Prince of Persia - Arabian Nights

To this day, exactly 30 years ago, the original Prince of Persia came out and brought a slightly different adventure of saving the princess.

Rescuing a kidnapped princess in the late 1980s was a well-known practice thanks to Super Mario. But exactly 30 years ago, one game came up with a slightly different formula for such a rescue mission. It was Prince of Persia, a play by Jordan Mechner that was inspired by stories from 1001 Arabian Nights.

The original Prince of Persia has thrown the player into a dungeon full of traps such as spines, guillotines and decaying floors, aiming to save the princess from the evil Jaffar. The game at its 12 levels was no different at first from the other platformers, but the rules were a little different. Specifically, Prince did not have a limited number of lives, as was standard in other games. However, the game had a timeline within which the player had to end it.

That limit was 60 minutes, but time did not reset after dying, so any mistake resulted in a penalty - a subtraction of time. Later, that limit was increased in other versions of the game, but in the original he put pressure on the player and asked him for full focus.


Prince of Persia also stood out in its time as the title of the unique animation made by rotoscoping. It was for this reason that the protagonist in the game was dressed in white, as the creator of the game captured the animation from the footage of his younger brother while he was making jumps and running dressed in white. The animations of the character's movement were realistic, but this was reflected in controls that were slower in command and generally not as responsive as in other games.

Interestingly, Prince of Persia was not a success at first when it was launched for the then Apple II platform. Sales on the US market went poorly, but as soon as the game came to Europe and Japan, Prince earned a fortune. The game was eventually switched to almost all platforms - from NES to iOS, and there were also unofficial releases for ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.


With over two million copies sold, Prince of Persia has turned into a successful franchise with several sequels and spin-off games. It has been rebooted several times, most successfully in 2003 with the play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Under the same name in 2010, we also got a movie adaptation produced by Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer. The prince was embodied by Jake Gyllenhaal, and he was not named in the movie but his name was Daston.

We saw the last game of the Prince of Persia series in 2018, but it was the mobile title of PoP: Escape. We played our last real game in 2010 with the mediocre The Forgotten Sands.