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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Extraordinarily fascinating.

Still less broken than rayman 3D

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

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....

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Watching this and remembering the soundtrack is FIRE!

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...

Destroyed my childhood

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

6:28 2/0 cages?

Wow even back then ubi just loved drm

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

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

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!"

Best Protection was Laser Lock, it was literally a visibly burned ring on the CD, and I mean burned, because if you want to copy the disc, the laser can't get past this ring.

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

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

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

In my opinion, I think they should have made it run as if it was corrupted, now that is unplayable

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

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.

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

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

there is a sense of evil justice here

"Globox is even more useless than before" Or maybe he just straight up refuses to help a pirate.

im not sure how organized this games code is but it all looks as easy and simple as disconnecting functions.

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).

Damn that's overkill!

Ubsoft back in the day was truly one of the top developers. Nowadays it's not even a shadow of what it once was in terms of quality.

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.

Ubisoft call this piracy protection, EA call this a game working as intended

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.

I remember get the message that I have a pirated copy even tho I have an offical 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

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

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.

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.

Now we need to find glitches to bypass all of them

Kind of similar with Spyro 3 where gamebreaking shenanigans would occur more and more as the game progressed if pirated

"hey you see what those spyro devs did? dave, do that with our game"

So typical of Rayman to teach kids not to steal

honestly, I hope someone makes a mod where its just this but somewhat possible, basically a kaizo raymen 2

this is what the game would be like on day one if ubisoft made it today

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?

one of the funniest things about this is... I pirated this game as a kid, and it never broke for me.

0:40 Why does that look scary. it just popping out of nowhere, imagine that happening with legitimate buyers and how terrifying that would be

I love anti privacy stuff in video games this was never displayed in any of the lists I've been watching.