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.
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
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.
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
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.
>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!
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...)
I played it relentlessly as a kid (3-6 years old), and never got past the 4th level…
> - 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
There's something very of-the-era about fixing a virus-ridden PC and then "improving" it by installing Prince of Persia
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"
That is excellent playground wisdom
The graphics of Prince of persia took me to those dungeons more effectively than any 4k ray traced modern game could...
That's because you were younger. Nostalgia is a hard drug.
I 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.
I came here to recommend the same thing. The entire War Stories series was magnificent.
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.
> 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...
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.
"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 ..
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.
Until 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.
Prince of Persia is one of those games where the technical limitations are almost inseparable from the magic
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
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.
I read this and Masters of Doom back-to-back. Both very enjoyable, and great contrast between the two.
Agreed! I did actually enjoy his first one even more; the early years.
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.
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!
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
Funny to see this; I read the first ~100 pages of the Stripe Press book last night and am highly enjoying it.
> 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.
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 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.
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
It's a great and novel game, but how many more retrospectives do we need?
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.
Gobsmacked to learn that this was originally developed on the Apple II. I always thought of PoP as a 16-bit type of game.
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
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.
That's impressive. You clear this game... that puts you in contrast with me, who can't even become a 'prince' in a game
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.
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.
The first two games to fall in love with - Karatéka and then Alley Cat.
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!
Yeah, plenty of "wasted" hours playing that game.
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.
My dad's favourite game. Still held up 30 years later, I played the shit out of this on IPad.