Prince of Persia was first released on Apple II computers 35 years ago today, kicking off a legendary adventure series years before Ubisoft created its own entry in 2003. It's been through multiple iterations, telling the stories of a refugee who becomes a prince, a prince who becomes a refugee (and reclaims his throne), and a nameless adventurer who helps a princess save the world. The franchise has come roaring back this year with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and The Rogue Prince of Persia, two very different action-adventure platformer games that revisit the series' 2D roots; and details about the remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time currently in the works at Ubisoft Montréal.
Through it all, the series has been defined by its One Thousand and One Nights-inspired settings, acrobatic exploration, high-stakes combat, and coming-of-age stories that often focus on love and time as thematic pillars. To celebrate 35 years since Prince of Persia's debut, we spoke with creators from throughout the franchise about their experiences on the games and what the series means to them. We'll be publishing their stories weekly throughout the month of October, beginning with series creator Jordan Mechner and the legendary 1989 classic.
ABOVE: The original 1989 box art for Prince of Persia.
The original Prince of Persia centers on a refugee who falls in love with a princess, and is imprisoned by her father's evil vizier, Jaffar. Jaffar then seizes the kingdom and gives the Princess one hour to agree to marry him - or die. In those 60 minutes, players must escape a 12-level labyrinth of deadly traps, puzzles, and guards, where death is never further away than a mistimed parry or a poorly aimed jump - possibly onto a spring-loaded bed of hidden, impaling spikes.
Finding the Humanity
Part of what set Prince of Persia apart from other games in 1989 was that Mechner was among the first videogame developers to use rotoscoping, a technique for creating frames of animation from filmed actors for smoother, more lifelike movement. The resulting fluidity was legendary (and even more impressive given that the Apple II computers it ran on were already eclipsed by better machines when Prince of Persia launched).
This helped create a platform-action game "with that visceral fear that if you fell too far, it would really hurt," says Mechner (who wrote about his experiences creating the game in Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family and The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993). This wasn't just about realistic action and graphical flair, but about capturing the character's humanity.
"I really wanted the character to feel human so that, as players, we would identify with the little guy running and jumping on the screen," Mechner says, "to feel that there was not just an abstract sprite, but a flesh-and-blood human being up there."
ABOVE: The Prince leaps toward a guard in the Apple II version of Prince of Persia.
To help create that human being, Mechner enlisted his brother David, then 15, to put on loose white clothing meant to contrast sharply with his surroundings, and run and jump around the Reader's Digest parking lot and a high school near their family's home in Chappaqua, New York, while Jordan filmed. (Jordan had a long history of pulling the rest of the family into his creations, says David Mechner, which is also reflected in Prince of Persia's music, composed by their father, Francis.) David, now CEO of New York City-based tech company Pragma Securities, estimates filming for Prince of Persia took one or two days, during which his brother directed him to execute running leaps, scale concrete walls, and even dangle from a ledge by his fingers while kicking his legs.
"I was kinda hanging there for a while," says David. "I think I eventually struggled my way up, but that was one where he definitely edited out a lot of frames. The comical thing is, I'm really not very athletic at all, and I wasn't then, either."
Jordan agrees: "There's a sort of endearing awkwardness to the way that he moved, and even in a few pixels, that came through. And I think that really helped to bond the player with the character."
Extreme Danger on a Tight Schedule
Prince of Persia also needed suspense; players needed a reason to really not want the Prince to plummet to his death. The ticking 60-minute clock, represented by a huge hourglass in the Princess' chamber during cutscenes, was Mechner's solution for achieving this without limiting the player's stock of lives, with the idea that players would run out of time on their early attempts, but quickly move through early levels on subsequent playthroughs. Another big source of tension was that the deaths in Prince of Persia were legendarily extravagant for 1989. Losing a swordfight to a guard wasn't particularly graphic, but if players failed to spot telltale holes in the floor, a sprint through an "empty" hallway could end with the Prince awkwardly slumped onto a jagged spike trap. Metal jaw traps could slice the Prince in half, with a bright trail of orange pixels leaving no doubt as to what had just happened.
ABOVE: A jaw trap cuts the Prince in half in the Apple II version of Prince of Persia.
"I thought that with the cartoon graphics, it wouldn't be too gory - but now, 35 years later, I hear regularly from people who encountered those spikes and that slicer when they were 4 or 5 or 6 years old," says Mechner, adding that his inspiration was the trap-filled temple in the first 10 minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark. "I hope I didn't traumatize too many people, but ... if you can almost get crushed and impaled, that visceral sense of danger is so exciting."
Over the course of Prince of Persia's four-year development, the Apple II hardware it was created for went from being state-of-the-art to obsolete, and there was real concern that it would flop. "It was saved by the ports," says Mechner, adding that the PC version was the one he oversaw personally, with a Broderbund team. "We redid the graphics, and my dad re-orchestrated the music to take advantage of the capabilities of new PCs ... so I think that that's the closest to the definitive port of the original."
ABOVE: The Prince flees a guard in the 1990 PC version of Prince of Persia.
Prince of Persia was eventually ported to no fewer than 18 different platforms besides Apple II. Most of those ports weren't overseen by Mechner or Broderbund, and were often made by teams in other countries, sometimes on platforms Mechner had never seen. But they "were great too, in their own way," he says.
"The Japanese Super Famicom version is really a highlight," Mechner adds. "They made more levels, with new settings and enemies. It was almost like seeing a remake or a remaster of the original game, so I loved it."
ABOVE: The Prince finds his sword in the SNES/Super Famicom version of Prince of Persia.
One Hour, Lifelong Memories
The influence of Prince of Persia is difficult to ignore, from the imitators who tried to replicate its formula at the time, to the Ubisoft developers who went on to create their own Prince of Persia games after discovering the original as kids. While speaking to them about their own games (which we'll cover in the coming weeks), we asked developers about their experiences with the first game.
Mounir Radi, game director on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, discovered the original in a small computer shop where he and a friend would try games. "The manager was super-happy with that, since he had two cheerful demoists to promote his games," Radi laughs. "I remember being completely shocked with the animation, that was super-striking for me. And we had to figure out, by ourselves, all the aspects of the game to complete it within one hour, making our own drawings [to map out the levels]. It was a great lesson in autonomy."
Ubisoft Chief Production Officer Martin Schelling (who worked on Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, The Two Thrones, Prince of Persia (2008), and The Forgotten Sands as a level artist, art production manager, and associate producer) recalls playing it at a friends' house and being struck with the animation and setting. "When we were doing The Sands of Time, we were still looking at the original to make sure that the enemies, obstacles, and everything were respecting the original DNA and ideas," Schelling says.
"When replaying the original Prince of Persia, of course there's the notion of the rotoscopy that is super powerful and brings weight to the character," says Bio Jade Adam Granger, creative director of the in-development remake of The Sands of Time. "Every jump has tension built into it. That's continued as the brand has evolved, and interacting with the environment is core to it. To me, that's one of the differences between a platformer, where jumping is more a question of timing and execution, and Prince of Persia, where you are rooted in this world with the weight of that character. That love of movement also brings that daring vertigo feeling much better than something more mechanical," Granger says.
ABOVE: The Prince discovers a spike trap in the PC version of Prince of Persia.
"It's been a lot of fun, seeing all the material that Jordan's found," says David Mechner of the journals and video footage Jordan Mechner kept during Prince of Persia's development. "Otherwise, it would just be more of a dim memory."
Mechner doesn't attribute the creation and success of Prince of Persia to himself alone. "It's the combination of something very ancient, Persian culture and stories that are a collective cultural heritage that's thousands of years old. The combination of that with something that's very new, videogames ... creates a swashbuckling heroic adventure, which in every medium just clicks with us. I was in the right time and in the right place for those two currents to come together," he says.
Stay tuned throughout the month of October for more behind-the-scenes stories from throughout the Prince of Persia series, and check out Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown's Mask of Darkness DLC and the first details on the remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
If you're interested in checking out some of the Prince's later adventures, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Warrior Within, The Two Thrones, Prince of Persia (2008), and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands are available on PC via the Ubisoft Store (where they're on sale for up to 80% off during the Autumn Sale) and Steam, and are included with a Ubisoft+ Premium subscription. The Rogue Prince of Persia is available in Early Access via Steam and GeForce Now. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is available on PC (via the Ubisoft Store, Epic Games Store, and Steam) as well as Switch, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Amazon Luna; is coming soon to Mac; is included with a Ubisoft+ Premium subscription; and is on sale for 40% off the Standard Edition from the Ubisoft Store until October 8.
