IGN Presents: The History of Prince of Persia

A nameless traveler climbs the palace walls of Persia merely to glimpse the Sultan's daughter, more beautiful than the new moon. A jealous Vizier imprisons them both, one in the highest tower, the other in the lowest dungeon. The traveler is undaunted. The path to save his Princess is treacherous, and there is no time to waste.

Most people think time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction, but this dashing young adventurer has a very special relationship with time. He sees the face of it, struggles against it, uses it as a weapon on his enemies. This man, who fights the corruption of gods, re-arranges the threads of history to his liking on a whim, only to find history changing him as well. Always, there are consequences for the unwary traveler, and traps take on many forms. Time, this hero - this Prince - will tell you, is an ocean in a storm, and he sails those dangerous waters with the grace of a dancer, the potency of a sword. The Prince waits for no man.

His is a tale like none we've ever seen.

Once Upon a Time

When Doug Carlson finished writing his first computer game in 1979, he and brother Gary founded a company solely to market it. Brøderbund was a made-up word roughly translating as "band of brothers" from mashed-up German, Swedish and Danish, and Galactic Empire, the first game in the Galactic Saga, gave players 999 years to conquer the known universe. It only took ten for Brøderbund to conquer their share of the industry with powerhouse franchises Choplifter and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. A few half-hearted attempts to expand the company fell through, but the Carlsons kept looking for new properties to boost their profile.

They found one in Karateka, a surprisingly advanced undergrad project put together by Yale student Jordan Mechner.

Mechner was a psychology major who grew up in love with animation, but couldn't draw well enough to make cartoons of his own. He turned to computers instead. His big idea was to put equal focus on graphics and gameplay, and give some priority to animating the human avatar's moves. Most other game designers stuck to using spaceships or oddly static creatures, and didn't put much effort into animating either... they weren't making cartoons, after all. Mechner was.

Karateka sent gamers on a karate-fueled mission in feudal Japan to save Princess Mariko from evil warlord Akuma and his pesky eagle. It looked fairly stunning for a 1984 side-scroller, showing off a fluid array of character movements. Running sequences, of which there were many, were strangely mesmerizing. Combatants bowed before pasting each other in the face. Karateka also included an early regenerative health system, something that wouldn't fully catch on until nearly two decades after its release on the Apple II.


Half a million in sales made Karateka a big win for Brøderbund. They wanted another game out of Mechner, and he started thinking about locations. Part of Karateka's success, he believed, was the exotic Asian setting... ironically rare in the U.S., even from Asia-produced games. He eventually settled on the fantastic Middle Eastern world of One Thousand and One Nights. To that framework, Mechner added gameplay structure from the two games he'd recently been enjoying: Brøderbund's own Lode Runner and The Castles of Dr. Creep. The Prince, his new protagonist, would navigate a puzzle and trap-filled labyrinth, and he'd do it with the energy of Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. The opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where archeologist and fortune hunter Indiana Jones stayed half a step ahead of instantly lethal booby traps and slowly closing gates, became another huge influence.

Mechner wanted to stretch out the thrills of those eight minutes to fill an entire game. For urgency, he put players on the clock. Everything would play out in real time.

The Prince relied heavily on acrobatics for his survival, requiring a far more extensive set of moves than the karateka's one-on-one throwdowns. That game proved stellar graphics could grab attention in a crowded gaming market and keep it, so the question became how to upgrade Karateka's look. Rotoscoping became the answer. Mechner cast his brother David (largely based on David's willingness to work for free), filmed him running and jumping around in baggy white pants, then traced and scanned the frames into the computer. Their father, Frances, wrote the Persian-themed music.

Prince of Persia released in 1989 on the Apple II, and was an instant success.


At first, it didn't seem so complicated. Mixing carnal lust with political ambition, the evil Vizier Jaffar imprisoned a beautiful Princess in a high tower and gave her an hour to marry him or die. Rather than go for an annulment, the Princess leaned towards Option B. Her only hope was her commoner-lover, the Prince (no relation), who Jaffar left to rot in a dungeon. One swift escape later, the Prince was running up the tower to beat the deadline.

And running was the only way to do it. Players had just sixty minutes to reach the top and defeat Jaffar, and a ton of pressure-plates to hit on the way. Guards were actually dueled in a patient series of retreats, advances, strikes and parries. If spike traps skewered you, or a skeleton warrior chopped you, or a section of floor collapsed under you, the game whisked you back to the start of the level while the clock kept ticking. Lost time compounded issues like loosing your soul, which cut the Prince's health to almost nothing. Worse, that "Shadow Prince" played for the other team, harassing you at every turn. A real sense of danger permeated every moment, helped by seamless animations and rudimentary physics that gave the Prince real weight. It just felt like he was always about to be killed. Often enough, he was. That made his escapes all the more thrilling.

Prince of Persia started with players under the gun, and let the pressure build from there. Then Mechner added twists nobody expected; killing the Shadow in a duel killed the Prince, but simply walking into it merged them back together. Reaching Jaffar required a "leap of faith" over a bottomless chasm. Gamers were challenged to think about what they were doing in ways few other games did, but taking the time to simply stop and think ate into the precious few minutes you had left. It was wonderfully tense.