Prince of Persia, created by Jordan Mechner, was a breakthrough for the action adventure style. Earlier adventure games were either text based or displayed graphics that left the imagination to fill in the textures the game could not. The first entry into the saga of the Prince paved the way for future adventure games to flourish through its exciting story, simple to learn but difficult to master game play, and special attention to animation. Prince of Persia was originally released for the Apple II computer, but since then, the game has been ported to many platforms. In the past couple of years, the game was re-mastered and ported to the Xbox 360 and PS3. The fact it was ported so many times, including recently, goes to show the community that PoP is definitely a classic game.
The game is set in Ancient Persia where the Sultan takes a leave of absence and leaves his vizier, Jaffar, in charge. While the Sultan is away, Jaffar abuses his power to his fullest extent, even forcing the Sultan’s daughter into an ultimatum. She can either marry Jaffar or be killed – enter the nameless protagonist. The player plays as this unnamed who, after travelling to Persia from a foreign country, falls in love with the Princess and seeks to rescue her which the player ends up doing. Let’s be real here, how classic of a story could it be if the unnamed Prince doesn’t succeed. While the game doesn’t earn itself any extra awesome points for a completely original story, the plot is a classic story telling theme which adventure games try to portray. Any good adventure game tells a story, and one way to really convey the theme is with pleasing aesthetics and for 1989, PoP has plenty of that.
Some of the biggest ground broken with Prince of Persia is the quality of animation. While PoP shared the pixilated graphics style as its competitors, the animation in the game added a fluid and realistic feel to the game. The inspiration for the games visual ideas came from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mechner wanted to create the agile dungeon diving feel in his computer game, and what better inspiration the Indy whipping his way through caves and thugs to find a lost treasure. Mechner and his team settled on rotoscoping to convey their setting, theme, and mood. Rotoscoping was an old animation technique that animators used to make their lives easier when it came to making realistic movements. The idea is to take a piece of film, display it, and have the artists trace the film image on paper. Mechner used the same basic principles, granted some changes had to be made when applied to a computer image. He filmed his younger brother doing the stunts he wanted to see in his game, and then meticulously analyzed them as he programmed those movements to the characters. The importance of this realism is that it makes it easier for gamers to get sucked into the game. This focus on realism has been continues with action/adventure games today.
Another big breakthrough the game made was with combat. Previously, the majority of video games had projectile weapons; however, the only weapons in PoP were melee weapons. While the combat system was very simple, strike or parry, it added a flavor to the gaming world that had not yet been experienced. The controls of move, jump, leap, attack, and parry are simple to learn, yet the game was difficult to master. Using Nolan Bushnell’s theorem, the difficulty of the game kept the player coming back and wanting to push forward to the next puzzle. Bushnell’s theory was that video games should be easy to learn and difficult to master. This makes the game accessible to many people but not everyone can be considered a veteran.
Action/Adventure games have certainly taken a page from Prince of Persia’s page. The game broke major ground in graphics and style. Games are no longer the run and gun little blips side scrolling across the screen. Today we see intricate combat systems and very realistic graphics that make immersion much easier. The more realistic the setting is the more profound of an effect it has on players, not to mention the effect of my 55” burning my retinas with glorious color. PoP by today’s standards might be hard to get into for those who their gaming careers with the N64 or later, but I would suggest to anyone who is a fan of the genre to take at least a quick peek. It’s good to understand where our games of today started.
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