Prince of Persia, history

Contents

The classic trilogy The Sands of Time trilogy The reboots and the freezing of the series The spin-offs and modern times It's May 1985 and an incredulous Jordan Mechner watches Karateka (1984 - Apple II), the first video game he developed, climb the US sales charts and reach the top position on Billboard. Mechner is a university student who, as happened to many of his fellow developers, is tired of taking exams because he is more focused on his passions: writing films and, of course, video games. Brøderbund, the US publisher of Karateka, would be delighted to develop a second title, given the success of the first. Graduation day arrives but Mechner, then 21, feels no satisfaction. He is much more into his first screenplay and his second game, the one that with great effort will become Prince of Persia.

"There is no guarantee that the new game will be another success (like Karateka ed), or even that there will still be a computer game market in a couple of years", wrote Mechner in his diary on July 5, 1985.

A few days later he and Gene Portwood of Brøderbund decided on the oriental setting of the new title, still unnamed, and the same year they began filming the movements of David, the brother of Mechner, for the realization of the animations of the protagonist, with a tracing technique of the frames at the time at the forefront in the world ofa> video games: rotoscoping. There was a lot of talk about it, despite the fact that it had been employed by the film industry for several years, especially animation studios.