How we made hit video game Prince of Persia

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/jan/05/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-hit-video-game-prince-of-persia

by msephton • 1 month ago

275 111 1 month ago

timzaman• 1 month ago

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

runevault• 1 month ago

Stripe did such a good job with this book (and the others I bought that they published). Each one feels like an artifact I can show off on top of having interesting information inside.

47282847• 1 month ago

Agreed! I did actually enjoy his first one even more; the early years.

pjmlp2• 1 month ago

Can acknowledge.

noufalibrahim• 1 month ago

Was going to say the same thing. It's a very nice trip down memory lane.

Also, Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8

normie3000• 1 month ago

I read this and Masters of Doom back-to-back. Both very enjoyable, and great contrast between the two.

bentcorner3• 1 month ago

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.

Lethalman• 1 month ago

It was also incredibly difficult. As a kid I couldn’t go beyond the first level. It was also difficult to attack the enemy at the right time.

But still it was an amazing experience whenever I played it. I felt the pressure and the need to start again like no other game nowadays.

But maybe that’s just because I was a kid.

setopt• 1 month ago

I played it relentlessly as a kid (3-6 years old), and never got past the 4th level…

HeavyStorm• 1 month ago

Yeah, it was. It wasn't even my first game - I was like 11 when I first got to it, and by then was a solid gamer having already owned a master system and mega drive game consoles. And still PoP was hard, really hard.

(But I also didn't like it very much...)

qsera4• 1 month ago

It was also incredibly difficult.

And we dumb kids used to play it without the manual. It was a minor victory day for us when we finally figured out how to pick up the sword!

Cthulhu_2• 1 month ago

I don't think it was just because you were a kid, if I recall correctly the controls were incredibly unresponsive. Probably a technical reason, that they couldn't or didn't want to interrupt an animation easily, but still.

Years later though, and games like Dark Souls and Monster Hunter have a similar sluggishness / unresponsiveness to them. But it doesn't feel as unfair in those games.

BrtByte5• 1 month ago

I don't think it was only because you were a kid. The game really did punish hesitation in a way that feels pretty unusual now

holoduke• 1 month ago

pop.exe -megahit is what I remember to cheat. Then ctrl combinations for powers.

ant6n• 1 month ago

Well thanks to the 60 minute game play and no saves, you only ever see the first four/five levels or so. It’s a great game, but that particular mechanic is …kind of annoying.

CamouflagedKiwi• 1 month ago

I remember it having saves? I'm not sure if that was an addition to the PC version or if I'm getting it mixed up with the sequel (which definitely did have them, but was also quite a bit harder so it _really_ needed them)

eru4• 1 month ago

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

You can see if Dead Cells's parrying mechanic works for you.

Daedren• 1 month ago

Also Nine Sols. It's becoming increasingly popular as games are moving the complexity/flashiness of interactions with enemies to the enemy's side. Rather than learn and perform complex combos like Devil May Cry, the enemies now are the ones with very flashy movesets and now you simply parry/dodge.

bentcorner3• 1 month ago

I've played a little bit of Dead Cell's but it hasn't stuck with me yet.

I have to admit the game is a little overwhelming but maybe I need to stick with it a bit more.

Part of PoP's charm is that the game is very simple, yet the parry mechanic has nuance - you can buffer parry/attack/parry/attack/... sequences and the timing is just a bit faster than normal enemies, meaning you can wear them out (these fights have a very Errol Flynn Swashbuckler feel to them). Eventually your attack lands before they can begin their parry animation.

Later in the game you meet enemies that hit faster than you can respond to with a parry, so you need to change up your tactics.

BrtByte5• 1 month ago

A lot of games have time limits, but Prince of Persia made it feel less like an arcade score mechanic and more like part of the story

xtracto• 1 month ago

Likewise, but for different reasons: We had a [pirated] copy of the game, and thus didn't have the manual.

Down here in my city in Mexico that's basically how everyone played it, so most of us played only the first level.

At some point, I was tinkering with the "x tree gold" program and saw the "hex view" thing. I remember opening Prince's .sav file, which was a very small file that only appeared after you saved. After tinkering with the numbers I managed to appear in the next level .

It was my 5 minutes of fame at my computer class when I arrived and showed that I had passed the bottles room.

And I became fascinated by cracking at that point.

jhartwig2• 1 month ago

That is awesome! I love the origin stories.

Stevvo• 1 month ago

Another notable mechanic was the rewind. Didn't see that again until Braid, which really went to town with it.

somenameforme2• 1 month ago

That was about 15 years later. The original released in 1989, and there was no rewind.

somenameforme2• 1 month ago

Somehow in my mind the animation of it and Another World/Out of this World felt similar, and way outside everything else that was available at the time. The games even felt very similar, but I never got particularly far in either so that could well be just the perspective of youth.

LiteUser• 1 month ago

The most movie-like experience I'd ever had in a video game at the time. Each level was a genuine act of discovery and innovation.

aaroninsf• 1 month ago

My favorite easter egg by far in this domain, was the Apple II version of Karateka.

The game came on a floppy disk; if you inserted it in the drive upside down (the Apple II only used one side of the medium) you found (unusually) that the game would load, but was rendered upside down.

It was fully playable. Non trivial given the way those games were written!!!

msephton2• 1 month ago

This is mentioned in the Karnataka history. Apparently it was trivial to implement and discovered somewhat by accident. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/-i-prince-of-pe...

kirubakaran• 1 month ago

Pardon my nit but it was stylized `Apple //c` fwiw, not `][c`. That was just `Apple ][` and `Apple ][+`.

achairapart2• 1 month ago

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.

d3Xt3r• 1 month ago

I actually rewired my internal PC speaker to a big external speaker just so that I could hear the music/sfx of the game in all its glory.

And that awesome intro animation too - never seen anything like it at the time, like simply seeing realistic human faces being drawn in a DOS game was just mind blowing.

achairapart2• 1 month ago

Best PC Speaker music ever was Xenon II, by Bomb the Bass[0] (which much later I discovered was a re-rendition of Carpenter' Assault on Precint 13 OST[1]).

May sound silly for some people today, but that was some incredible wizardry at the times, given the limitations (PC speaker was monophonic, square-wave only). As a YouTube comment says: "This is musical equivalent to pixel art."

And a great game too!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izadA3nSPbk

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5UU2TxOcZs

zem• 1 month ago

it's the colour scheme that I remember most strongly. I still think "very prince of persia" when I see certain colour combinations, especially cream and purple.

protocolture• 1 month ago

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.

e12e• 1 month ago

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.

Sounds like the summary of the opening chapter of a Bruce Sterling novel.

Love that your Hong Kong friend memorized the DRM codes.

Of course, DRM was no issue with a cracked copy of the game...

bentcorner3• 1 month ago

My dad had a fairly sizable collection of C64/Apple games and I never really learned where he got them from.

"Cracked by The Vulture" was something that I was very used to seeing upon booting up a game.

jhartwig2• 1 month ago

My first real paycheck job was a store in Beaverton Oregon that would buy and sell software. Folks would buy the software, copy the disc, bring it back to us to and we would reseal and sell it. I was always more interested in the actual hardware side and spend most of my day helping the pc tech. I think the store got sued eventually for basically pirating Windows.

curtisblaine• 1 month ago

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.

larodi• 1 month ago

The first two games to fall in love with - Karatéka and then Alley Cat.

phodo• 1 month ago

In 7th grade social studies, I did a report for a class project, and printed the Karateka opening screen on my apple image writer as the cover page. I got an A+ because of that cover!

prmoustache• 1 month ago

Desperately trying to jump on that bin to avoid the dog only to be pushed back by another cat peering over...

simple but good times

magpi3• 1 month ago

Yeah, Karateka deserves more than a simple aside here. It's amazing that he made that on his own as a college student. I loved that game.

nvader2• 1 month ago

My favourite Easter egg about karateka:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFe28MNCG7o&t=17

bluedino2• 1 month ago

Oh, Karateka. I had the flawed Atari 7800 version as a kid.

dekhn• 1 month ago

Seeing and hearing Karateka for the first time on an Apple II+ was a life-changing experience for me. Along with Ultima III, it made me want to be a game developer (I was in 4th grade, so around 12, at the time). Everything about the game is just so smooth and well-done- it has a plot, a progression, good animation and realistic sounds. I was pretty unhappy for years around the fact that I didn't understand the technology (machine language instead of BASIC, Apple's very funny graphics implementation, doing sound and animation simultaneously) to make games like that.

namenumber• 1 month ago

If anybody wants to see how that entire creative process went, there's a "game" called "The Making of Karateka" on Steam that is a nice interactive experience telling the story of Jordan Mechner's start in the games industry and how Karateka came to be.

It's a fun media experience with a lot of playable prototypes.

pjmlp2• 1 month ago

Yeah, plenty of "wasted" hours playing that game.

bschwindHN• 1 month ago

Such an absolute classic. My brothers and friends and I played this so much when we were kids that we had a notebook written up to overcome the game's "DRM", which required you to find a letter in a particular page/paragraph/sentence in the game's manual. You then drank the potion with the right letter floating over it. If you got the wrong one, you died and had to restart the game, but this was only at the end of level 1 so that wasn't a huge setback. Theoretically you didn't have this manual if you pirated it, but kids have nothing but time so our notebook ended up quite complete.

The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. And my god, the vertical chopping blades you have to carefully jump through...those things are brutal.

lukan2• 1 month ago

"The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. "

Skyrim did that also pretty well. The first draugh zombies/skelletons lying km the catacombs are just objects to loot from. But then you tried to loot the next one and it moves and gets up ..

Cthulhu_2• 1 month ago

But Skyrim ended up overdoing it, to the point where it's in every tomb (and there's a lot of them), so you end up expecting it and stab every corpse first.

Agentlien• 1 month ago

The Apple II was dying as a platform by the time the game came out [...] it was rereleased on PC in the US and sales picked up. You wouldn’t get that second chance today.

On a much smaller scale, I was actually part of something similar a few years ago. The game Wavetale was originally a Stadia exclusive but launched just before the platform shut down. We were allowed by Google to port it and release it for every other platform, and I ended up being one of four programmers doing that work; I mainly focused on optimizing the switch version.

The Stadia version barely got noticed, but the other versions, especially Switch, did quite well. The game was even featured on AGDQ, which was really cool.

mscdex• 1 month ago

If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend watching the "War Stories" video on the making of Prince of Persia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54

On a related note, I also highly recommend the "War Stories" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o

skibz• 1 month ago

I came here to recommend the same thing. The entire War Stories series was magnificent.

Someone• 1 month ago

That, and more, is available from Jordan Mechner’s site https://www.jordanmechner.com.

Prince of Persia info at https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/library/#pop

Smalltalker-80• 1 month ago

Yes, specifically buying options for the book are on this page: (recommended) https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/books/journals

Dathuil• 1 month ago

This is serendipitous as I'm just reading the making of Prince of persia from stripe press.

Goes into lots of detail as what was going on through the journal entries of the dev. Honestly it has encouraged me to start journaling again myself as I can see the value in being able to read back to a day in the last.

meerita• 1 month ago

This was the first game I ever played on a PC, and it will always have a place in my heart. I first played it on an 8086 PC-compatible machine with an amber monochrome CRT monitor (the kind usually paired with MDA or Hercules-style graphics, where everything appeared in those beautiful orange shades). Later, my father bought a 386 PC with a VGA graphics card capable of 256-color modes, which on my monochrome display looked like 256 shades of gray. A couple of years after that, we finally upgraded to an Acer VGA color CRT monitor, and seeing the same game in full color felt like entering a completely different world.

As a small note of color, when I was a teenager I helped the local police department clean up one of their PCs, which had been infected with multiple viruses, Michelangelo is the one I still remember, though there were others. After cleaning the machine, I installed Prince of Persia for them. The policemen were absolutely thrilled to have that video game on their computer.

qsera4• 1 month ago

The graphics of Prince of persia took me to those dungeons more effectively than any 4k ray traced modern game could...

eru4• 1 month ago

That's because you were younger. Nostalgia is a hard drug.

nvader2• 1 month ago

My first exposure to Prince.exe was in the computer lab at school, which has a tiny set of DOS games, including digdug, space invaders and some typing game.

I remember when I was around 6 or 7, a boy a couple years older (and therefore, seemingly infinitely wiser) sharing the folk advice: "Play the other games first, don't play Prince of Persia too early or it will ruin all the other games for you"

BrtByte5• 1 month ago

That is excellent playground wisdom

BrtByte5• 1 month ago

There's something very of-the-era about fixing a virus-ridden PC and then "improving" it by installing Prince of Persia

pelario• 1 month ago

As I see many others like me, full of nostalgia: You can play it on the internet archive:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Prince_of_Persia_1990

Once every couple of years I dive into it, I still cannot complete it without cheat codes, but I love the mouse animation, the "mirror" prince, and many other amazing details!

shevy-java• 1 month ago

At that time it was a really great game. I played it a lot in my younger days.

Nowadays games are often epic like a mega-long movie. But it no longer feels like a game to me. Often the prompts and UI has been dumbed down to appeal to the masses. That may be a good strategy, but if I then compare it to old games such as Prince of Persia, they lost playability in the process. I can not want to be bothered to play such games, even aside from any time constraints I already have. Those "games" don't interest me into actually playing it.

On top of that there are milking steps such as play-to-win and other shenanigans. I can't support such evilness. I have also seen how they exploit younger people into addictive habits that way.

pyb• 1 month ago

Gobsmacked to learn that this was originally developed on the Apple II. I always thought of PoP as a 16-bit type of game.

jdw642• 1 month ago

this game was so difficult that I never managed to clear it all the way to the end. I played it in the school computer lab, and it was one of the popular games... I can't remember the names of the others

glimshe• 1 month ago

I once beat it in 27 minutes. I didn't know it was supposed to be hard at the time! I briefly checked speed run records now and that time would have put me in the top 50 "no glitches" ranking!

I'm not that good at games... For some reason PoP leveraged some brain circuitry I have with questionable evolutionary value.

jdw642• 1 month ago

That's impressive. You clear this game... that puts you in contrast with me, who can't even become a 'prince' in a game

aidenn0• 1 month ago

Bionic Commando is that game for me. My best time is just under 16 minutes, but I'm generally the worst at video games of any of my friends; it's one of the few platformers I've beaten at all on the NES.

alansaber• 1 month ago

My dad's favourite game. Still held up 30 years later, I played the shit out of this on IPad.

trwhite• 1 month ago

Funny to see this; I read the first ~100 pages of the Stripe Press book last night and am highly enjoying it.

stefanos82• 1 month ago

I have watched the creator explaining to us in great detail how he came up with so many tiny details that made it a perfect game for its time!

Just watch it yourself, you will be in awe!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54

kriro• 1 month ago

That jump through the mirror blew my mind as a kid. And level 6 oh man took us forever to beat that slightly obese guard. I still remember that we once accidentally walked all the way into that guard and switched places but then were killed by a strike to the back. always wanted to replay and see if I can pass the guard that way.

jgalt212• 1 month ago

It's a great and novel game, but how many more retrospectives do we need?

msephton2• 1 month ago

11?

BrtByte5• 1 month ago

Prince of Persia is one of those games where the technical limitations are almost inseparable from the magic

EliRivers• 1 month ago

If you like that, you'll like this: https://www.filfre.net/2016/10/how-jordan-mechner-made-a-dif...

And an awful lot more written by Jimmy Maher on that site.

rando1234• 1 month ago

I love the 'How we made the...' series on the guardian. They also do it for songs, movies etc. Really interesting to hear the back stories.

throw4847285• 1 month ago

I really enjoyed Jordan Mechner's graphic memoir Replay. It's a multi-generational family history and personal reflection interwoven together.

the_af4• 1 month ago

Like I suspect many here reading the story, I grew up with Prince of Persia and remember it fondly as one of my favorite games from my youth.

It's very interesting to see the filming material used for rotoscoping the characters.

I find it very funny that when they filmed the actress doing the princess (it's cool to see her doing the swirl with her skirt to face the Prince!) they were young nerdy men interacting with an attractive young actress, and they were pretty shy about it! I think Jordan Mechner recounts this somewhere, probably his book about the making of PoP.

(The book is something I really want but never decided to pull the trigger, go figure. Maybe because I already read a lot of it way back when it was a free blog?).

wdaher2• 1 month ago

Assuming we’re talking about the Stripe Press book: if you email me and if you have a US address I’d be glad to mail you my totally unread copy which is mostly just gathering dust for me. (Email in profile.)

the_af4• 1 month ago

I really appreciate the offer. I live in South America, so this is a no-go.

How come you didn't read it? Did you lose interest?

ecocentrik• 1 month ago

The developers of Prince of Persia still talking about the game more than 30 years later seems very bizarre to me. I remember a game called Flashback having very a similar graphical sprite animation innovation around the time PoP was released and I remember it being very fun to play, but nobody talks about it the same way. What's the deal with Price of Persia?

pizza234• 1 month ago

Flashback came considerably later (1992) than PoP (1989); a single year back then was a lot more significant than it is today. A classic game in between was Another World (1991).

Just out curiosity, PoP ran on 8088/8086, while Flashback on 286/386.

gbalint2• 1 month ago

Prince of Persia came out in 1989, while Flashback arrived in 1992. In the late 80s and early 90s, pc video game tech was evolving at a breakneck pace, a 3-year gap was an eternity. Prince of Persia ran quite well on an 8-bit XT, Flashback needed a 16-bit 286. They are basically from a different era, and Flashback was surely inspired by PoP.

badc0ffee• 1 month ago

The 8088 had an 8-bit data bus, but I don't think I would call it (or the XT) "8-bit" overall. By the same logic, a 386SX or 486SLC is "16-bit".

dfxm12• 1 month ago

It's more popular, especially with the subsequent games and media franchise. FWIW, I hear people talk about Flashback's predecessor, Another World, a lot. That is also a popular game.

bluedino2• 1 month ago

If you liked Flashback, try an earlier release (also from Delphine software) called Out of this World/Another World

ofalkaed• 1 month ago

Flashback had the bulk of Prince of Persia's mechanics but developed story and the puzzle aspect to a far greater extent and was less action based compared to Prince of Persia's race against the clock. There are times in Flashback when you have to race the clock but there are also times when you just have to stare at the screen and figure out how to do something or wander the world trying to figure out what you missed and where the fuck you are supposed to go next. Flashback is one of my favorites but I am not a gamer and the majority of my gaming was in the previous century.

bryzaguy• 1 month ago

I had Flashback on Sega Genesis as a kid. For whatever reason, I was unable to get past the first obstacle. I had a similar experience with Myst. After a while I came back to those games and now they are two of my all time favorite games. I was excited to see The Last Night revive the rotoscope style but sadly it was never finished. I saw Replaced picked up the mantle so I created an account and purchased it on Steam before realizing it's windows only and I'm macOS :(

christkv• 1 month ago

This is a great interview with Jordan Mechner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQVB7tP1JIg

bicepjai• 1 month ago

In my elementary school, we used to have something called computer class, where we just played the 2D Prince of Persia game, which was always in an air-conditioned room :) Many of us were obsessed with this game and the act of using a keyboard. Those perfectly timed jumps necessary to move to the next level are etched in my memory :)

buildsjets• 1 month ago

Prince of Persia was great, but since it came out in 1989 and my family got our Apple //e in 1986, I spent a lot more hours playing the author’s previous rotoscoped platformer from a few years earlier, Karateka.

https://youtu.be/wKqk9kosCs4?is=awtDYponzgbjyA52

https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/games-movies/karateka/

neom• 1 month ago

Tough choice between Worms Armageddon and Prince of Persia for my fav Amiga games.

49 minute Amiga play through for those feeling like a nostalgia hit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukSECkajKYA

How we made hit video game Prince of Persia

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