No doubt, Prince of Persia is one of the most influential games in the history of video games. The brainchild of an ingenious American programmer, Jordan Mechner, he revolutionized the market thanks to true programming miracles.

Discover the exciting story behind its development below!

The beginning of everything

Mechner was no longer an inexperienced programmer when he began developing Prince of Persia. At the age of 25, born in New York and part of a family descended from Jews who fled the war, Jordan had already launched one of the most successful computer games to date: Karateka, a cinematic martial arts adventure.

To create and eventually launch Karateka, Mechner had to be extremely creative, because due to the many limitations of the hardware at the time, his programming had to be precise and efficient, taking into account the few advantages that the platform on which he created the game, the Apple II, had.

Among the many innovations he presented were animations. For them, in order to make them more realistic, Jordan used a technique called rotoscopy, in which, one by one, the motion frames are basically traced over footage of real people acting.

To do this, he counted on the help of his family. With a Super 8 camera in hand, the boy took his parents and sister to an open area near the family home, where he asked his father to wear the gi borrowed from his mother, who trained in karate in her free time, and filmed him. moving as the game's protagonist would do. There, he was also able to record other animations on celluloid that would be part of Karateka, such as the hero's meeting with the maiden, a moment in which he filmed his father hugging his sister, and even, in some recordings, himself playing the villain.

In the same way, with the aim of capturing the blows of martial fighting, Jordan had the help of the instructor who taught his mother, asking him to perform kicks, punches and other movements necessary to become Karateka as authentic as possible. His father, Francis, also contributed enormously to the musical side of the game. A man of many talents, Francis is an accomplished pianist, and with his creative gifts, he was able to compose a simple yet incredibly moving score for Karateka.

Everything eventually culminated in the launch of what became a tremendous success, which with an unprecedented audiovisual presentation, in addition to challenging gameplay, won over the computer game fanatic public. In many ways, without Karateka there wouldn't be Prince of Persia, not far from the financial aspect, as it was with the winnings from this game that Mechner was able to dedicate the necessary time to his next big project. 

Prince of Persia

Even reaching a level never reached before with that game, Mechner wanted more. He would use the revolutionary animation techniques and programming tricks he had acquired up until that point to work on what would become his greatest masterpiece: Prince of Persia, in which he was inspired by old matinee adventure series, as well as Indiana Jones, where the hero's path is full of dangerous traps and bloodthirsty enemies.

As well as Karateka, Prince of Persia It took all the talent that Jordan had both in programming and as an artist to make it a reality, and like every story of the beginnings of any industry, this journey was not easy at all. The game had a much more ambitious development roadmap, and in order for it to get off the ground, it had to travel a bumpy path, completely outside the few maps that existed in the nascent video game industry.  

With fluid and natural movement, just as he did with Karateka, the young developer revolutionized the medium by giving its main character much more to do besides fight. In the game, the prince, whose animation frames were based on recordings of his younger brother, was given a much greater range of movement, making him jump, climb, fall, among many other actions. 

To do this, he had to be ingenious, as the Apple II's memory only had 48 kilobytes, less than a common text file today. Inside them, all the game data should fit, so that it could be loaded and played. Initially, however, the animations alone already reached this limit. Mechner had to be creative to overcome this obstacle, after all, he had been developing the project for more than two years and there was no way back.

Going beyond all limits

At the time, the mid-1980s, the dominant platform in the computer gaming market was the Apple II, and it was a very limited computer, both graphically and sonically, even when compared to its competitors such as the Commodore 64. For this reason, Jordan found himself programming so much Karateka as Prince of Persia to the platform.

The great advantage of the machine created by Steve Jobs and company was that it was by far the one in most homes in the major gaming markets, the United States and Europe, and the tools with which games could be created were plentiful, some of which Mechner himself had programmed, to assist him in the process of creating his games, as he did with Karateka.

When he faced the Apple II's memory limit, the meager 48 kilobytes were easily occupied by the – for that moment, at least – absurd amount of data from the game's wonderful animations, he found himself at a crossroads. On one side, there was IBM, which would soon overtake its competitor with its own computer, the 286, and, on the other, there was the Apple II, in full decline.

There was no way Jordan could start from scratch and develop the game for any other platform. With the rope around his neck, he found himself influenced by the opinions of his colleagues, with whom he shared the workspace. Among them was Tomi Pierce, who whenever she saw him at his desk working furiously on his game, reinforced the idea that Prince of Persia it had to be more than a simple escape adventure, to make room for combat.

At first, Mechner was against this idea, but, little by little, he saw that what he had developed so far was not fun to play, another problem to be solved in addition to the Apple II's memory limitations. To be able to include other characters for the prince to fight against, he had to resort to a programming command unique to the platform he was working on.

It was the EOR – Exclusive-OR Memory with Accumulator – or, in more general terms, a command that gave a byte of data the ability to act in two different ways, if there are two identical ones in a sequence, being able to perform an action or not. 0 or 1. Shadow Man was born, the shadow man, the perfect opponent for the player, coming out of the mirror that the prince finds in the dungeon.

This enemy was an impertinent obstacle, as it undone everything the protagonist had achieved, and, on top of that, stole the valuable restorative potions. Thanks to the computational limitations of the Apple II, Mechner was able to create a unique enemy, the missing element to make Prince of Persia exciting, as previously the sense of urgency that this new obstacle proposed was lacking. 

This solution became even more poetic: because it was the exact image of the player, the more you fought with this lookalike, the more the protagonist's vital power was exhausted. The solution was to put away the sword and merge with the enemy, becoming one again, recovering everything that had been stolen so far by the “villain”. A brilliant solution to a big problem, which came to exist thanks to the difficulties of programming a game within the extreme limits of the Apple II.

From then on, Mechner used his intelligence and mastery of the platform's programming language to make the game as efficient as possible, making room for the elaboration of the sword fighting system, the inclusion of guards, and the final boss, the grand- vizier, who held the princess hostage at the end of the game, with the 12 kilobytes saved by the Apple II in its auxiliary memory. 

Enemies at height 

A new problem arose: how to deal with fight animations. With his brother on the other side of the country and unaware of anyone who knew how to fence, Jordan turned to one of his favorite films, Robin Hood, Errol Flynn's classic from the 1930s. By a stroke of fate, there is a short scene in the feature film in which the hero and his enemy face each other, face-to-face, in profile, exactly what the New York programmer needed to come up with the game's animations!

Taking photos of every frame of the two actors' movements, Mechner extracted the movements necessary for a believable fight in his game. Finally, his vision was complete. Prince of Persia reached its final form. With this experience, Jordan found himself learning an important lesson, as he listened to the voice that came from within him, which sought to bring to the game an element present in the films he loved so much, in contrast to the need to bring to his game a good dose of emotion through fights. (https://vallartainfo.com)  

Marrying the two aspects, the game we know today was born and has influenced so many others since then. Launched in 1989, Prince of Persia was not an even bigger sales champion than Karateka, because at that moment Mechner's worst nightmare had come true, with the delay of the Apple II. However, it was with conversions to practically all computer platforms and video game consoles that the game became the revolution it was, saving it from oblivion and freeing Jordan from the limitations of the Apple II.

In the decades that followed, Prince of Persia received numerous sequels, and based on the prototype that would become a new chapter in the series, the first Assassin's Creed. The series, however, lives on. The latest incarnation of the franchise will be released in January, and it appears to be a game with a strong influence from the Apple II original, with generous doses of mechanics Metroidvania, based, in turn, on the excellent creation of Gunpei Yokoi, Metroid, and the terrifying Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the brainchild of Koji Igarashi.

And of course we will have more about him, entitled Prince of Persia: The Stolen Crown, very soon here at Showmetech. Until then, see what we think of your demonstration, available to the public during this year's Brasil Game Show! 

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Sources: Ars Technica, The Making of Karateka, Wikipedia [1], [2]

Text proofread by: Pedro Bomfim (13 / 11 / 23)