How we made hit video game Prince of Persia

I will always have a soft spot for the original Prince of Persia. It was one of those games I played constantly as a child, although only when my dad would let me use his Apple ][c.

I only realize it now but it had some very unique game mechanics that even today you don't see very often (ok maybe that's a bit of a stretch but the mechanics were novel to me back then):

- Notably you have 60 minutes to finish the game. Dying doesn't reset the timer, so there is constant pressure to keep moving.

- There is a satisfying parry mechanic. This is still rare to see in 2d platformers.

- Incredibly smooth animation. This could be nostalgia goggles but the rotoscoped animation really stood out compared to other games of the era.

When I was a kid, my grandparents were involved in a pretty decent intercontinental floppy disk piracy ring. They would buy and clone software sold locally and send it forward and get copies of games in response. My parents ran a small business converting peoples university notes/recordings into well written essays. My grandparents had a PC with Prince of Persia, and as payment for my parents essay writing services one of their friends from Hong Kong used to come around and teach me how to play. See he couldn't speak or understand english very well, but he had memorised the potions you needed to drink to get past each level, and also the fighting technique of most of the bad guys.

These are some of my earliest memories of computing, and the conversations I had with that guy, who was doing computer science, plus the things he opened up for me on the computer really pushed me into the industry.

I ended up visiting the US with my grandparents sometime later, and got to see the original disks most of my games had been cloned from. They even had the original F-15 Strike Eagle box from memory.

Just buy - The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 (Book #2 in the Mechner Journals Series) By Jordan Mechner

highly recommended as 90s gamer

Just reading "Prince of Persia" and in my head starts playing the oriental background music (by pc speaker! No sound card back then, at least for me).

Also, the steps, the gates and all other sound FXs.

Most people are/were fascinated by the fluid animations, but this game was perfect from every angle.

I have a soft spot for Prince of Persia, but I have an even softer spot for Karateka, its (rotoscoped) predecessor on an ancient green phosphor Apple //e, a computer (and an age) where everything seemed possible.