Prince of Persia

1989 · Platform / Action · Apple II / DOS

Overview

Prince of Persia (1989) is Jordan Mechner's cinematic platformer: escape the Sultan's dungeons in one hour to save the princess, with rotoscoped animation.

Deep Dive

A young man thrown into the Sultan's dungeons by the vizier Jaffar has sixty minutes to escape and rescue the princess. Twelve levels of traps, crumbling floors, gates and sword-fights test timing, and the one-hour limit runs across the whole game. Jordan Mechner filmed his brother running and jumping and traced the footage to animate the hero with a realism no computer game had shown, giving every leap and fall real weight. It was ported to many platforms and became a long-lived series.

Developer Story

Prince of Persia was designed by Jordan Mechner in 1989 over four years of development. Mechner used rotoscoping — tracing over video footage of his brother David running, jumping, and falling — to create the most realistic human animation seen in a home computer game. The one-hour time limit created tension across the entire game. Mechner documented the entire development process in journals later published as "The Making of Prince of Persia."

Did You Know?

Mechner rotoscoped his brother David's movements by filming him and tracing each frame onto animation cells — creating animation unlike anything in 1989 games.
The one-hour time limit was global — players who spent too long on any puzzle sequence ran out of time for later ones, requiring holistic time management.
Mechner kept a detailed journal throughout development, published decades later — one of the few primary source documents of 1980s game creation.
The original Apple II version took four years to develop — an unusually long timeline that Mechner balanced against other projects.
Prince of Persia was ported to 25 platforms and inspired the modern platformer's emphasis on physics-based, weighty character movement.

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