peel away. it had the same tactic as this does; an initial "you pirated the game!" warning that was easily patched out. most games stopped there, so most pirate groups stopped there. they'd release the crack or copy, pirate players would get their hands on it, and it would become apparent in the course of a few days that something was wrong. but then there's the extra level of genius; for a while, it probably wouldn't be clear that these were anti-piracy measures. there would be bug reports, or users might not get the right info, or all they might say is "broken patch! fix it!" it probably wouldn't take long to figure this out, but that's not the point; the point then is for every additional layer to get gradually peeled back. pirate groups would have to dedicate significant time and energy to check for these problems, and inevitably, they'd miss some because of how insidious some of these changes are. it's not unlikely that some of the parts where you can still progress in spite of removed objects are unintentional; they might be there to give the pirates respite, thinking "okay, that level's got nothing, that's the last one" or even cause problems for users down the line and make the pirate groups have to scour some more. as you note in the description, a dev interview claims this kept a working crack from being made for ten months. that's dream territory for a big release like this; there's a common saying in the industry that games make the majority of their sales in the first two weeks. that's the target spyro and rayman 2 were aiming for, and both massively exceeded it. job well done on that front, i'd say
Because normal security measures are usually cracked within a week and if you embed this kind of stuff into the game, it'll take longer to decode it or find an exploit to bypass it and it increases the number of sales by a small margin.
Nope. The fix to the pirate face is also the fix to every other security measure. And that's to trick the game into thinking you have the CD in. Try again.
Wow, that's pretty interesting priacy measures beyond that small pirate head. It essentially breaks the game and renders it unplayable. I can only imagine long it could have taken to program. Since, everything must have been hardcoded. Well done on the video. I will look forward to see more like this in the future.
20 years later and I stumble upon this and finally get closure. As a kid I simply didnt understand what was happening when the robot pirate head appeared. It was the reason I never could finish a certain level with the clark bossfight and had to resort to a cheat from a game magazine to skip that level. I'm tempted to go to GOG and get the game to finish it once and for all.
This game has it worse than Spyro! And you'd think that the pirate head and maybe just having 1 level exit being broken would've been enough to deter pirates. But look at all those small changes all over the place.
When I was young (in 2001 to be exact) I've found this beautiful CD in a tabaco shop. (The one with a tiny figure) Rayman 2, cost me 15€, the game was beautiful, and after a while, I got this pirate head on the level with the whale. You cannot swim with this head on your screen, you can only play naturally but no swimming. I remember trying and falling in the "aquarium" to the right, I managed to complete the level with this head. Jumping everywhere and finding spot to exploit...I still don't know how i've managed to do this, that was one of the best day of my life. That was an orignal copy of the game, piracy have long day, trust me.
Most of these changes seem to be just the pirate screen disabling a vast majority of level progress, transition and platform movement triggers. Very clever
Bruh I picked this game up from a second hand store got about 70% through the game with all Yellow lums so far only to run into that bug. I was really confused and thought there was legit another CD I needed to finish the game
yup, never finished this game because I thought the toy store forgot to put a second disc in the huge box it came in. Couple years ago my friend told me this was anti-piracy triggered by a bug, I doubt the receipt would still be valid after 22 years
This explains a ton to me. I had the same mysterious error as a kid. I even managed to beat one level (8:49) with his stupid face on the screen, I simply refused to give up. It was extremly hard but I managed to beat it. Sadly, a few more levels further ahead it happened again but that time I couldn't beat the level. (12:32). I could jump down there just fine, but I couldn't turn the cogwheels that's you supposed to. Perhaps it worked but I couldn't see if anything happened. I was devastated. I couldn't complete my favorite game. Not until many years later (Also on the 3DS many more years later, hehe) I still have that original CD, btw. It's in pretty bad condition though.
I got this gem of a game as my first PC game and it was awesome. Times when Gamepads weren't like nowdays with Bluetooth and adapters. I got a very crappy, cheap Pad so it was very difficult
So let me get this straight. Ubisoft made it so that if the DRM detects you are playing a pirated copy it will alter the game a bit and display that graphic, but because their DRM sucks and was triggering false alarms on legit copies they removed it in a patch, right ? Cuz I had this game from a magazine in 2003, legit copy but it had no DRM, you could just copy it.
This was a really good opening to the video, but when you went into all the different blocking mechanisms it got really boring. You need to add more info or change the topic a little after you have shown a few examples
Dang, I never knew what that was! 0:40. I had a legal copy, but our pc wasn't the greatest, and so the letters were just blocks so I had no clue what it said.. :O
Oh damn. My original CD was also covered with a pirate face. But only when I arrived to the moving chair level. Up until that point it was all normal. I was always so sad about that :(
Weird, I had a burned cd copy of the game back in the day . . . it worked perfectly, none of these protections appeared. It was the french version, maybe it's the reason ?
i had the original big box version release when i was a kid and i could never get past a certain level because i always got the missing cd thing even though i had completely legit version bought from store shelf, still to this day im slightly salty about it
See what they SHOULD have done is what my PS2 copy of the game fucking did to me is lock you in the cave of bad dreams until you beat the level. If I tried to exit the level, I just hit an infinite loading loop forever. That... PETRIFIED me as a kid... And I had a legit copy damnit!
This was a really cool video. I think piracy though is really healthy for the game industry in particular. I pirated Elden ring because I didn't have the money to waste on it at release. Ended up enjoying it but didn't appreciate the terrible launch performance so I deleted it and bought it on Xbox a few days later. If I hadn't have pirated it the game would have slipped into the back of my mind and most likely I would never have bought it until it went on a deep sale in half a years time anyway
I'd say that they're twats for doing this, but this really is quite impressive and dedicated in terms of copyright protection. You've got to give them a thumbs up for this, even if you don't like the fact that you can't copy their game. It's also quite unnerving...
huh?! I had pirated copy of this game when I was young. I finished it easily, without any strange things. How is it possible that I learn about those things now? :O
The thing is why bother doing this for the entire game because surly if the first level is unbeatable you wouldnt be able to reach the later levels so unless you could use someone elses save you would never be able to see the later levels anyway so the piracy protection on thoses levels seams pointless
back then I'd always download no-cd cracks even if I had the legit copy, it was way too annoying to keep on swaping the discs and you would quickly ruin your discs Also, do you remember the universal keygens for EA games? It would find and insert the key for you in a second instead of you entering the key from your box manually, the antypiracy protections were way too annoying back then.... Installing sims 2 with all the DLCs was the worst chore if you did not use keygens and cracks.
Ironically enough as a kid I had a pirated version of this game and it worked fine, so its another case of developers going so hard on piracy that they actually hurt legitimate users.
It's hilarious, how the efforts to harm pirates have always, from day one, caused more harm to official customers than the intended targets. I remember this game, I'm glad I didn't have any of these issues.
Yup, it's always a horrible idea. Typical example of how many people (be it in business, politics, or anything) love to punish the innocent, because it makes them feel safer... They neither care nor realize that all it leads to is good peoples freedom and privacy being taken away. (which is getting worse and worse nowadays, VERY fast...)
Really interesting that they put in so many lines of protection. Just making the first cage unbreakable would have been enough to stop any regular player.
Unless you got a save file from somewhere an skipped the first mission. Only to download 200 more save files to finish the game at all. Nope. Rather buying the game. Or getting better xrack.
I remember that both me and a friend bought same release of this game (i think it was the 'Ubisoft eXclusive' edition). Both on my pc with my disk and on his pc with his disk, the game would always end up showing this anti-piracy head just when the battle with Foutch would start. I remember seeing some glimpses of him in the corner of the screen and I remember that I would constantly hear the dying in lava sound effect. We would spent complete afternoons finishing the level in different ways to figure out if we were doing something wrong. Also we would get our parents (English is not our native language) to translate the text and try to figure this out together with them. It was long before we had access to the internet so at some point we had to quit trying and accept that Rayman 2 ended at the start of the fight with Foutch. 2 years later we found a classmate that was able to complete the game with his copy and we were amazed to finally see the 4 or 5 remaining levels in the game. Now after 22 years I finally figured out what was going on back then. It angers me that Ubisoft was already messing with my gaming experience around 22 years ago.
1:22 YOOO! I got that pirate head as a kid, and everyone in my family was confused as to why. Never realized it could've been because of piracy! (We had made a copy of the DVD and lost the original, so that's why it showed up.) I remember almost completing a difficult keg-flying segment even with the pirate face present, and I was so mad that I hit the wall. It's nice to know that I probably wouldn't have been able to finish the stage/game anyway. Very interesting video!
I thought this would just be riding the "scary anti piracy screen" meme that got started by Mario Party DS, didn't expect an actual serious in-depth video. Well done!
I hate that meme so much because of all the children promoting those fake anti piracy screens and making it a hassle when those kinds pop up when looking for real ones
@@Sean-D78 yeah that's exactly why i hate it, i love seeing stuff about genuine antipiracy in games and all those annoying children are doing are making it harder to find
Had no idea this game even had anti-piracy measures, so this is very interesting! It's almost funny how many things they changed to make sure the player couldn't progress, even though just a few of them would be enough for any person to stop playing.
They really liked removing things from the SET Data for these measures didn't they? Jesus the fact that they were hiding traps all the way to the very end of the game. They REALLY didn't want pirated copies to be played.
You know what would've been funny? If the text below thd pirate head said a comical threat. Nothing scary, but something silly like "You are an inferior pirate! Surrender yourself now!" Or "Thd only pirates we want are ones of metal! Your flesh is weak!"
It's always cool to see anti-piracy mess with how the game is played. It would be sick to see a game where, it'll tell you that it knows you're playing a pirated version, and then it makes the game so immensely difficult that it's almost impossible to finish, but it can be completed. This mode could work as an unlockable "pirate" difficulty in the official version so that people won't go out of their way to get a pirated copy just for a harder game.
@@ninjawithnobalance Another one is Batman: Arkham Asylum. But there was many, many, many games which did things like this, particularly on the older computers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga.
Oh so THAT is why my game bugged out on CD! I fixed itself when I reinstalled it but I think I got it when I was installing it and my pc died 1/2 way through; but counted it finished. It does explain why the Henchbots scared me as a kid; I didn't have any anti-piracy stuff appear as a kid so I didn't know what this was. Thought it was a scary game. (Then I got sonic CD with a bugged physical CD). Thanks for the video, I honestly thought I was being unreasonably scared of the game as a kid.
Incidentally, in the game Headliner by Unbound Creations, if you're playing a pirated version it actually unlocks an added background storyline about software pirates hurting the game industry but then eventually rallying around independent creators to save the day.
I imagine a single coder was told to simply make the game unplayable if it's pirated, and he just ahead and ruined one thing in almost every level lol I doubt he or she expected anybody to be able to hack the game like this so it was probably an inside joke or prank
Actually this was done by a team with a directive to investigate the use of DLCs (then a futuristic concept) to unlock parts of the game that were supposed to be there. The general concept was to sell the game playable but you had to buy things to finish levels. This way you get to sell the same game 50 times each time asking for a small amount of money that totals way higher than the usual price. It feels a bit rough and "broken" rather than a "dlc to unlock the having level 2 expansion" as this was the first attempt and they didn't know how to hide it very well so instead of letting you access full levels as content they broke the way for you to reach it while not hiding the fact that it's already there.
Oh my god, yes! 11:46 - this exactly what to me, when when a giant pirate face appeared on my screen and Rayman just kept dying on lava! I though I was supposed to fight the boss by keep flying, but nope! I never even knew, that the platform was missing, because how should I know, that my legal copy had that bug, without even realising that the pirate face was supped to be an anti-piracy message. (How ironic) I mean, at least NOW I know, why I haven’t finished the game on PC, but managed to do it on PS1.
That explains the missing web in the 3DS version. Also, some of those missing platform jumps that are still doable makes me wish they would've thrown in an optional hard mode.
@@miymoto128 Ah, maybe I misremembered. I think I saw a GameFAQs thread talking about it, but maybe they were talking about emulating it, or they just got unlucky with a faulty cartridge.
My copy never had this piracy bug, and could complete the game normally. Ironic, being that my dad would only let me have games if he wasn’t busy enough to pirate them. It just so happened that this game was one of the non-pirated ones - a present from my aunt.
Very interesting video. It must have been a lot of work so thank you for documenting all this. I think walking around in the loading zones is very interesting.
I recognise a lot of these from working on the RMG. It's interesting to see just how many things are broken by the anti-piracy triggers coming into effect. Makes you wonder if they spent some development time going in and deliberately choosing which things to remove as an anti-piracy measure, or if they just randomly removed say half of all objects from the game...? Especially the Pirate Ghost is intriguing. Also inspiring... hmmm new ideas brewing...
@@JuiceboxCE oh hello! Raymap Game - a project in Unity that for a time was trying to recreate Rayman 2 from its base art assets and programming wholly new code that was trying to get as faithfully close to feeling like the original as possible. I don't know if the project is still alive, but my contribution to it has ended (for now...?).
@@JuiceboxCE there's a couple of vids on my channel about the Waypoint system I was working on if you want to get a small intro in what the project looked like back then. But it's a bit of a valedictorian exercise, shall we say, because I'm pretty sure my systems are not (currently) part of the project anymore x)
@@Shrooblord I'm unfortunately not tech savvy, however I absolutely love the idea of being as much. Played around with the Rayman 2 browser Unity project you had linked in a video about Foutch! Also, watching the rest of your videos on that project, I have always found myself absolutely fascinated by stuff like this. You tech wizards do such amazing things. Just been having a lot of fun seeing shared love for Rayman 2 especially. I hope you don't mind, I was hoping I could ask you how you came to start your journey in technical knowhow? To get to where you are today, and to be able to work on projects like you did with that Rayman 2 project? I do apologize if I'm being too nosey, I've recently started working in a datacenter and have found myself absolutely fascinated by the way the coding engineers talk and work. Stuff like this is increasingly fascinating to me, however it's so insanely broad, it's *very* daunting finding a foundation for these sorts of things! Thanks for your time, either way, you've been fun talkin to!
This happened to me as a kid during a boss fight midway through the game, It was the orange triangle head guy in the thorn level. I haven't played the game since, i haven't seen anything past that point in the game either. So Rayman 2 has just stayed in my mind as an unbeatable game for the longest time. I know that i could just buy another copy and finish it, but i just got hit by this super nostalgic memory of how i felt in the moment when i was a kid.
Instead of saying "MISSING DISC" they would put "Oh ow, Rayman can't stop The robo-pirates because You are a pirate for pirating this Game, get a leggit copy of Rayman 2 and report this copy immeditly!"
If I was a game dev and programmed in some anti piracy I wouldn't make the game unplayable...instead I would actually make the game hard as balls and annoying as shit whilst still being theoretically possible to beat. like having it locked to some sort of difficulty that can't normally be accessed and have it called "A pirates life for me" or something. If the person who pirated the game were to beat it in this state It would actually remove the anti piracy and let them have the game as intended completely free of charge. If a person goes through all that trouble just so they don't have to pay for a video game I am going to respect the dedication they have to something so pointless and you bet I am gonna reward them for overcoming the odds. Hell I would even add a hall of fame feature, like a leader board for all of those who completed the game like this to add a sort of insensitive to pirate it if people were dedicated to the challenge. Seriously I have mad respect for people who complete hard games and I am one of them. I have beaten getting over it 66 times now as well as a plethora of other hard games XD. Now this difficulty would be down right unfair, I am talking things that wouldn't normally happen like its a Mario 64 corruption mod or Minecraft corruption mod where it will randomly screw with you and make shit very difficult whilst still being theoretically possible to beat. I would probably call the game "Pay or Pirate" but have it have nothing to do with the name. I would make it very clear that I don't mind if you pirate the game so long as you beat it.
You ask "why?" yet the answer is obvious. To make it as tedious as possible to fully crack the game. Most people distributing copied games at the time would patch the initial anti-piracy check (like you did) and leave it at that. Thinking they're done it. Next thing you know they're spending weeks, if not months trying to hunt down and patch every little mishap that occurs from the checks because the people taking said copies would complain about the game being broken. Yet by the time they patched all of these occurrences the game would have already sold the copies it needed to so said measures would have been deemed a success.
i just keep admiring the art direction in this game. it's old, but it doesn't look dated at all. it looks intentionally simple. the low res textures don't look blurry, they just look stylized (and pleasantly so). everything is just so well made and go together flawlessly. timeless art direction. kinda miss this stuff with newer games.
I wouldn't say it doesn't look dated, because it certainly lacks detail in some areas and/or aspects.
However, i say that as someone who absolutely *adores* this style! And i, too, very much miss this kind of technique to create games.
It has so much style and life. Almost every single texture just *oozes* character!
Rayman Revolution, the remaster for PS2, gets quite close to making it look truly timeless, with a lot of small details added to make some areas feel much more... well, detailed! (even if some areas got more love than others)
Some areas really do hold up almost perfectly!
I often replay some levels on an emulator with texture filtering turned off, just to appreciate not just the atmosphere, but even the textures themselves. The art really is fantastic!
It's just not the same nowadays... And anyone who calls that "nostalgia" is simply blinded by their own rose-tinted glasses for the "new" and "modern"...
every now and again I come across an indie game with a certain quality to its art direction that makes me think 'these devs for sure played rayman 2 as a kid'
2D games like Donkey Kong Country and the console ports of Street Fighter 2 get a lot of praise for how good they looked within the confines of their respective hardware limitations and I think Rayman 2 is similarly on that level, untouchable by other 3D platformers of the era.
also the PS2 version is a great upscale/remaster that doesn't detract from the original's charm at all, in my opinion anyway
Sphinx and The Cursed Mummy has aged similarly incredibly well
@@lovofofo the PS2 version is focused on combat to such a degree that it feel much less fun. The changes to level order/progression are annoying too but that might be just me loving the original version.
holy crap, this has been buggin me for 20 years! I had a perfectly legal copy of this game and the pirate face happened to me, every single time at the exact same point, me, my brother and my parents were so confused, we thought the game originally had 2 discs or something and we needed to switch, but we only had 1 disc, we even had a big fight at the store because we wanted our money back, because it made the game unplayable for 12 year old me, and we didn't had internet back then, so we didn't know about a patch, this is such a revelation to me, the big conundrum finally solved
Did you get the money back?
@@Konyad nop we didn't
@@xelda1990 Wow, that's disgusting...
"What's that? Our product doesn't work...? Well you already paid so *f*ck you!!!"*
And this is also why anti-piracy is such a horrible idea, because more often than not it only hurts the consumer... Which is *never okay.*
Same for me, everytime I entered Whale Bay. And today, I learn it could've been avoided...
Imagine getting a pirared copy from a relative or something for your birthday when you where a kid without knowing it is pirated and getting relatively far into the game just to get stuck because of a missing platform you don't even know is supposed to be there. That must be so frustrating.
i mean, the pirate head would already be very annoying
Then you still had a fairly good childhood. I used to play the pirated version of Spyro 3 as a kid. And this changed me as a person.
for a regular player that part with the platform would have actually been impossible to get to lol. you need to break the first cage you encounter in order to access the hub world to get to that level. so there would have been no way to get there without hacking using a pirated copy.
@@El_Fabricio OH SHIT!!!
@@El_Fabricio I bought a Spyro 3 CD as a kid from this shady store and I was so excited because I have played and 100% Ripto's Rage. I was so mad because random eggs from different worlds would just disappear from the Atlas or freed characters would randomly be locked again even after freeing them. I played through it for a number of times each with different outcomes. Little did I know my CD was a pirated one :(
As many protections this game contains, I think they kinda missed the opportunity to make a specific one for Cave of Bad Dreams by removing the option "No Treasure for me!" and have only "I want the treasure!" available.
That's exactly what I was thinking
At least you could still run Treasure% in that case 😜
Rayman's face next to the health bar creeps me out. The normal one looks like he's gonna light my cereal on fire just because I didn't share. And the near death one looks like he's sorry for accidentally setting your placemat on fire after trying to light your cereal on fire.
Crazy how they went through the hassle to modify parts of every maps.
They really didn't want you to make ANY progress as soon as a copy was detected as pirated
honestly i just think the game outright disables some entities and deactivates level stuff like triggers and events when the anti piracy check gets tripped, i don't think someone on the team went all their way out to put these irregularities in the game one by one
it's way easier to program something to not work than to edit the maps. Like if someone wanted to stop the headlights on a car working, it would be way easier to disconnect a wire that controls them both than to physical remove the headlights. So in a game, anything that is related to cages, just turn off the ability for cages to be destroyed instead of editing every cage.
@@EndlessDelusion Several cages were destroyed in this video, though. And many of the changes were specific edits, like turning a platform into a wall. They really did go out of their way.
@@SimpleAmadeus I'd wager they went for a mixed approach. For the most part the anti-piracy protection probably simply breaks the scripts and game logic, but they also added a few things here and there manually for good measure.
I dont think they went through each map to add anti piracy stuff to it.
Certain things can be effected to all maps by tempering with the game's logic.
Like the breakable cages, lvl/map exits, etc.
12:42
At least the web is working unlike in the 3DS version...
Yeah, I was wondering if these measures were what caused the web to break in the 3DS version, but I guess not.
Also I wonder if they realised the anti-piracy was triggering on legit copies, so they added in the pirate head at the last minute, since to most people they'd think the game was extremely broken and buggy for no reason.
3ds? I have n64 and playstation versions, I never heard of no goddam 3ds
@@chilldedede
The game was released on lots of platforms.
@@AuToMaNiAk005 ik like playstation, dream cast I think, n64, Gameboy advanced and more
@@chilldedede
N64, PC, Dreamcast, Game Boy Color, PS1, PS2, NDS, 3DS and iOS.
8:28 Fun Fact that "Broken Purple Lum" it's the same model of Yellow Lum from PS1 version
Okay, this actually solves one of my childhood experiences with the game since my dad just pirated the PC version. The Head never popped up and the only effect that triggered was broken exit #7 around 6:19
Naturally that was the end of my playthrough but it's nice to finally have closure on that.
i think an important thing to highlight here is why a team or someone on the team would go through this effort. a great game to compare to is spyro: year of the dragon, which had many layers of anti-piracy which pirates had to gradually peel away. it had the same tactic as this does; an initial "you pirated the game!" warning that was easily patched out. most games stopped there, so most pirate groups stopped there. they'd release the crack or copy, pirate players would get their hands on it, and it would become apparent in the course of a few days that something was wrong.
but then there's the extra level of genius; for a while, it probably wouldn't be clear that these were anti-piracy measures. there would be bug reports, or users might not get the right info, or all they might say is "broken patch! fix it!" it probably wouldn't take long to figure this out, but that's not the point; the point then is for every additional layer to get gradually peeled back. pirate groups would have to dedicate significant time and energy to check for these problems, and inevitably, they'd miss some because of how insidious some of these changes are. it's not unlikely that some of the parts where you can still progress in spite of removed objects are unintentional; they might be there to give the pirates respite, thinking "okay, that level's got nothing, that's the last one" or even cause problems for users down the line and make the pirate groups have to scour some more.
as you note in the description, a dev interview claims this kept a working crack from being made for ten months. that's dream territory for a big release like this; there's a common saying in the industry that games make the majority of their sales in the first two weeks. that's the target spyro and rayman 2 were aiming for, and both massively exceeded it. job well done on that front, i'd say
Because normal security measures are usually cracked within a week and if you embed this kind of stuff into the game, it'll take longer to decode it or find an exploit to bypass it and it increases the number of sales by a small margin.
Nope. The fix to the pirate face is also the fix to every other security measure. And that's to trick the game into thinking you have the CD in. Try again.
bullshit
Wow, that's pretty interesting priacy measures beyond that small pirate head. It essentially breaks the game and renders it unplayable. I can only imagine long it could have taken to program. Since, everything must have been hardcoded. Well done on the video. I will look forward to see more like this in the future.
20 years later and I stumble upon this and finally get closure. As a kid I simply didnt understand what was happening when the robot pirate head appeared. It was the reason I never could finish a certain level with the clark bossfight and had to resort to a cheat from a game magazine to skip that level. I'm tempted to go to GOG and get the game to finish it once and for all.
Really informative and interesting video! I never knew Rayman 2 even had any anti-piracy protection.
Impressive video dude, every video you upload of Rayman 2 just makes me wanna do a full playthrough all over again. Lekker bezig man!
This game has it worse than Spyro! And you'd think that the pirate head and maybe just having 1 level exit being broken would've been enough to deter pirates. But look at all those small changes all over the place.
Why would they implement all this if the player can't see past the pirate head anyway?
When I was young (in 2001 to be exact) I've found this beautiful CD in a tabaco shop. (The one with a tiny figure)
Rayman 2, cost me 15€, the game was beautiful, and after a while, I got this pirate head on the level with the whale. You cannot swim with this head on your screen, you can only play naturally but no swimming. I remember trying and falling in the "aquarium" to the right, I managed to complete the level with this head. Jumping everywhere and finding spot to exploit...I still don't know how i've managed to do this, that was one of the best day of my life.
That was an orignal copy of the game, piracy have long day, trust me.
Most of these changes seem to be just the pirate screen disabling a vast majority of level progress, transition and platform movement triggers. Very clever
I really loved this game. I believe settlers 2 have similar protections where, for example, smelter is producing pigs instead of metal
Ubisoft call this piracy protection, EA call this a game working as intended
6:28 2/0 cages?
Bruh I picked this game up from a second hand store got about 70% through the game with all Yellow lums so far only to run into that bug. I was really confused and thought there was legit another CD I needed to finish the game
one of the funniest things about this is... I pirated this game as a kid, and it never broke for me.
Kind of similar with Spyro 3 where gamebreaking shenanigans would occur more and more as the game progressed if pirated
2:12 That sound effect in the music for riding the shell was later used in Pizza Tower when you hit the taunt button
It's a very common sample on Roland keyboards! I've heard it being called "Philly Hit"
@@redbird_studios INTRESTING
Why would anyone even want to pirate Rayman 2?
I really hope the Anti-Piracy protection in Rayman 2 prevents future generations from ever playing it.
yup, never finished this game because I thought the toy store forgot to put a second disc in the huge box it came in.
Couple years ago my friend told me this was anti-piracy triggered by a bug, I doubt the receipt would still be valid after 22 years
That's nice to know. Gladly i played the DS and 3DS version so it never happened to me
This explains a ton to me. I had the same mysterious error as a kid. I even managed to beat one level (8:49) with his stupid face on the screen, I simply refused to give up. It was extremly hard but I managed to beat it.
Sadly, a few more levels further ahead it happened again but that time I couldn't beat the level. (12:32). I could jump down there just fine, but I couldn't turn the cogwheels that's you supposed to. Perhaps it worked but I couldn't see if anything happened. I was devastated. I couldn't complete my favorite game. Not until many years later (Also on the 3DS many more years later, hehe)
I still have that original CD, btw. It's in pretty bad condition though.
Fun thing.
I bought this game from gamestop a couple years ago.
turns out it was a pirated version.
I got this gem of a game as my first PC game and it was awesome. Times when Gamepads weren't like nowdays with Bluetooth and adapters. I got a very crappy, cheap Pad so it was very difficult
HOW IS THIS NOT ON THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR?!
I feel like this video would have greatly benefited from some narration.
So let me get this straight. Ubisoft made it so that if the DRM detects you are playing a pirated copy it will alter the game a bit and display that graphic, but because their DRM sucks and was triggering false alarms on legit copies they removed it in a patch, right ? Cuz I had this game from a magazine in 2003, legit copy but it had no DRM, you could just copy it.
So... Ubisoft just thinks rainbow six: siege is pirated by the players?
This was a really good opening to the video, but when you went into all the different blocking mechanisms it got really boring. You need to add more info or change the topic a little after you have shown a few examples
I got this free from Epic and am almost certain it's broken. I tried getting it to play and it felt broke. Might try again now after seeing this.
Dang, I never knew what that was! 0:40. I had a legal copy, but our pc wasn't the greatest, and so the letters were just blocks so I had no clue what it said.. :O
Ubisoft the true pioneers of DRM.
Oh damn. My original CD was also covered with a pirate face. But only when I arrived to the moving chair level. Up until that point it was all normal. I was always so sad about that :(
It was also the greatest game ever
Weird, I had a burned cd copy of the game back in the day . . . it worked perfectly, none of these protections appeared.
It was the french version, maybe it's the reason ?
can you beat the game on "pirate" mode?
maybe there's really broken glitches to help you get past the obstacles
I'm curious how did you get through that shitshow
Crazy and genius at the same time!
Nah that’s not an anti-piracy protection, it’s Just a normal ubibug game
O wow now I'm feeling very special because I had a simple burned copy of my classmates original game and somehow had no issues with it ^^"
How ironic how the copy protection failed to protect against copying but succeeded at making the game impossible to finish on some legit discs ;)
7:53 Way to go Robin. I just laughed my butt off.
Very interesting, cool vid!
i had the original big box version release when i was a kid and i could never get past a certain level because i always got the missing cd thing even though i had completely legit version bought from store shelf, still to this day im slightly salty about it
See what they SHOULD have done is what my PS2 copy of the game fucking did to me is lock you in the cave of bad dreams until you beat the level. If I tried to exit the level, I just hit an infinite loading loop forever.
That... PETRIFIED me as a kid... And I had a legit copy damnit!
This was a really cool video.
I think piracy though is really healthy for the game industry in particular.
I pirated Elden ring because I didn't have the money to waste on it at release. Ended up enjoying it but didn't appreciate the terrible launch performance so I deleted it and bought it on Xbox a few days later.
If I hadn't have pirated it the game would have slipped into the back of my mind and most likely I would never have bought it until it went on a deep sale in half a years time anyway
I'd say that they're twats for doing this, but this really is quite impressive and dedicated in terms of copyright protection. You've got to give them a thumbs up for this, even if you don't like the fact that you can't copy their game.
It's also quite unnerving...
huh?! I had pirated copy of this game when I was young. I finished it easily, without any strange things. How is it possible that I learn about those things now? :O
The thing is why bother doing this for the entire game because surly if the first level is unbeatable you wouldnt be able to reach the later levels so unless you could use someone elses save you would never be able to see the later levels anyway so the piracy protection on thoses levels seams pointless
I had a legal copy of the game couldn't get past the lava boss coz it would constantly say insert disk, only completed it on psx burnt copy lol
But can you still beat the game?
Holy crap this is just EXCESSIVE
back then I'd always download no-cd cracks even if I had the legit copy, it was way too annoying to keep on swaping the discs and you would quickly ruin your discs
Also, do you remember the universal keygens for EA games? It would find and insert the key for you in a second instead of you entering the key from your box manually, the antypiracy protections were way too annoying back then.... Installing sims 2 with all the DLCs was the worst chore if you did not use keygens and cracks.
Ironically enough as a kid I had a pirated version of this game and it worked fine, so its another case of developers going so hard on piracy that they actually hurt legitimate users.
It's hilarious, how the efforts to harm pirates have always, from day one, caused more harm to official customers than the intended targets. I remember this game, I'm glad I didn't have any of these issues.
Yup, it's always a horrible idea.
Typical example of how many people (be it in business, politics, or anything) love to punish the innocent, because it makes them feel safer...
They neither care nor realize that all it leads to is good peoples freedom and privacy being taken away. (which is getting worse and worse nowadays, VERY fast...)
Really interesting that they put in so many lines of protection. Just making the first cage unbreakable would have been enough to stop any regular player.
Unless you got a save file from somewhere an skipped the first mission.
Only to download 200 more save files to finish the game at all.
Nope. Rather buying the game. Or getting better xrack.
I imagine the point was to make life harder for any hackers trying to circumvent the anti-piracy checks one by one.
Break the game as much as possible when it knows its a fake
Best anti piracy feature
It's most probably not on purpose. The warning sign just dissable asset loading, so nothing loads at all. Thats why you cant do almost anything.
@@YamiSpyro2011 if you like this you should look up spyro 3's anti piracy :D
So Ubisoft really hates your guts if you didn't gave them any money
Todays Ubisoft takes your money and still hates you
I remember that both me and a friend bought same release of this game (i think it was the 'Ubisoft eXclusive' edition).
Both on my pc with my disk and on his pc with his disk, the game would always end up showing this anti-piracy head just when the battle with Foutch would start. I remember seeing some glimpses of him in the corner of the screen and I remember that I would constantly hear the dying in lava sound effect. We would spent complete afternoons finishing the level in different ways to figure out if we were doing something wrong. Also we would get our parents (English is not our native language) to translate the text and try to figure this out together with them.
It was long before we had access to the internet so at some point we had to quit trying and accept that Rayman 2 ended at the start of the fight with Foutch.
2 years later we found a classmate that was able to complete the game with his copy and we were amazed to finally see the 4 or 5 remaining levels in the game.
Now after 22 years I finally figured out what was going on back then. It angers me that Ubisoft was already messing with my gaming experience around 22 years ago.
Happened at the same point for me. We had internet access, but I wasn't aware of there being a patch or anything.
1:22 YOOO! I got that pirate head as a kid, and everyone in my family was confused as to why. Never realized it could've been because of piracy! (We had made a copy of the DVD and lost the original, so that's why it showed up.) I remember almost completing a difficult keg-flying segment even with the pirate face present, and I was so mad that I hit the wall. It's nice to know that I probably wouldn't have been able to finish the stage/game anyway. Very interesting video!
..razorbeard would have been your final stop
I thought this would just be riding the "scary anti piracy screen" meme that got started by Mario Party DS, didn't expect an actual serious in-depth video. Well done!
I hate that meme so much because of all the children promoting those fake anti piracy screens and making it a hassle when those kinds pop up when looking for real ones
@@Sean-D78 yeah that's exactly why i hate it, i love seeing stuff about genuine antipiracy in games and all those annoying children are doing are making it harder to find
lol those videos should say "fake antipiracy" so that no one gets confused.
@@TheUltimateRare unfortunately the annoying children want their clickbait views
@@subg9165 can kids even upload on youtube? isn't uploading 13+? Does anyone follow the rules on this site? lol
A very interesting video, I had no idea there was more than just the pirate head! Well done
Had no idea this game even had anti-piracy measures, so this is very interesting! It's almost funny how many things they changed to make sure the player couldn't progress, even though just a few of them would be enough for any person to stop playing.
They really liked removing things from the SET Data for these measures didn't they?
Jesus the fact that they were hiding traps all the way to the very end of the game. They REALLY didn't want pirated copies to be played.
Honestly, if I were paid/enabled to be this extra by my boss, I'd be living the dream lol
Weird that they made all these changes when the unbreakable first cage alone makes completing the game impossible.
Not if you have 100% save file that unlocks every level
kinda doesn't matter if you can't finish it if you you've played 99% of it already tho
11:45 "This is fine"
Then he slowly realizes the situation
11:47 "Oow! My feets are burning!"
They likely wanted to prevent save sharing between a legit copy and a pirated. This is a very basic anti-piracy method which was defeated easily.
You know what would've been funny? If the text below thd pirate head said a comical threat. Nothing scary, but something silly like "You are an inferior pirate! Surrender yourself now!" Or "Thd only pirates we want are ones of metal! Your flesh is weak!"
lmao at the fact the web they broke in rayman 3D is still working
It's always cool to see anti-piracy mess with how the game is played. It would be sick to see a game where, it'll tell you that it knows you're playing a pirated version, and then it makes the game so immensely difficult that it's almost impossible to finish, but it can be completed. This mode could work as an unlockable "pirate" difficulty in the official version so that people won't go out of their way to get a pirated copy just for a harder game.
This is exactly what game dev tycoon does
Oh there is . And quite a few with that protection .
@@ninjawithnobalance For example?
@@kokoshustrinoi2405 Spyro 3
@@ninjawithnobalance Another one is Batman: Arkham Asylum. But there was many, many, many games which did things like this, particularly on the older computers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga.
5:18 I know Robo Pirates can be zombies, but ghosts? This is ridiculous!
Pretty sure even coming across ONE of these would have made me beg my mum to buy me the game XD Interesting amount of measures though!
Still less broken than rayman 3D
Oh so THAT is why my game bugged out on CD!
I fixed itself when I reinstalled it but I think I got it when I was installing it and my pc died 1/2 way through; but counted it finished.
It does explain why the Henchbots scared me as a kid; I didn't have any anti-piracy stuff appear as a kid so I didn't know what this was. Thought it was a scary game. (Then I got sonic CD with a bugged physical CD).
Thanks for the video, I honestly thought I was being unreasonably scared of the game as a kid.
I wonder if there’s been any games where the anti-piracy measures make the game unsatisfyingly easy instead.
No, but thanks for the idea
I love this idea
Incidentally, in the game Headliner by Unbound Creations, if you're playing a pirated version it actually unlocks an added background storyline about software pirates hurting the game industry but then eventually rallying around independent creators to save the day.
I imagine a single coder was told to simply make the game unplayable if it's pirated, and he just ahead and ruined one thing in almost every level lol
I doubt he or she expected anybody to be able to hack the game like this so it was probably an inside joke or prank
or just ubisoft being ubisoft
@@me67galaxylife For Ubisoft Montpellier is definetly not the case
@@TornaderX could you elaborate ?
Actually this was done by a team with a directive to investigate the use of DLCs (then a futuristic concept) to unlock parts of the game that were supposed to be there.
The general concept was to sell the game playable but you had to buy things to finish levels.
This way you get to sell the same game 50 times each time asking for a small amount of money that totals way higher than the usual price.
It feels a bit rough and "broken" rather than a "dlc to unlock the having level 2 expansion" as this was the first attempt and they didn't know how to hide it very well so instead of letting you access full levels as content they broke the way for you to reach it while not hiding the fact that it's already there.
@@blueplayer6197 really ?
Oh my god, yes!
11:46 - this exactly what to me, when when a giant pirate face appeared on my screen and Rayman just kept dying on lava! I though I was supposed to fight the boss by keep flying, but nope! I never even knew, that the platform was missing, because how should I know, that my legal copy had that bug, without even realising that the pirate face was supped to be an anti-piracy message. (How ironic)
I mean, at least NOW I know, why I haven’t finished the game on PC, but managed to do it on PS1.
So did I!
I could play normally up till that point and had no idea what was going on and couldn't play further.
Extraordinarily fascinating.
Funny how this just looks like an unfinished version of the game 🤔
My original version I bought from the store had that pirate head appearing whenever I was at the fire boss. Imagine the dissapointment as a child....
I didnt have the pirate head, but I do remember my copy always crashing at the fire boss start.
I didn't know there were any game breakers besides the pirate and there are so many of them!
That explains the missing web in the 3DS version. Also, some of those missing platform jumps that are still doable makes me wish they would've thrown in an optional hard mode.
I was thinking the same about hard mode.
Yeah the 3Ds version is _unexplicably_ explicable after this...
I have the 3DS ver. (Got it when the 3DS came out) and never had any problems with the webs
@@miymoto128 Ah, maybe I misremembered. I think I saw a GameFAQs thread talking about it, but maybe they were talking about emulating it, or they just got unlucky with a faulty cartridge.
Of course Rayman 2 is against piracy, the pirates are the bad guys 😂
My copy never had this piracy bug, and could complete the game normally. Ironic, being that my dad would only let me have games if he wasn’t busy enough to pirate them. It just so happened that this game was one of the non-pirated ones - a present from my aunt.
thats were the Pirate Head came from! I had that bug in a legal copy and it ruined the game for me, it made me so sad
Very interesting video. It must have been a lot of work so thank you for documenting all this. I think walking around in the loading zones is very interesting.
I recognise a lot of these from working on the RMG. It's interesting to see just how many things are broken by the anti-piracy triggers coming into effect. Makes you wonder if they spent some development time going in and deliberately choosing which things to remove as an anti-piracy measure, or if they just randomly removed say half of all objects from the game...?
Especially the Pirate Ghost is intriguing. Also inspiring... hmmm new ideas brewing...
What's the RMG if you don't mind me asking?
@@JuiceboxCE oh hello! Raymap Game - a project in Unity that for a time was trying to recreate Rayman 2 from its base art assets and programming wholly new code that was trying to get as faithfully close to feeling like the original as possible.
I don't know if the project is still alive, but my contribution to it has ended (for now...?).
@@Shrooblord That sounds awesome, guess I have a rabbit hole to dig into! Thanks for the information 🙂
@@JuiceboxCE there's a couple of vids on my channel about the Waypoint system I was working on if you want to get a small intro in what the project looked like back then. But it's a bit of a valedictorian exercise, shall we say, because I'm pretty sure my systems are not (currently) part of the project anymore x)
@@Shrooblord I'm unfortunately not tech savvy, however I absolutely love the idea of being as much. Played around with the Rayman 2 browser Unity project you had linked in a video about Foutch! Also, watching the rest of your videos on that project, I have always found myself absolutely fascinated by stuff like this. You tech wizards do such amazing things. Just been having a lot of fun seeing shared love for Rayman 2 especially. I hope you don't mind, I was hoping I could ask you how you came to start your journey in technical knowhow? To get to where you are today, and to be able to work on projects like you did with that Rayman 2 project? I do apologize if I'm being too nosey, I've recently started working in a datacenter and have found myself absolutely fascinated by the way the coding engineers talk and work. Stuff like this is increasingly fascinating to me, however it's so insanely broad, it's *very* daunting finding a foundation for these sorts of things!
Thanks for your time, either way, you've been fun talkin to!
Watching this and remembering the soundtrack is FIRE!
This happened to me as a kid during a boss fight midway through the game, It was the orange triangle head guy in the thorn level. I haven't played the game since, i haven't seen anything past that point in the game either. So Rayman 2 has just stayed in my mind as an unbeatable game for the longest time. I know that i could just buy another copy and finish it, but i just got hit by this super nostalgic memory of how i felt in the moment when i was a kid.
Same for me, I ended up finishing it the first time on the Nintendo DS port because of that.
I've bought this game some good 3-4 times and I still get that pirate head lmao
13:52 SIKE!
Actually that was really interesting. They made sure nobody would play on pirated copy.
Well I have an original version and I had the issue after completing 55% of the game. So frustrating because I can’t play anymore
Instead of saying "MISSING DISC" they would put "Oh ow, Rayman can't stop The robo-pirates because You are a pirate for pirating this Game, get a leggit copy of Rayman 2 and report this copy immeditly!"
If I was a game dev and programmed in some anti piracy I wouldn't make the game unplayable...instead I would actually make the game hard as balls and annoying as shit whilst still being theoretically possible to beat. like having it locked to some sort of difficulty that can't normally be accessed and have it called "A pirates life for me" or something. If the person who pirated the game were to beat it in this state It would actually remove the anti piracy and let them have the game as intended completely free of charge. If a person goes through all that trouble just so they don't have to pay for a video game I am going to respect the dedication they have to something so pointless and you bet I am gonna reward them for overcoming the odds.
Hell I would even add a hall of fame feature, like a leader board for all of those who completed the game like this to add a sort of insensitive to pirate it if people were dedicated to the challenge. Seriously I have mad respect for people who complete hard games and I am one of them. I have beaten getting over it 66 times now as well as a plethora of other hard games XD. Now this difficulty would be down right unfair, I am talking things that wouldn't normally happen like its a Mario 64 corruption mod or Minecraft corruption mod where it will randomly screw with you and make shit very difficult whilst still being theoretically possible to beat. I would probably call the game "Pay or Pirate" but have it have nothing to do with the name. I would make it very clear that I don't mind if you pirate the game so long as you beat it.
You ask "why?" yet the answer is obvious. To make it as tedious as possible to fully crack the game. Most people distributing copied games at the time would patch the initial anti-piracy check (like you did) and leave it at that. Thinking they're done it. Next thing you know they're spending weeks, if not months trying to hunt down and patch every little mishap that occurs from the checks because the people taking said copies would complain about the game being broken. Yet by the time they patched all of these occurrences the game would have already sold the copies it needed to so said measures would have been deemed a success.