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.
Well thanks to the 60 minute game play and no saves, you only ever see the first four/five levels or so. It’s a great game, but that particular mechanic is …kind of annoying.
Likewise, but for different reasons: We had a [pirated] copy of the game, and thus didn't have the manual.
Down here in my city in Mexico that's basically how everyone played it, so most of us played only the first level.
At some point, I was tinkering with the "x tree gold" program and saw the "hex view" thing. I remember opening Prince's .sav file, which was a very small file that only appeared after you saved. After tinkering with the numbers I managed to appear in the next level .
It was my 5 minutes of fame at my computer class when I arrived and showed that I had passed the bottles room.
And I became fascinated by cracking at that point.
Somehow in my mind the animation of it and Another World/Out of this World felt similar, and way outside everything else that was available at the time. The games even felt very similar, but I never got particularly far in either so that could well be just the perspective of youth.
My favorite easter egg by far in this domain, was the Apple II version of Karateka.
The game came on a floppy disk; if you inserted it in the drive upside down (the Apple II only used one side of the medium) you found (unusually) that the game would load, but was rendered upside down.
It was fully playable. Non trivial given the way those games were written!!!
it's the colour scheme that I remember most strongly. I still think "very prince of persia" when I see certain colour combinations, especially cream and purple.
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.
> 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.
Sounds like the summary of the opening chapter of a Bruce Sterling novel.
Love that your Hong Kong friend memorized the DRM codes.
Of course, DRM was no issue with a cracked copy of the game...
My first real paycheck job was a store in Beaverton Oregon that would buy and sell software. Folks would buy the software, copy the disc, bring it back to us to and we would reseal and sell it. I was always more interested in the actual hardware side and spend most of my day helping the pc tech. I think the store got sued eventually for basically pirating Windows.
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.
Seeing and hearing Karateka for the first time on an Apple II+ was a life-changing experience for me. Along with Ultima III, it made me want to be a game developer (I was in 4th grade, so around 12, at the time). Everything about the game is just so smooth and well-done- it has a plot, a progression, good animation and realistic sounds. I was pretty unhappy for years around the fact that I didn't understand the technology (machine language instead of BASIC, Apple's very funny graphics implementation, doing sound and animation simultaneously) to make games like that.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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?).
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 55.9 ms ] threadhighly recommended as 90s gamer
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.
But still it was an amazing experience whenever I played it. I felt the pressure and the need to start again like no other game nowadays.
But maybe that’s just because I was a kid.
You can see if Dead Cells's parrying mechanic works for you.
Down here in my city in Mexico that's basically how everyone played it, so most of us played only the first level.
At some point, I was tinkering with the "x tree gold" program and saw the "hex view" thing. I remember opening Prince's .sav file, which was a very small file that only appeared after you saved. After tinkering with the numbers I managed to appear in the next level .
It was my 5 minutes of fame at my computer class when I arrived and showed that I had passed the bottles room.
And I became fascinated by cracking at that point.
The game came on a floppy disk; if you inserted it in the drive upside down (the Apple II only used one side of the medium) you found (unusually) that the game would load, but was rendered upside down.
It was fully playable. Non trivial given the way those games were written!!!
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.
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.
Sounds like the summary of the opening chapter of a Bruce Sterling novel.
Love that your Hong Kong friend memorized the DRM codes.
Of course, DRM was no issue with a cracked copy of the game...
"Cracked by The Vulture" was something that I was very used to seeing upon booting up a game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFe28MNCG7o&t=17
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Just watch it yourself, you will be in awe!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54
And an awful lot more written by Jimmy Maher on that site.
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?).