by bentcorner
7 subcomments
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
by ecocentrik
4 subcomments
- 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?
by bschwindHN
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by protocolture
3 subcomments
- 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.
- 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
by throw4847285
0 subcomment
- I really enjoyed Jordan Mechner's graphic memoir Replay. It's a multi-generational family history and personal reflection interwoven together.
- 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 :)
- 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!
- > 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.
by achairapart
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by stefanos82
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by curtisblaine
4 subcomments
- 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.
- Prince of Persia is one of those games where the technical limitations are almost inseparable from the magic
- Gobsmacked to learn that this was originally developed on the Apple II. I always thought of PoP as a 16-bit type of game.
- Yeah, plenty of "wasted" hours playing that 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
- This is a great interview with Jordan Mechner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQVB7tP1JIg
- It's a great and novel game, but how many more retrospectives do we need?
by shevy-java
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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?).
- My dad's favourite game. Still held up 30 years later, I played the shit out of this on IPad.
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