RAY OF LIGHT

There’s little to recommend the game that built Ubisoft Montpellier today. Rayman was a brutal hangover from the SNES and Mega Drive era of 2D platformers, a cruel cavalcade of spike pits and memory-test bosses. Its protagonist was a bequiffed berk with no limbs and even less charisma; his world a nonsensical mishmash of poachers, pirates, and washerwomen, in which even static objects unsettled you with their big, googly eyes.

And yet there was still something about it. The scrolling was smooth, and those cartoon graphics stunned audiences at the time. Over four million played it, establishing Ubisoft as a publisher and Montpellier as an idiosyncratic part of the