![]() Thankfully, he’s not a Hollywood star, but a handful of white, pink and yellow pixels – and that’s a good thing. If the Prince were a real live hero, he’d probably be feeling a little tired and creaky by now, heaving his widening midriff over ledges and huffing wearily through closing gates, like Harrison Ford in that belated Indiana Jones sequel we won’t dwell on here. Regardless of age or hardware, there’s something timeless about Prince Of Persia a kind of videogaming X factor, an atmosphere and drama that is entirely unique. Only yesterday, Nintendo announced that it will soon make the Game Boy Color and Super Nintendo ports available to download for the 3DS and Wii respectively.įor a game created more than 20 years ago by a single programmer, that enduring popularity might seem rather surprising – that is, until you go back and play it again, on almost any system you care to choose. A graphically enhanced remake of Prince Of Persia appeared on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network a couple of years ago. Only the other day, I noticed someone playing it on their iPhone. And just to add to the tension, the game would end automatically after an hour, meaning that a few simple mistakes would make the end of the game impossible to reach. Total concentration and pixel-perfect accuracy were required if the player was to survive the numerous leaps and sword-fights – a single mistake would send the Prince back to the beginning of the stage. This sense of drama may explain why Prince Of Persia has continued to endure, despite its astonishingly cruel difficulty level. It didn’t matter that the levels themselves were a comparatively sparse amalgam of grey walls, blue tiles and white spikes – when the Prince hung by his fingertips above a precipice, or leapt through a closing gate with barely a second to spare, the experience was akin to stepping into the shoes of Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker.Īnd like all great blockbusters, Prince Of Persia was full of unforgettable set-pieces – who could forget their fist encounter with a skeleton warrior, as it formed, Harryhausen-like, from a pile of dusty old bones? Or the surreal moment where the Prince leaps through a mirror, only for another, identical (and decidedly mischievous) version of himself to emerge from the other side? But unlike the many, many other platform games available at the time, Prince Of Persia was the first that could accurately be described as cinematic far from a gimmick, the smooth, realistic character animation absorbed players into this digital Persian world. ![]() Against the diminishing sands of time, players had to guide the Prince out of his captivity, across 13 levels of chasms, traps and enemies, to the palace tower where the evil Jaffar has the princess held captive. ![]() The game itself was a comparatively straightforward platform adventure. Back when motion capture was unheard of in the games industry, Mechner spent months scanning and manipulating the live action footage of his brother, and turning it into the agile character who would become known simply as the Prince. It’s remarkable, in fact, just how effective Mechner’s deployment of such a simple technique was. Mechner had explored the possibilities of rotoscoping in videogames before – his fighting game Karateka was released in 1984, while he was still studying psychology at university – but the extraordinarily lifelike characters in 1989’s Prince Of Persia were unparalleled at the time. It’s now well over 20 years since US programmer Jordan Mechner took some video images of his brother leaping, running, and climbing up walls in a local park, and turned them into the seminal Prince Of Persia.
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