Rayman 2's Anti-Piracy Protection

Back when Rayman 2: The Great Escape was released, pirating a PC game was often as easy as borrowing a friend's copy and burning it to an empty disc. Ubisoft developed and implemented a range of different protections to prevent this. Unfortunately, these protections didn't only affect the pirates...
Scripts from the game were exported using raym.app/
Full list of changes:
pastebin.com/raw/iGmRDZTt
Things I forgot to mention in the video:
- The exit in The Sanctuary of Rock and Lava 2 is also broken but I forgot to record it. 21 Broken exits I guess.
- There's a bunch of "fake" files on the Rayman 2 disc that appear to take up a giant amount of space (multiple gigabytes), which made copying the game to a physical disc impossible.
- According to a developer's profile, the protection took a bit over 10 months to be broken.

[@GraveUypo]

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.

[@schnek8927]

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"...

[@lovofofo]

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]

also the PS2 version is a great upscale/remaster that doesn't detract from the original's charm at all, in my opinion anyway

[@literatemax]

Sphinx and The Cursed Mummy has aged similarly incredibly well

[@AkatsukiBucko]

@@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.

[@Sledgex3]

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.

[@kacpercicharski4193]

That's exactly what I was thinking

[@redbird_studios]

At least you could still run Treasure% in that case 😜

[@MDLuffy1234YT]

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.

[@joostinatortje]

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.

[@Eddies_Bra-att-ha-grejer]

Happened at the same point for me. We had internet access, but I wasn't aware of there being a patch or anything.

[@OMGitzDEKED]

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.

[@GenerationLex]

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.

[@schnek8927]

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...)

[@xelda1990]

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

[@Konyad]

Did you get the money back?

[@xelda1990]

@@Konyad nop we didn't

[@schnek8927]

@@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.*

[@duncanlavalle8689]

Same for me, everytime I entered Whale Bay. And today, I learn it could've been avoided...

[@tggd8423]

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.

[@El_Fabricio]

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.

[@huks.]

I imagine the point was to make life harder for any hackers trying to circumvent the anti-piracy checks one by one.

[@YamiSpyro2011]

Break the game as much as possible when it knows its a fake Best anti piracy feature

[@doctorletsplay]

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.

[@charmedrools1]

@@YamiSpyro2011 if you like this you should look up spyro 3's anti piracy :D

[@Darekmot]

Kinda ironic, since the game has you fight Pirates

[@JohnMiller-bs2ln]

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.

[@arekrekas213]

i mean, the pirate head would already be very annoying

[@El_Fabricio]

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.

[@byyykramermusic]

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.

[@bluelightstudios6191]

@@El_Fabricio OH SHIT!!!

[@bugoyoutub]

@@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 :(

[@GTASimMaster51515]

So Ubisoft really hates your guts if you didn't gave them any money Todays Ubisoft takes your money and still hates you

[@PixelPls]

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!

[@Sean-D78]

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

[@subg9165]

@@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

[@TheUltimateRare]

lol those videos should say "fake antipiracy" so that no one gets confused.

[@subg9165]

@@TheUltimateRare unfortunately the annoying children want their clickbait views

[@TheUltimateRare]

@@subg9165 can kids even upload on youtube? isn't uploading 13+? Does anyone follow the rules on this site? lol

[@kingkongsz]

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!

[@darky5335]

..razorbeard would have been your final stop

[@torcnein]

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

[@lukabrasi001]

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

[@EndlessDelusion]

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.

[@SimpleAmadeus]

@@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.

[@ThinBear4]

@@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.

[@Eliminator1900]

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.

[@norsktegnefilmsang3689]

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.

[@TheGreenManThom]

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.

[@AuToMaNiAk005]

12:42 At least the web is working unlike in the 3DS version...

[@HalfDuck]

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.

[@chilldedede]

3ds? I have n64 and playstation versions, I never heard of no goddam 3ds

[@AuToMaNiAk005]

@@chilldedede The game was released on lots of platforms.

[@chilldedede]

@@AuToMaNiAk005 ik like playstation, dream cast I think, n64, Gameboy advanced and more

[@AuToMaNiAk005]

@@chilldedede N64, PC, Dreamcast, Game Boy Color, PS1, PS2, NDS, 3DS and iOS.

[@RamblePrism]

A very interesting video, I had no idea there was more than just the pirate head! Well done

[@PixelNova97]

8:28 Fun Fact that "Broken Purple Lum" it's the same model of Yellow Lum from PS1 version

[@Knuxfan24]

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.

[@JuiceboxCE]

Honestly, if I were paid/enabled to be this extra by my boss, I'd be living the dream lol

[@lm9029]

11:45 "This is fine" Then he slowly realizes the situation 11:47 "Oow! My feets are burning!"

[@ReesetYT]

Weird that they made all these changes when the unbreakable first cage alone makes completing the game impossible.

[@shroomy2549]

Not if you have 100% save file that unlocks every level

[@GraveUypo]

kinda doesn't matter if you can't finish it if you you've played 99% of it already tho

[@onevoltten6845]

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.

[@moodysshuffle]

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

[@Retrofuge]

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.

[@MegaDude10]

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!"

[@flumphflumph6021]

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.

[@lolmanyeah1]

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.

[@ieatthighs]

bullshit

[@aortaplatinum]

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.

[@Nintendofiery1up1]

This is exactly what game dev tycoon does

[@ninjawithnobalance]

Oh there is . And quite a few with that protection .

[@kokoshustrinoi2405]

@@ninjawithnobalance For example?

[@NAFEDUDE]

@@kokoshustrinoi2405 Spyro 3

[@bradallen8909]

@@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.

[@ketrub]

lmao at the fact the web they broke in rayman 3D is still working

[@WannabeMarysue]

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.

[@larswesterwoudt2561]

Impressive video dude, every video you upload of Rayman 2 just makes me wanna do a full playthrough all over again. Lekker bezig man!

[@saraschmidt5612]

Really informative and interesting video! I never knew Rayman 2 even had any anti-piracy protection.

[@admiralrazorbeard]

Extraordinarily fascinating.

[@cone7124]

Still less broken than rayman 3D

[@Arctaris]

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.

[@robonaught]

5:18 I know Robo Pirates can be zombies, but ghosts? This is ridiculous!

[@lPsychoMax]

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.

[@Shrooblord]

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]

What's the RMG if you don't mind me asking?

[@Shrooblord]

@@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]

@@Shrooblord That sounds awesome, guess I have a rabbit hole to dig into! Thanks for the information 🙂

[@Shrooblord]

@@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)

[@JuiceboxCE]

@@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!

[@iRazenrak]

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

[@me67galaxylife]

or just ubisoft being ubisoft

[@TornaderX]

@@me67galaxylife For Ubisoft Montpellier is definetly not the case

[@me67galaxylife]

@@TornaderX could you elaborate ?

[@blueplayer6197]

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.

[@me67galaxylife]

@@blueplayer6197 really ?

[@memaimu]

No commentary. Interesting choice! Was not expecting that!

[@szymskiPL]

I didn't know there were any game breakers besides the pirate and there are so many of them!

[@bunyamin360]

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....

[@Woutva]

I didnt have the pirate head, but I do remember my copy always crashing at the fire boss start.

[@petergriscom3431]

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.

[@ultralowspekken]

I was thinking the same about hard mode. Yeah the 3Ds version is _unexplicably_ explicable after this...

[@fluffycritter]

I wonder if there’s been any games where the anti-piracy measures make the game unsatisfyingly easy instead.

[@moxieandreas9374]

No, but thanks for the idea

[@duckmeat4674]

I love this idea

[@fluffycritter]

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.

[@bluz0r69]

Why would they implement all this if the player can't see past the pirate head anyway?

[@Elratauru]

Remembers me of the Broken Grapple of the first Batman Arkham game, without it, you were not able to go through a particular scene and there was no way to move forward until a crack or skip was developed for that particular part. Rayman 2 was one of my favourite games on Dreamcast, spent quite a lot playing the Demo alone, and then the full game, but I always found oddities, things that changed from time to time, either something was triggering the protection, or those were just bugs, but I found a few of those "Cant climb" glitches before playing normally.

[@BAIGAMING]

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.

[@TheGiddyReaper]

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.

[@Eddies_Bra-att-ha-grejer]

Same for me, I ended up finishing it the first time on the Nintendo DS port because of that.

[@ronbenatia6682]

Watching this and remembering the soundtrack is FIRE!

[@suqd674]

6:28 2/0 cages?

[@ashessakura7518]

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!

[@JuiceboxCE]

This was so fascinating for me to witness this level of depth in an absolute favorite of mine from my childhood! Spent so many hours playing through these levels, hilarious to think a developer was paid to go through them all and pick out annoying blocks for pirates. Razorbeard isn't about to be topped as the pirate mastermind in this title LOL

[@GameboySR]

I had no clue there was this much besides the pirate head, very nice video

[@reginaldcz6332]

I am suprised that I didn´t hear about this yet, while we heard about similar DRM in games like Serious Sam 3 or Talos principle. But probably the reason is the big pirate head making us unable to see majority of our game screen. Anyway, thanks for showing us how the entire game looks in its impossible mode.

[@Benjeta]

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.

[@KevkaBeats]

Funny how this just looks like an unfinished version of the game 🤔

[@ipaqmaster]

This is a great video. I love the various anti-piracy detections and silly things devs might add to combat it at the gameplay level, let alone other eerie out-of-universe popups in the game screen. To see so many in Rayman 2 alone is nuts. Great work documenting them all.

[@TwisterTH]

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.

[@apieceoftoast768]

So did I! I could play normally up till that point and had no idea what was going on and couldn't play further.

[@CiccioImberlicchio]

Do you happen to know if the n64 version had some copy protection too? I was trying a n64 psvita emulator but it seems on the first level there's a broken switch that doesn't seem to work at all Not sure if it's an emulator issue or some hidden copy protection

[@miciso666]

i remember my ''pirated'' spyro disc doing this. any portal you take after the first few gave infinite loading screens. i even used my real cd moved on. went back to my backup one. and it still did it. only the first 2 portals worked.

[@persononyoutubereal]

does anyone know about a level called “astro 17” or whatever the number was? i saw it on ONE video and cant find it on the raywiki or anywhere else. please reply to this comment if you do also at 6:29 2/0 cages? what? also also, how did you do things like get on the chair on the top of the world? did you like use cheats or something?

[@redbird_studios]

Astro_20, I have a video on it called "mysteries of the hall of doors"

[@persononyoutubereal]

@@redbird_studios sorry didnt see ur reply i just looked it up on the wiki and looked through ur videos and found it, thanks tho, just find it really interesting that a scrapped level was in the game, especially in a mysterious and awesome game such as rayman 2

[@CoolDudeClem]

What I want to know i HOW games are able to tell the difference between a copied disc and the original. Does it somehow skip certain files or something?

[@---pp7tq]

Feels like a demo version of each level in case of being accessible by cheats or 100% save game, forcing you buying the game sooner or later. Only if this piracy measure was really exploited commonly. Looks like the safedisc was beaten sooner and better than they expected I suppose, so it ended up completely useless so no game files modification was needed (probably except binary if it was safedisc but I think that some regional versions were only cd-check protected with big files inside).

[@outofideasexe]

I'm subbing cause I enjoy your content

[@redbird_studios]

Thank you very much! :)

[@bitnewt]

I had this problem with my legit disk, stopping me from finishing it for years until I bought GOG's patched version. It's frustrating that so much effort went into stopping pirates playing the game that it stopped a lot of people who'd paid from playing, too.

[@raggedystar8255]

For saying the game has this much anti-piracy stuff in it, there sure are a lot of Robot Pirates still around

[@lovofofo]

how startlingly little of this game I recognize is probably sign that I need to replay it and regain those childhood memories

[@videocrowsnest5251]

Gotta hand it to Rayman 2's devs for cooking up all the interesting anti-piracy protection. I personally if designing such a feature would probably just have went with the method of spawning in an army of unfairly tough enemies, or a special invisible one-shotting relenteless hunter enemy, but I am not sure if the engine of Rayman 2 could have handled that kinda horsing around. That or I would have taken inspiration from Rayman 1 and just had off-screen kill zones activate so when our limbless friend wandered too close when a pirate decided to try yo-ho fiddle de deeing the game the floor would eat them or something. As a side note: The pirate skull head always popped up on my copy of Rayman 2 when I got to the chair level. Thinking about it: I am not sure is it the anti-piracy program messing up, or damage to the CD disk that leads to it triggering.

[@GoodSmile3]

13:52 SIKE! Actually that was really interesting. They made sure nobody would play on pirated copy.

[@TheUKNutter]

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.

[@nelson6128]

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

[@MobCat_]

As for the why so many checks I think the idea was that pirates would fix one check that was stopping them at the time, release the crack, people play it and find it has bugs, the crack gets nuked and then they have to fix more checks and by the time they fix all of them one at a time the game has been on the market for long enough to make it's money back. But what ends up happening is they end up just patching the master check as a hole and most of these issues never get seen. It was like this with Spyro on the ps1 till the wobble check and libcrypt got patched at the high end fixing all the checks down the chain.

[@bjorn9087]

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

[@DragonUltraMaster]

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.

[@scottrobertson7806]

Wow even back then ubi just loved drm

[@CryoSignal]

Just wanted to say I really enjoyed the video. Some extra commentary throughout the video would have been nice. I was kinda upset to notice that you don't really have any other longer format videos.

[@stevebat2072]

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

[@ralpholiver2889]

I've bought this game some good 3-4 times and I still get that pirate head lmao

[@Maxikang44]

That's nice to know. Gladly i played the DS and 3DS version so it never happened to me

[@anthonyoliver418]

When this game has more copyright protection from piracy than half of every game in existence combined!

[@aaydinturk]

Since I used to be scared of the start of rayman 3 when I was like 4, the pirate head would've probably worked for me.

[@QckSGaming]

They definitely did not make all those changes manually. The most likely reason for this is just that most of the dynamic entities are simply not loaded (gameplay layer of the level)

[@MrBarranda]

Just stumbled across this video, but it explains a lot! We bought this game years ago and always somewhere far into the game in the same place the "insert disc" message appeared! I thought we were scammed because we only had 1 disc but clearly a second disc was missing. But it was just bugged. My childhood, ruined by a bug.. (just kidding, although it was very frustrating!)

[@LauweJoster]

Very interesting, cool vid!

[@mariopsmt]

I really loved this game. I believe settlers 2 have similar protections where, for example, smelter is producing pigs instead of metal

[@CidalTwitch]

I immediately remembered having that pirate head popping up on a legit copy when I was really excited to play

[@BombaiBeast]

I had a pirate, the ng64 non-save version and finally a ps1 original that was kindly borrowed from a friend where I finally completed the game 100% with everything. the pirate version I had was a n64 version rom modified to work in the pc, as a way to circumvent the pc version, it hadn't the skull over the screen, but had EVERY single bug showcased without fail, with a extra of crashing on many parts or missing textures in creepy ways enough to fuel a creepypasta, to the point that at time I stopped playing by being too scared (specially of unkillable zombie enemies), only getting back with the n64 version which forced me to basically speedrun the game daily to try do 100% without saving

[@Takaoldaria]

Do you have any idea if the anti-piracy protections exist in the DS version? A few broken exits and disabled elements reminds me of things that would happen once in a blue moon in that version. Or maybe it's just the general bugginess.

[@redbird_studios]

The DS version is pretty much identical to the N64 version, which doesn't have these protections. So I'd just blame it on the quality of the DS port :P

[@Takaoldaria]

@@redbird_studios Given how I sometimes fell through the floor without a clear reason, wouldn't surprise me if they were just coincidences. I can't believe the DS port was my most played game as a kid.

[@theamazingpip]

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!"

[@strayaone2212]

this game was worth every dollar, a childhood core memory for me

[@YadonTheCat]

Of course Rayman 2 is against piracy, the pirates are the bad guys 😂

[@dotfoxtom5942]

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.

[@Mezbich]

I remember when me and my friend bought the rayman games on gog and played through Rayman 2 "together", and she kept getting the piracy warning late into the game, we tried to fix it but we didn't find the patch the video talked about :(

[@Rukalin]

The anti-piracy protection also always happened on my legit copy. It always triggered on Whale Bay. I eventually tried playing despite the pirate but couldn't proceed cause of the lack of water physics.

[@manuelmanolo7099]

Reminds me of the kind of piracy protection in the much later released Batman: arkham asylum. There are several vents and exits which you could not use either if you had a pirated version

[@nightcrawler2884]

Damn that's overkill!

[@FaKz92]

Crazy and genius at the same time!

[@aslightlystablefootsoldier9838]

Imagine being the dev and the boss approaches you and says “Make our game unplayable”

[@dieusama1798]

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 ?

[@ninjawithnobalance]

i wonder how my digital version from gog is not being flagged by the game files as being pirated. I played it as a kid and bought it to retry as an adult .

[@mandret1996]

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