How we made hit video game Prince of Persia
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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.
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.
Years later though, and games like Dark Souls and Monster Hunter have a similar sluggishness / unresponsiveness to them. But it doesn't feel as unfair in those games.
And we dumb kids used to play it without the manual. It was a minor victory day for us when we finally figured out how to pick up the sword!
(But I also didn't like it very much...)
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!!!
You can see if Dead Cells's parrying mechanic works for you.
I have to admit the game is a little overwhelming but maybe I need to stick with it a bit more.
Part of PoP's charm is that the game is very simple, yet the parry mechanic has nuance - you can buffer parry/attack/parry/attack/... sequences and the timing is just a bit faster than normal enemies, meaning you can wear them out (these fights have a very Errol Flynn Swashbuckler feel to them). Eventually your attack lands before they can begin their parry animation.
Later in the game you meet enemies that hit faster than you can respond to with a parry, so you need to change up your tactics.
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
Prince of Persia info at https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/library/#pop
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.
I remember when I was around 6 or 7, a boy a couple years older (and therefore, seemingly infinitely wiser) sharing the folk advice: "Play the other games first, don't play Prince of Persia too early or it will ruin all the other games for you"
Just like active recall (essentially guess consciously before checking the answeris) a better way to learn I think the less detail their is in the story (book, game, movie, etc) the more you have to do yourself and so it becomes your own experience rather than someone elses.
It is sad that people easily write off memory of nice things as "nostaliga"! Somethings really were nice.
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.
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.
Skyrim did that also pretty well. The first draugh zombies/skelletons lying km the catacombs are just objects to loot from. But then you tried to loot the next one and it moves and gets up ..
But yes, they overdid that and should probably have made more variations.
highly recommended as 90s gamer
Also, Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8
And an awful lot more written by Jimmy Maher on that site.
Just out curiosity, PoP ran on 8088/8086, while Flashback on 286/386.
It's a fun media experience with a lot of playable prototypes.
simple but good times
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.
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?).
How come you didn't read it? Did you lose interest?
It's more the satisfaction of (a) doing a small nice thing for a stranger on the Internet while also (b) freeing up a little shelf space is also worth the ~$5 it would cost me to mail it to someone.
If I do buy it, I prefer the physical book with photos rather than a Kindle version.
I'm not actually asking for help here, just musing.
(Again, thanks for your reply anyway).
As I said, I'm not looking for help here. I do know where to buy the book and I can afford it. I just haven't decided to buy it (yet) for the myriad of reasons people sometimes refrain from impulsively buying all the things :)
Also, I'm afraid of buying it and then never reading it, like it happened to the other commenter.
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.
Just watch it yourself, you will be in awe!
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.
And that awesome intro animation too - never seen anything like it at the time, like simply seeing realistic human faces being drawn in a DOS game was just mind blowing.
May sound silly for some people today, but that was some incredible wizardry at the times, given the limitations (PC speaker was monophonic, square-wave only). As a YouTube comment says: "This is musical equivalent to pixel art."
And a great game too!
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.
49 minute Amiga play through for those feeling like a nostalgia hit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukSECkajKYA
I'm not that good at games... For some reason PoP leveraged some brain circuitry I have with questionable evolutionary value.