1989 — present
A nameless youth, a ticking hour, and animation so fluid it looked filmed. Jordan Mechner’s Apple II dungeon crawl became one of the most ported games ever made, then a Ubisoft action franchise that keeps finding new shapes.
The original Prince of Persia is a cinematic platformer: you guide an unnamed prisoner through twelve palace levels, dodge traps, fence with guards, and reach the princess before sixty minutes expire. There are no extra lives. Death sends you back to the start of the current level, but the clock does not rewind. That pressure is the design.
Movement is deliberate rather than twitchy. Running, hanging from ledges, careful jumps, and swordplay all take time to learn. Health is a row of red triangles. Potions restore it, poison it, extend it, or briefly let the prince hover. Spikes, guillotines, and three-story falls kill instantly.
The prince is a body in a hostile machine. Gates open only while a pressure plate is held. A shadow double steals potions and later shares your life. Jaffar waits at the end. When he dies, the timer stops and the remaining minutes become the score.
Later entries kept the acrobatics and added parkour, time rewind, open worlds, Metroidvania maps, and roguelike runs. The through-line is still a human-scale hero moving through Persian-inspired architecture against a clock, a curse, or a collapsing timeline.
Jordan Mechner designed and programmed the first game after Karateka. He drew from One Thousand and One Nights, swashbuckler cinema such as The Adventures of Robin Hood, and adventure films like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Broderbund published the Apple II original in 1989.
The animation was rotoscoped. Mechner filmed his brother David performing runs, jumps, and falls in white clothes, then traced the motion frame by frame. The result looked unlike most 8-bit sprites: weight, hesitation, and a sword fight that read as fencing rather than button-mashing. That technique is why the game is still cited as the start of the cinematic platformer, a line that later includes Another World.
The prince was never a superhero. He was a young man who could miss a jump and die — and the hourglass did not care.
The Apple II original was not an overnight blockbuster. Ports made it famous. DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, consoles, and handhelds followed until it became one of the most widely ported games in history.
Twelve levels, a sixty-minute limit, and a shadow self that must be merged with before Jaffar can fall. SNES and some later versions stretch the map and the clock.
Broderbund built the sequel with Mechner directing after film school. Larger, more story-heavy, and still acclaimed. The prince is framed for murder and hunted across a wider Persia.
Red Orb’s jump to three dimensions, PC and later Dreamcast. Buggy, poorly received, and a commercial disappointment. Corporate takeovers then moved the brand toward Ubisoft.
Mechner still owned the intellectual property. Ubisoft Montreal, fresh from Splinter Cell, brought him in for a 2003 reboot. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time kept cinematic movement and added the Dagger of Time: rewind a fatal fall, slow combat, and parkour through a living palace. Farah, a sharp-tongued ally, replaced the silent princess-in-the-tower formula.
Darker, louder, and more violent. Mechner sat this one out and later said the tone did not appeal to him. Critics split; sales did not. The Prince fights the Dahaka, a pursuer that cannot be rewound away.
A middle path between the fairy-tale first game and the grim sequel. The Dark Prince split the hero in two. A DS spin-off, Battles of Prince of Persia, tried turn-based strategy between the first two stories and landed with mixed reviews.
The Forgotten Sands (2010) filled the gap between the first two console games on home platforms, while handheld versions told their own stories. It arrived as a tie-in to the live-action film starring Jake Gyllenhaal — a Hollywood Sands of Time that borrowed the dagger and little of the game’s restraint.
In 2008 Ubisoft released another Prince of Persia, unrelated to the Sands continuity. The Prince and Elika cooperated through an open, painterly world. Death was often a rewind by a companion rather than a fail state. A planned sequel, The Fallen King on DS aside, did not become a lasting series.
Gameloft rebuilt the 1989 game as Prince of Persia Classic (2007), dressed in Sands-era art but still racing a one-hour clock. A remake of The Shadow and the Flame followed in 2013. Mobile runners such as Escape (2018) kept the name in app stores without advancing the craft. For more than a decade the franchise felt archived.
January 2024 brought the first major new installment since The Forgotten Sands: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. It is a 2.5D side-scroller with Metroidvania structure. The hero is Sargon of the Immortals, not the classic prince, and the time tricks return as traversal tools rather than a simple rewind button.
In 2025, Evil Empire’s The Rogue Prince of Persia took the acrobatics into a roguelike, with Franco-Belgian comic art and a day-one Steam release — unusual for modern Ubisoft. The brand that began as one programmer and a camcorder is now several parallel interpretations sharing a silhouette: a runner on a ledge, a blade, and time that can be argued with.
The 1989 game taught an industry that animation could carry emotion on a home computer. The 2003 reboot taught another generation that failure could be undone without becoming cheap, if rewind was a resource and a story device. Parkour in later action games still owes a debt to that palace.
Mechner published journals and a graphic-novel adaptation of the original, making the production itself part of the folklore: a young designer, a brother in a white shirt, and frames copied by hand. Ports, HD collections, Classic remakes, a Hollywood film, and two 2020s reinventions have kept the hourglass in public memory even when no new “main” game existed.
Mechner’s cinematic platformer. Save the princess from Jaffar in sixty minutes.
Broderbund sequel under Mechner’s direction. Broader story, same lethal precision.
Awkward 3D transition. The rights soon pass, via corporate sales, toward Ubisoft.
Time rewind, parkour, then a darker middle chapter and a split-hero finale.
Gameloft restages 1989. Ubisoft tries a new continuity with Elika.
Jake Gyllenhaal on screen; a console gap-filler and several handheld variants.
Sargon, Mount Qaf, and a critically strong Metroidvania return.
Evil Empire’s roguelike: same vaults and traps, a new loop.