GA101 - Prince of Persia

From thecrankyhermit

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In the mid-80's, a Yale psychology undergraduate named Jordan Mechner created Karateka, a side-scrolling action game. Predating Super Mario Bros. by a year, Karateka innovated the genre with a cinematic look and feel. Rotoscoping allowed for more fluid, realistic character animations and gestures than had ever been possible before. Cross-cut shots, tracking shots, and lavish set pieces, inspired by silent filmmaking techniques, would be spliced in between scenes of gameplay, and demonstrated skillful use of cinematographic grammar in the context of a video game. It became a best-seller, and convinced Mechner to pursue a career as a game designer. Shortly after his graduation, developer/publisher Brøderbund approached him to create a second game, which he would spend the next three years making.

In 1989, Brøderbund released Prince of Persia for the Apple II, and a year later an enhanced port to DOS, to high critical acclaim but disappointing sales. But it gained a second wind when its European and Japanese releases exceeded expectations, and was re-released in the US with a stronger marketing campaign, and subsequently converted to 20 odd platforms, selling over 2 million copies worldwide.

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Prince of Persia opens with a fluidly animated cinematic, set in a princess's chamber in an ancient Persian palace. Her father, the Sultan, is fighting a war abroad, leaving his vizier Jaffar as regent. Seeking to gain power as a member of royalty, Jaffar enters the room and presents an ultimatum to the princess - consent to marriage within the hour, or die. Her only hope lies with you, a foreign suitor. Thrown into the palace's labyrinthine dungeon and left to rot, you have sixty minutes to escape, to make your way through twelve levels of the dungeon and palace rooms, defeat Jaffar, and rescue the princess.

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Each level is a sprawling maze, filled with climbable ledges, crumbling walls, secret passages, gates, concealed pressure plates which open and close said gates, and gauntlets of deadly traps and menacing guards. There are no Super Mushrooms or similar Nintendo-inspired powerups to aid you as you dash through these obstacles, leap over chasms and pits, nor do you have fantastic jumping abilities or a projectile weapon with infinite ammo. Your only abilities are standard human agility, swordsmanship, and your wits. You can jump long distances, but only a few feet high, and only from a good running start. Hoisting plays a particularly important role in the platforming - it is the only way to reach platforms higher than your head, and often you must clear a gap with a running jump that takes you just close enough to the other side that you can grab its ledge and scramble up. Traps are unforgiving, and a single misstep around them can result in your gruesome and instant death. Guards are armed with swords, and can strike, feint, and parry, as can you.

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Prince of Persia is often called the original "cinematic platformer," and is credited with creating its own subgenre. Released at a time when Nintendo's NES dominated the console scene and was saturated with platformers in the style of Super Mario Bros, and when platformers on home computers were comparatively crude and overshadowed by adventure games, RPGs, and simulations, Prince of Persia took the genre in a completely different direction from Super Mario Bros that played to both the technological strengths of computers and the expectations of older, more patient users who owned them.

Some of the most famous NES platformers of the time were Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, Metroid, Contra, Mega Man, and Ninja Gaiden. These games granted characters the ability to leap into the air several times their own height, and emphasized jumping from platform to platform, often requiring complex mid-air maneuvering to avoid damaging traps or projectiles. Prince is athletic, but can only jump a few feet, and traverses platforms mainly by hoisting himself up to and down from ledges. Foes in the NES platformers are monsters and other fantastic beings, who constantly swarm you, mindlessly moving and attacking according to predictable patterns, and are inexplicably lethal to touch. Foes in Prince of Persia are human beings who are uncommonly encountered, rely on their fencing skills to fight you, who fight intelligently, and yet have the same vulnerabilities that you do. Level design is non-repetitive, using puzzles, and occasional scripted set pieces to ensure a tightly paced gameplay experience without one screen of filler. Many then-ubiquitous platforming gameplay mechanics are omitted entirely - there are no points, no coins to collect, no standard powerups other than healing elixers, no concept of multiple but limited lives, and the sole on-screen indicator that you are playing a video game is a small strip at the bottom which indicates your health status and occasionally reminds you of the remaining time.

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Further contrasting Prince of Persia with prior platformers is a serious, dark tone. The plot, though meager and pretty much the same as in Super Mario Bros, is presented in a straight-faced manner. Super Mario Bros.' plot is only conveyed through the manual (and re-enforced through Toad's only line of dialog). Prince of Persia illustrates its plot in game, using a dramatic, vividly animated, wordless mise-en-scène. In Super Mario Bros, Bowser's evil plan and intentions for the princess are vague. The developers didn't care, and neither do the players. Prince of Persia makes it clear that the consequences of your failure are dire. To remind you, the game will cut to the princess's chambers as time starts to run out, showing the princess watch the sands of time trickle down the hourglass, awaiting her fate. Prince's plight is similarly grave - while Mario would "die" with a goofy expression as he plummeted from your television screen, Prince could be graphically impaled on spikes, crushed by falling ceilings, slashed, or could simply fall a sufficiently long distance for the landing to prove fatal. Such misadventures would leave him a disfigured, bloody corpse; a gory and chilling effect that was highly uncharacteristic of the era's video games.

Of special note is Prince of Persia's splendidly fluid and detailed character animations, a major factor of its "cinematic" label. Every single action a character can make, is represented by a realistic animation. While your typical 8-bit platformer had a one or two frame jumping animation to cover all trajectories, Prince of Persia features three distinct animations, each with enough frames to suggest true-to-life motion. From a still stance, Prince will look up, swing his arms, arch his back, bend his knees, lift his heels, and smoothly uncoil to propel himself upwards, his arms lifted above his head ready to grab a ledge just out of reach, so that he can slowly hoist himself up. Equally detailed animations were drawn for his forward jumps, and his running jumps. Running animations do not start and stop instantly, but rather Prince leans forward, takes a step, breaks into stride as momentum takes over, and skids to a halt as you release the "forward" key or change direction. Even actions such as collecting health pickups were fully animated - while Mario would simply touch a Fire Flower and cause it to disappear, Prince would bend down to pick up a potion on the ground, lift it to his lips, and arch backwards as he quaffed it.

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Such realistic animations were achieved by rotoscoping - a technique similar to modern motion capture. Jordan Mechner casted his own brother as a model for Prince's movements, and videotaped him running, jumping, changing directions, dangling from ledges, etc. He would then trace over the pictures, and animate sprites from these tracings. The princess and Jaffar were similarly rotoscoped. Sword fights, which were implemented late in development, were traced from the 1938 swashbuckler film The Adventures of Robin Hood, using the climactic duel between Errol Flynn's Robin Hood and Basil Rathbone's Sir Guy of Gisbourne to a thrilling effect.

Prince of Persia's influence goes well beyond its immediate impact of creating a subgenre of 2D platformers with degrees of realism and emphasis on puzzles over action, a genre with well known titles such as Flashback, Blackthorne, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, and more recently Limbo. The revolution truly manifested in the groundbreaking 1996 title Tomb Raider, which successfully translated the hallmarks of the sub-genre to 3D gameplay, and to greater critical acclaim than the series' own 3D installment in 1999. The same feat was never truly accomplished for Mario-style platformers. The use of climbing and acrobatics are now standard platforming mechanics in virtually every 3D platformer, as well as action games with platforming elements, including Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider titles, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, Mirror's Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and, of course, the future Ubisoft Prince of Persia titles.

With all the versions of Prince of Persia out there, I must recommend that the DOS version be considered the definitive edition, and strongly recommend its playthrough first, tempting as newer versions may be. Most of the newer versions, up to and including the recent iOS "Prince of Persia Retro," control so poorly that their snazzier graphics can't make up for it. The SNES version and recent "Prince of Persia Classic" lack the original's aesthetic and sense of dread urgency, and the most memorable moments and surprises have less impact. In addition, DOS is the only 16-bit version of the game to use its own rotoscoped animation. The more "advanced" versions use conventional pixel art, drawn at a higher resolution and with more detail, but without the distinctively fluid animation that DOS and the 8-bit versions have.

Beginner tips:

  • If you're used to Mario style jumps, and you probably are, then your biggest cause of death will likely be from pressing the jump button too late while attempting a running jump. The trick is to press and hold it sooner than you think you have to. It is very easy to hit the jump key too late, but almost impossible to press it too early. This mainly applies to the DOS version.
  • To elaborate, here's basic running jump theory. Put some distance between yourself and the edge you wish to jump from, using cautious steps if you must. Press and hold the direction key towards the edge to make Prince run toward it. After Prince breaks into stride but before he reaches the edge, press and hold the up arrow without letting go of the previous direction. If you do this right, Prince will automatically jump when he reaches the precise edge of the platform, and not one inch too soon or too late.
  • Hold the shift key and tap left or right to perform a cautious step forward. This kind of step will alert you to crumbling floors, will not walk off ledges, and can be used to step through spike traps unharmed.
  • If you have a full keyboard, you can perform a standing jump forward by pressing 7 or 9 on the numpad. This is safer than trying to move diagonally by pressing two arrow keys simultaneously, as you can accidentally cause Prince to run forward by failing to press both keys at the exact same time.
  • Starting on level 3, you are permitted to save your game by pressing Ctrl+G. You can reload by pressing Ctrl+L on the title screen. If you have at least 50 minutes remaining by level 3, you have plenty of time to finish the game as long as you reload whenever you die (just wait for about 30 seconds on your death to return to the title screen), and save whenever you reach a new level. If you have less time than that, you might consider starting over.
  • You *must* learn to parry and counter-attack in order to defeat the tougher guards, especially Fat Man and Jaffar.


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