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How we made hit video game Prince of Persia
- timzaman 4mo agoJust 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
- pjmlp 4mo agoCan acknowledge.
- runevault 4mo agoStripe 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 4mo agoAgreed! I did actually enjoy his first one even more; the early years.
- noufalibrahim 4mo agoWas 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8
- normie3000 4mo agoI read this and Masters of Doom back-to-back. Both very enjoyable, and great contrast between the two.
- bentcorner 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoIt 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 4mo agoI played it relentlessly as a kid (3-6 years old), and never got past the 4th level…
- HeavyStorm 4mo agoYeah, 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...)
- qsera 4mo 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!
- chihuahua 4mo agoI remember having hundreds of pirated C64 and Amiga games. When starting a new game, we'd press every single key on the keyboard and try to figure out what, if anything, that key did.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoI 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.
- achairapart 4mo agoJust 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 4mo agoI 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.
- achairapart 4mo agoBest 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izadA3nSPbk [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5UU2TxOcZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5UU2TxOcZs
- zem 4mo agoit'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 4mo agoWhen 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 4mo 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...
- bentcorner 4mo agoMy 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.
- jhartwig 4mo ago
- curtisblaine 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoThe first two games to fall in love with - Karatéka and then Alley Cat.
- phodo 4mo agoIn 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 4mo agoDesperately 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 4mo agoYeah, 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.
- nvader 4mo agoMy favourite Easter egg about karateka: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFe28MNCG7o&t=17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFe28MNCG7o&t=17
- bluedino 4mo agoOh, Karateka. I had the flawed Atari 7800 version as a kid.
- dekhn 4mo agoSeeing 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.
- pjmlp 4mo agoYeah, plenty of "wasted" hours playing that game.
- bschwindHN 4mo agoSuch 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.
- lukan 4mo 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_ 4mo agoBut 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.
- lukan 4mo agoUntil you learn the trick to see that only the ones with the glowing eyes are alive ... But yes, they overdid that and should probably have made more variations.
- Agentlien 4mo 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 4mo agoIf 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
- skibz 4mo agoI came here to recommend the same thing. The entire War Stories series was magnificent.
- Someone 4mo agoThat, and more, is available from Jordan Mechner’s site https://www.jordanmechner.com https://www.jordanmechner.com. Prince of Persia info at https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/library/#pop https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/library/#pop
- Smalltalker-80 4mo agoYes, specifically buying options for the book are on this page: (recommended) https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/books/journals https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/books/journals
- Dathuil 4mo agoThis 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 4mo agoThis 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.
- qsera 4mo agoThe graphics of Prince of persia took me to those dungeons more effectively than any 4k ray traced modern game could...
- eru 4mo agoThat's because you were younger. Nostalgia is a hard drug.
- qsera 4mo agoIt is not nostalgia.
- kruffalon 4mo agoI think it's because you have to use your imagination. Just like active recall (essentially guess consciously before checking the answeris) a better way to learn I think the less detail their is in the story (book, game, movie, etc) the more you have to do yourself and so it becomes your own experience rather than someone elses.
- pelario 4mo agoAs 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 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 4mo agoAt 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 4mo agoGobsmacked to learn that this was originally developed on the Apple II. I always thought of PoP as a 16-bit type of game.
- jdw64 4mo agothis 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 4mo agoI 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.
- jdw64 4mo agoThat's impressive. You clear this game... that puts you in contrast with me, who can't even become a 'prince' in a game
- aidenn0 4mo agoBionic 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 4mo agoMy dad's favourite game. Still held up 30 years later, I played the shit out of this on IPad.
- trwhite 4mo agoFunny to see this; I read the first ~100 pages of the Stripe Press book last night and am highly enjoying it.
- stefanos82 4mo agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54
- kriro 4mo agoThat 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 4mo agoIt's a great and novel game, but how many more retrospectives do we need?
- msephton 4mo ago11?
- BrtByte 4mo agoPrince of Persia is one of those games where the technical limitations are almost inseparable from the magic
- EliRivers 4mo agoIf you like that, you'll like this: https://www.filfre.net/2016/10/how-jordan-mechner-made-a-different-sort-of-interactive-movie-or-the-virtues-of-restraint/ 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 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoI really enjoyed Jordan Mechner's graphic memoir Replay. It's a multi-generational family history and personal reflection interwoven together.
- the_af 4mo agoLike 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?).
- wdaher 4mo agoAssuming 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_af 4mo agoI 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?
- bookofjoe 4mo agohttps://stiggyblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/the-making-of-prince-of-persia-ebook/ https://stiggyblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/the-making-of-pr...
- the_af 4mo agoThanks! I've no problem buying the Stripe Press book, as I've said I simply haven't pulled the trigger yet. I don't mind the price, it's just that most of it I've already read back when it was freely available in Mechner's blog. If I do buy it, I prefer the physical book with photos rather than a Kindle version. I'm not actually asking for help here, just musing. (Again, thanks for your reply anyway).
- ecocentrik 4mo agoThe 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 4mo agoFlashback 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.
- gbalint 4mo agoPrince 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.
- dfxm12 4mo agoIt'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.
- 4mo ago
- christkv 4mo agoThis is a great interview with Jordan Mechner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQVB7tP1JIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQVB7tP1JIg
- bicepjai 4mo agoIn 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 4mo agoPrince 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://youtu.be/wKqk9kosCs4?is=awtDYponzgbjyA52 https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/games-movies/karateka/ https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/games-movies/karateka/
- neom 4mo agoTough 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukSECkajKYA