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A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

jordanmechner.com

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Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#91

Post by anw »

marapuru wrote: post #68
mratzloff wrote: post #55

Fun fact: the original Assassin's Creed game was originally a sequel to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time called Prince of Persia: Assassin . In the original concept, you protected the prince instead of playing the prince himself, playing in an open-world environment. Ubisoft didn't like the idea of not playing the prince himself, so they spun it out into a separate property and came up with all the other plot poin…

Thanks for sharing this. Do you have a source for this fact? :)

https://www.polygon.com/features/2018/10/3/17924770/assassin...

This provides a pretty good overview of what happened.

What was originally an idea for a next-gen, open-world Prince of Persia game became what is now the Assassins.

> ... I’m asking, “OK, so what’s next?” And I was told, “Let’s do a Prince of Persia, but for the next generation of consoles.”

> At first we thought that we could do a Prince of Persia open world. We did not [yet] have the concept of an assassin fighting in an open world

> since I’d just finished a game with a prince, I wanted a different character. I wanted the prince to have a different job than just being there waiting for mom and dad to die and take their place. So I wanted to have an action character — something that in his title, it was a job where you could actually see action right away.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#93

Post by valtism »

stevepike wrote: post #19

The book he references ( https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Jordan-Mechner-e... ) is a collection of journal entries he wrote while making the game. It's been about ten year since I read it, so the details are fuzzy, but it's a very raw retelling of the process of making a game basically entirely alone and before the internet. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who writes software.

It seems very well written. I enjoyed the irony of this line:

> NOVEMBER 10, 1986

> Called Kyle Freeman in L.A. (he’s at Electronic Arts now) and asked him what he’d charge to license his Apple music subroutine.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#94

Post by wernsey »

The PC version of Prince of Persia will always have a special place in my heart.

The first time I saw it was when me and my brother were in a store with my mom and saw this game running on a PC in the computer section. It must've been the first game I ever saw with 256 colour VGA graphics.

That evening we told my dad about this amazing game we saw in the store with graphics that looked like real people.

I think it was also the first time I saw a 3 1/2" disk. We still had a 286 at home with 5 1/4" floppy drives.

It also later became the first game I ever heard with Sound Blaster music and sound effects at a friend's house. That evening I told my dad how the music sounded like real music.

I also remember us giving our old computer to my grandma for word processing and she telling us that she tried to play PoP but got chopped up by the blades every time because she had to close her eyes when she tried to go through because she was too afraid.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#95

Post by skocznymroczny »

hypeibole wrote: post #5
skocznymroczny wrote: post #2

Recently I was playing through the PC version of the original Prince of Persia again. Last time I played was as a kid and the game was very hard for me, level 5 was about as far as I could get. I trained for two days until I got so good at the game and memorized everything, that I was able to complete the entire game in one go with zero deaths. Took about 25 minutes of ingame timer to complete all stages.

That would make you 11th fastest player in the world. The world record is 15:01. https://www.speedrun.com/pop1

I may have been incorrect then. Perhaps my pace was 25 minutes remaining, that'd be 35 minutes of ingame time. While I didn't waste too much time and didn't die (dying is the biggest timewaster), I wasn't skipping any fights either along the way so definitely wasn't going anywhere near a world record pace.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#96

Post by animal531 »

rmbryan wrote: post #3

A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans: Thirty years ago today, I was at my Apple II, crunching on a six-week deadline to finish Prince of Persia by mid-July to ship in September. I know this because I wrote it in my journal. If I hadn't, those details would have long since faded from my memory, along with the 6502 hex op codes I once knew by heart. In 1989, I could never have imagined that Prince of Persia…

On the note of a new game, I don't want a new 3d AAA PoP game. Rather give me another 2d version with enhanced graphics, puzzles, more levels etc.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#97

Post by animal531 »

waterside81 wrote: post #48

Did Jordan get wealthy from the initial release of Prince of Persia?

Probably he didn't make that much initially. But over a few years it was ported to 20 odd other systems, had a sequel and then the big AAA games.

So he probably did pretty nicely for himself.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#98

Post by baud147258 »

baud147258 wrote: post #44
als0 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does POP 2008 compare to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time?

I'd say the combat (except the bosses fight) is better, since it's a series of duel, compared to the confused brawls against respawning enemies. Boss fight aren't as good and mostly too repetitive. It's easier, with no penalty for successive failures, unlike SoT where, once the sand is depleted, it's back to a checkpoint. But the difficulty of platform sequences isn't lower (I'd say even harder for some). The visual…

> kinda open-world

More like a big hub, with the various levels connected to it, but without any loading screen between the hub and the levels.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#100

Post by rothron »

joemi wrote: post #75
rothron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of them were made from 'rotoscoping' video recordings of his younger brother. Videos exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKgLfqOVHco

Wow. That's awesome. I could recognize most of the movements from the video... Guess I played a lot of Prince of Persia back in the day. It's funny how the brain can recognize specific movements like that, or like when you can recognize a friend from far away just based on how they walk.

I remember well the movement that impressed me the most. The elaborate changing of direction when running and then turning. It looked so natural, and it was the first time I'd seen that in a game.

Most platformers still violate conservation of momentum and let you change direction in mid air.

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