Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince of Persia, designed his first hit game in his college room at Yale University. This game, Karateka, was very popular because of the 'realistic' animations. The game was published in 1984, five years before Prince of Persia was released.
Prince of Persia was special not only because of he fluid character movement but mainly because of the gameplay. The game is very fun to play, even nowadays. The game selled nearly 2,000,000 copies and that's an awful lot, especially in the late 80's. Mechner made Prince almost entirely on his own. He got most help from his father and brother. His dad composed the music and his brother served ast the motion study actor for the prince. Prince took nearly four years to be completed.
Here are some fragments of the motion study (taken from the Prince of Persia Collection CD-ROM). If the fragment doesn't load correctly (which is probably the case in any browser but mine), you can download the movie.Prince was also created for the Apple system, which at that time had much better graphics than PC's. Here are some screenshots of the game on an Apple system:
But why do we still play this classic game when you can get 3-dimensional games with more action, more adventure, more of everything? There are two ways of answering this question. The first one is the pseudopsychological one: we are just too stupid to play difficult games. Prince uses only one actionbutton, it can't be any simpler. The second, more plausible one is that we just got (very) addicted to the game. Well, game, Prince isn't a game for us, it is a way of living! A very fast way of living, actually.
In the beginning we were happy when we saved the princess in less than 40 minutes, but times have changed. After finding trick after trick and improving our gameplay we are now capable of playing the game within 18 minutes. A very fast game of living indeed...
