Prince of Persia: the original

I finally managed to play the first and original "Prince of Persia" game to its end (that is, more or less 20 years after it was first published). It's a simple, brilliant, very well made and very frustating old game.

The story

It's pretty much similar to Disney's "Aladdin" (or vice-versa, or perhaps it's simply a standard one thousand and one night tale I'm not aware of). The evil vizier Jaffar exploits the absence of the persian sultan to seize control of his palace and to emprison the protagonist, the "prince" of Persia, and the sultan's daughter. The princess is given an hour to decide her own destiny: either marry the vizier or die.

The prince will have to escape through the prisons of the - architecturally very implausible - sultan's palace, engage Jaffar himself in a sword fight, kill him and thus save the princess... in less than 60 minutes.

The beginning is just, simply EPIC. I still have a vivid remembrance of the prince jumping out of his cell into the torch-lit dungeon, accompanied by an ominous MIDI sound. Simply great.

The initial scene of the game.

The game

The rest of the game is some kind of ancient "tomb raider": you run through the dungeon, jump across gaping holes, falling tiles, insidious traps and fight the vizier's guards. The goal of the game is to go through 12 increasingly difficult levels and to face the vizier himself in the thirteenth level. Every time the prince dies, either because of a badly timed jump, a sword hit too much or one of the many traps, he returns back to the entrance of the current level with full energy: ready to give it another try, but with less precious time.

In the first level the prince has to get a sword in order to fight the vizier's guard.

The game's graphics are beautifully rendered: each level is composed of a set of fixed-screen quadrants that cannot be seen until the prince enters. This makes it particularly tricky to avoid guards on the edge of the screen or to successfully cross a very close gap.

The characters' animations - the prince's in particular - are just wonderful. Having been produced by rotoscoping a video take of the author's younger brother jumping, running and climbing, they look very realistic. You have to get used to the small amount of delay each action takes in order to synchronize the protagonist's animations, which makes jumping a bit too difficult, but it looks great and brings the prince to life.

Above is an interview with Jordan Mechner (the author of the game) about how he created the game's graphics and some of the original footage of his brother (dressed just like the prince in the game!). Genius.

Fighting is a central component of the game and is really well made: fun and well balanced.

As soon as the prince faces one of the guards he will unsheathe his sword, ready to show off his skills. Fighting is very well done: you'll have to win with a careful combination of attacks, parrys and counterattacks. The system requires only two buttons and is simple enough to be understood in a couple of fights. But some of the tougher guards in the last levels (especially the "fat guard") can be really hard to get by, and being killed after losing minutes trying the same level over and over again can be frustrating.

After 12 levels of fighting and jumping, you finally get to fight the vizier and to save the princess. The game rewards you with a nice animation of the two lovers. Happy end... 'til Prince of Persia 2.

Awwwwwww...

One of the levels from the game

To have an idea of the architectural madness of the game's levels, just take a look at the collage of screenshots below:

Level 12, climbing the tower where the vizier is hiding. See full.

How to play Prince of Persia

Getting a copy of Prince of Persia is easy: it can be downloaded from one of the many abandonware websites (like Abandonia). In order to launch the game you'll have to install a DOS emulator (DosBox works perfectly well).

Cheats

As I said, sometimes the game can be quite frustrating: if you want to skip a seemingly impossible level or want a bit more time, here's a short list of useful cheats. In order to use them you must launch the game writing prince megahit on the command line.