Prince of Persia (1989)

Lore & Background

In the world of the 1989 game, the Prince is a lean, silent figure rendered as a flat silhouette with a bold black outline, moving through a palace of arches, corridors, and shadowed chambers. His enemy is the Vizier, a scheming courtier who has stolen the princess and sealed her in a tower. The Prince's only weapons are his body—his jump, his roll, his sword—against an ever-present timer that drains the life from every room he enters.

The palace itself is a character: a labyrinth of Persian-inspired architecture where each corridor is a small stage. Guards patrol on fixed patterns, and the Prince must time his movements to leap over them, roll beneath their strikes, or draw his blade in a single, decisive lunge. Falling is fatal. Hesitation is fatal. The clock is always, always running.

There is no dialogue, no exposition, no cutscene. The story is told entirely through movement, music, and the slow, inevitable approach of the Vizier's power. In that silence, the 1989 Prince of Persia feels less like a game and more like a storybook you are allowed to play.

In Their Own Story

The corridor is long and the torchlight barely reaches the far wall. The Prince rolls beneath a guard's sweeping blade, feels the cold stone against his back, and is already on his feet, already running. Above, the timer ticks down in a column of shrinking bars. He leaps a gap—two tiles, three—lands on the ledge, and hears the princess's voice, thin and far, from the tower. The Vizier's shadow stretches across the floor ahead, patient and wide. The Prince draws his sword. The clock does not care about courage. It only counts.

Reader's Guide

Jordan Mechner, then a young programmer, developed Prince of Persia in 1989 as a passion project, drawing every frame of animation by hand on a Macintosh. The game was inspired by Richard Williams' 1981 animated short of the same name, and Mechner sought to translate that fluid, hand-drawn aesthetic into an interactive medium at a time when most games relied on simple sprite swaps.

Broderbund published the title, and it became a breakout commercial hit across the Apple II, Macintosh, DOS, and Amiga platforms. Critics praised its elegant animation, atmospheric Persian setting, and the tension of its real-time timer. The game's influence on the platformer genre was immediate and lasting—its fluid character movement, room-based level design, and the integration of combat with traversal set a template that would echo through dozens of titles.

The franchise spawned two sequels in the early-to-mid 1990s before Ubisoft acquired the rights in the early 2000s, reimagining the Prince as a 3D action-adventure protagonist. Yet the 1989 original remains the spiritual anchor of the series. For fans, it represents a rare moment when a single developer's artistic vision—every joint, every frame, every guard's lunge—shaped a franchise that would run for over three decades. It is, in many ways, the game that proved a video game could feel like a hand-drawn storybook.

Did You Know?

• Jordan Mechner hand-drew every single frame of the Prince's animation, including the distinctive death sequence in which the character breaks apart into separate pieces.
• The game was directly inspired by Richard Williams' 1981 animated short film 'The Prince of Persia,' and Mechner has cited the film's fluid, hand-drawn movement as his primary visual reference.
• The real-time timer that pressures the player was a deliberate design choice meant to create urgency and a sense of a story unfolding in real time, rather than a static puzzle to be solved at leisure.
• After two sequels in the 1990s, Ubisoft acquired the franchise in the early 2000s and reimagined the Prince as a fully 3D character, beginning a new era that ran for over a decade before the series was eventually retired