There’s a lot of princely goodness on the horizon this month. The second instalment of the latest franchise reboot – Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands – is set for an 18 May 2010 release, and the highly anticipated Prince of Persia movie epic – The Sands of Time – will follow shortly after, set for 28 May 2010 in USA. It’s with princely anticipation that MyGaming takes a look back at the classic trilogy that started it all.
Prince of Persia (1989)
Prince of Persia Amiga Cover
The legendary first instalment in the Prince of Persia (PoP) series is revered among those who were lucky enough to have played it during its original reign, and sits firmly in the annals of classic platform games.
The story goes that whilst the sultan of Persia is off waging war, the evil Vizier, Jaffar, has machinations to marry the Princess. Refusing his advances, the Princess is given 60 minutes to think about it, or face certain death. To make matters worse, the Princess’ love interest (apparently a vagabond from a foreign land) has been tossed into the lowest level of the palatial dungeons, and must climb and fight his way back to the top of the palace to defeat Jaffar and rescue the damsel.
Jaffar makes his move on the Princess
Along the way the Prince has his first encounter with what is to become a recurring element of the games – his alter ego.
Leaping through a magic mirror placed in his path by Jaffar, the Prince is separated from his shadow, who later hinders the Prince’s progress at various points in the game before they are merged.
The game was noted for breaking new ground in a number of areas. Pro genitor Jordan Mechner studied video clips of his brother running, jumping, climbing and sword fighting. He then used rotoscoping – tracing the video frames – to create the incredibly fluid movements of the Prince.
The Prince of Persia leaps across a deadly trap
The fluid animations of the Prince were one of the first things to catch the eyes of gamers at the time. The Prince would swing his arms for balance as he ran, do a quick double step before making a dangerous leap, sway for a few precarious moments when dangling from a ledge, scoot along when crouching under low obstacles, and even perfectly parry enemy sword attacks. To top it all off, the Prince was grotesquely impaled on floor spikes, sliced in half by razor sharp guillotines (leaving a bloody smear on the blades), and crumpled into a pitiful heap when defeated by an enemy swordsman.
The Prince of Persia even battles undead
In an era when most platform game characters had very few animations, the subtleties of the Prince’s motion were a giant leap forward in character animation. Even Joe Public was impressed, as PoP was used as demonstration software by salesmen trying to show off the power of PC’s.
In another great example of thinking outside of the box, Mechner used an open level design – well, about as open as you can get in a 2D side scroller. Whereas most platform games at the time had the player starting on the left of the world and making their way right to the end of the level, Mechner had players explore, reach dead-ends and encounter diabolical traps, and backtrack to circumvent obstacles.
The Prince of Persia is shown how not to jump through guillotines
The fiendishly difficult platforming puzzles (usually involving running through a gauntlet of traps and treacherous obstacles with nary a mistake) inspired a further sense of urgency – having to backtrack (or dying) would seriously dent the Prince’s prospects of rescuing the Princess in under 60 minutes. Thankfully there were some cheat codes around to extend the timer for a more casual pace.
The game was originally published by Brøderbund for the Apple II and has since been ported to any and every platform you can think of.
Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1994)
Set eleven days after the conclusion of the first title, the Prince has since asked for the Princess’ hand in marriage (that sly dog). On the wedding day, the Prince turns up at the palace but upon entering the royal courts his appearance is transformed back into that of a beggar. Jaffar has returned, and assumes the vestige of the Prince, ordering the beggar to be removed from the palace. The Prince flees on a merchant ship which is struck by lightning cast by Jaffar. Awakening on a foreign island, the Prince fights his way back to Persia.
The Prince of Persia really hopes the horse can fly
Along the way, the Prince is reunited with his mother who helps with some character development. The Prince also discovers that he can separate from his body, transforming into the shadow of himself, as created by the magic mirror in the first title.
Assuming the shadow form and stealing a sacred flame from a conveniently located temple, the Prince returns to Persia, encounters Jaffar, and promptly dispatches him with the flames, saving the day once again, and reuniting with the princess.
The Shadow and the Flame had improved graphics
Graphically, the game was an improvement, with more detailed, colourful and rich environments. The fluid animations made their welcome return. In terms of gameplay, the game follow the same formula as the first, but sprinkled a few more enemies in for good measure, and of course the diabolical time limit was back.
Prince of Persia 3D (1999)
A rather tragic conclusion to the original trilogy, in that it was disastrously flawed. As the title suggests, the game made its transition to 3D, and probably established the foundations of gameplay that would appear in the next series reboot by Ubisoft.
Prince of Persia 3D had some pretty scenery
The platforming elements were praised by critics at the time, and rightly so – they were good fun and consisted of a number of exciting set-pieces – and in general the level design was good. The game let itself down graphically in some areas though, with a strange hodgepodge of good and bad.
The control implementation was probably the nail in the coffin for the title. Although the fluid princely animations that gamers had come to expect were in place, the game was unresponsive to inputs, used a dismal 3rd-person camera system, and had a particularly painful combat mode.
Prince of Persia 3D fell short with ugly character models
The shortcomings of the game can likely be attributed to the turmoil in which it was developed. Original publisher Brøderbund had been sold, and it’s development companies divided up. Red Orb was developing the game at the time, but had trouble finding a publisher. Ultimately, a game rushed to development completion was pushed out to the public, bringing the original trilogy to an end.
Prince of Persia 3D had some cool platforming sequences
For what it’s worth, the plot sees the Prince, Princess and the Sultan travelling to meet the Sultan’s brother Assan. Upon arriving it emerges that Assan is rather annoyed that the Sultan didn’t honour his (rather incestuous) promise to marry his daughter off to Assan’s son, Rugnor. The treacherous Assan has the Prince (you guessed it) slung into a dungeon and left for dead, and winds up killing the Sultan.
Of course the Prince doesn’t stand for this, and soon rescues the Princess from the clutches of Rugnor, and flies off into the sunset with his maiden, away from Persia, and on to never-to-be-concluded ambiguity (until franchise writers figure out a way to tie in the stories).
Be sure to discuss your favourite classic PoP moments in the forums.
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