Prince of Persia – Creating The Sands of Time Trilogy

Prince of Persia marked its 35^th anniversary on October 3, and we're continuing the celebration throughout the month with a series of retrospective articles in which we speak with developers who worked on the legendary series about their experiences behind the scenes. Last week, we spoke with series creator Jordan Mechner and others about the creation of the very first game in 1989. Today, we'll take a look back at a series that captured the hearts of fans and proved foundational to Ubisoft's early-2000s success: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (which celebrates its 21^st anniversary this November) and its sequels, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003)

"It began when [Ubisoft CEO] Yves Guillemot called me in 2001," says Jordan Mechner, creator of the Prince of Persia series; Ubisoft had recently acquired the portfolio of defunct publisher Broderbund and was interested in creating a new game at a new studio in Montréal. "There was a team there that was excited about doing a new Prince of Persia, and the inspiration was to go back to the first 2D games to try to recapture that spirit - the fluidity and the speed - on the PlayStation 2 generation of consoles."

"It was a small team of passionate people," says Raphael Lacoste, who joined The Sands of Time in 2002 as art director. Some members of the team were just out of school, he says, and most were between the ages of 20 and 26. "It was a mood of, 'try and make mistakes, and have a lot of fun creating this new IP.'"

That new IP would become 2003's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Rather than continue Mechner's earlier series, it introduced a new Prince who accidentally unleashes the titular Sands and turns a vast palace's inhabitants into sand zombies. To set things right, he works together with a kidnapped princess, Farah, and journeys from arrogant boyhood to maturity. The Sands of Time introduced new kinds of mobility, with players able to run up or across walls and parkour through trap-filled obstacle courses as they solved puzzles and battled groups of monsters. It also introduced the Dagger of Time (the look of which was designed by Lacoste) and its revolutionary ability to rewind the last few seconds of action, letting players undo any recent traversal or combat mistakes. 

"The rewind came first, very early," says Mechner, who joined the project first as a writer, and later full-time as a game designer and creative consultant. "That was a gameplay desire: Wouldn't it be cool to not have to die and restart so often? Is it possible to have a button on the controller that will just rewind, like rewinding a videotape? The engineers took that as a challenge, and we built the whole game around it. Characters were chosen and designed around that feature of the rewind." 

Image courtesy of Raphael Lacoste

Jean-Christophe Guyot, who joined The Sands of Time as a level designer around the same time as Lacoste, says the initial vision for the game was more of a traditional platformer; one of the early learnings was that acrobatics in 3D could be difficult, and so the rewind eased that frustration.

"I wouldn't say [the earlier version was] cartoony, but more magical, more fantasy... there was a floating castle in the air," Guyot says. "It started to shift more to a story-driven experience that was a little bit more mature, and with deeper meaning."

As art director, Lacoste worked with level designers to define the game's distinctive blue-tinted, Arabian Nights-inspired look. "We were learning how to make a really good-looking, detailed, and refined platform game, so it mainly meant that we had to start with blocks in level design and dress them into beautiful art," says Lacoste, who also created the mystical blue-lit fountains where the Prince extends his maximum health. Sometimes level designers would ask for things like unsupported columns hanging from the ceiling, which wouldn't make structural sense, Lacoste says.  "We used different ideas to make it a bit more credible; we added poles on the sides holding this broken pillar, and at the same time the poles were a great way to add swinging animations and play with different kinds of navigation challenges. So we made constraints into fun."

Image courtesy of Raphael Lacoste

One of Lacoste's inspirations when designing the massive palace of Azad was the French animated film The King and the Mockingbird, which is set entirely in a single castle with floors stratified by rank, with the king at the top. "As we would level-design all these different environments, I tried to design it with verticality, and make sure that we have this journey through the castle until we reach the top of the tower."

"The key elements of the story were to have it set in one palace, a confined space with the plague, with everybody being turned into sand monsters; the Dagger as the object that everybody is after; and then the relationship between the Prince and Farah, who are the only two survivors of this apocalypse," Mechner says. "It's a disguised zombie horror story, set in ancient Persia. All of those elements were chosen because they supported the gameplay's strengths - which were rewind, parkour, and combat - and created a playground where those three elements were what mattered most." 

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (2004)

 "There was an ask to make [the sequel] tonally a little darker, which we did," says Guyot, who moved from level design to become Warrior Within's creative director. "And which we overdid, probably, a little bit." 

2004's Prince of Persia: Warrior Within starred an older version of the Prince who - pursued relentlessly by a malevolent time-guardian called the Dahaka - was much angrier than the youth from The Sands of Time. Combat was improved, giving players more varied combos and weaponry, and it got a lot more violent, with the Prince now furiously decapitating and tearing enemies in half to a heavy metal-infused soundtrack (featuring licensed songs from the band Godsmack in addition to original music by composers Inon Zur and Stuart Chatwood). It also introduced new time powers, including portals that let players travel between past and present, and levels where the Prince would come face-to-face with his past self while revisiting familiar areas from a different perspective.

"The core idea for Warrior Within was, we wanted to continue with the story of the time powers, the Dagger of Time, and all these elements," says Guyot, "but play a little bit more with the paradox that it can create." 

"We had a narrative arc for the trilogy when we started working on Warrior Within," adds Kevin Guillemette, lead game designer on Warrior Within (and currently on the team remaking The Sands of Time). "For us, Sands of Time was: You're a teenager, you're coming of age. Warrior Within is: You're becoming an adult. You're affected by your past experiences, and all the events that you lived through, and this brings a darker tone. It breaks the playful mood that you had as a teenager." 

Guillemette was "deeply involved" in improving combat in Warrior Within, and from the first prototype, the team was excited by the new possibilities of two-weapon combat, and by the ability to pick up and throw enemies. They proposed new traps and made existing ones deadlier, and created the Dahaka, which would show up periodically to chase the Prince. These moments - which urged players through parkour sequences with death at their heels - were a way to add intensity to the traversal.

Image courtesy of Raphael Lacoste

"I also worked hard on improving the traversal with new acrobatic moves," Guillemette says. "We added drapes you could slide down with the dagger; that became something really iconic."

"There were a lot of people who enjoyed the first game and were a bit disappointed by Warrior Within, which I think is fair," says Guyot. "There are also a lot of people who came in with this chapter, and so now you have the crowd whose preferred game is the second one. So it drove a little bit of a division, and the idea was to bring everything together with the third one."

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (2005)

Bringing the Prince back home to Babylon, The Two Thrones once again made him a fugitive, hunted by an invading army led by his old nemesis, the Vizier. With the events of The Sands of Time undone, the old schemer was more dangerous than ever - but so was the Prince's lost love Farah, who returned to rekindle the love story and support the Prince with her bow and arrows. The Two Thrones added new parkour elements, including wall-mounted springboards, and new gameplay features like chariot races and stealth parkour, which let the Prince use height to escape enemies' notice, as well as Speed Kills, which turned stealth kills into brief minigames.

"At the beginning, we were thinking the game should begin with the Prince in a prison, and then he needs to run away," says Abdelhak Elguess, one of The Two Thrones' creative directors, adding that this was a deliberate nod to the 1989 original as well as a clear way to establish that the Prince is now a hunted fugitive. The location was soon changed to Babylon, which let the team explore Mesopotamian influences in a more open setting - and because "a city was more interesting than staying in a castle," says Elguess.

The Two Thrones' biggest addition to the series was the Dark Prince, a corrupted split personality created by the Prince's interactions with the Sands. Taking over the Prince's body at certain points, the Dark Prince used a "Daggertail" chain-whip to attack or strangle foes, and to swing from certain points. Essentially a second protagonist, the Dark Prince was also emblematic of The Two Thrones' central theme: bringing together the previous two iterations of the Prince and reconciling them with a story that was tonally between The Sands of Time and Warrior Within. 

"We tried to tone it down a bit without losing the gameplay improvements, and some of the maturity as well - to reach a balance between the two experiences [of Sands of Time and Warrior Within]," says Florence Baccard, who worked as a marketing coordinator on Two Thrones. "We had the mature side with the Dark Prince, the alter-ego of the Prince. He's always nagging him, trying to lure him to the dark side." 

Image courtesy of Raphael Lacoste

If Warrior Within is about transitioning to adulthood and the trauma of the past, "Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is deciding to face and fight those dark feelings that you have inside you," says Guillemette, also lead game designer on The Two Thrones. "You overcome them, and you bring back the joy you had when you were younger. You're becoming a man. That was really our thinking in the trilogy." 

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones are available on PC via the Ubisoft Store and Steam, and are included with a Ubisoft+ Premium subscription.

We'll continue our retrospective next week with Prince of Persia (2008) and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. For more Prince of Persia, check out our look back at the original 1989 game and the first details on the remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.