No 1989 platformer moved like Prince of Persia, and honestly, not many since have either.
Rotoscoping a game into existence
Prince of Persia was developed by Jordan Mechner, who spent years rotoscoping footage of his brother running and jumping to create the game’s fluid character animation. Published by Broderbund in 1989, it was initially released for the Apple II before its iconic DOS version followed. The game puts you in the role of a nameless prince imprisoned in a dungeon, racing against a 60-minute time limit to rescue the princess from the evil Grand Vizier Jaffar, in a setting of stone corridors, deadly spike traps, and bottomless pits. Mechner later published his development journals from the project, and they’re a genuinely fascinating read on their own — years of false starts, a publisher that nearly passed on the finished game, and a solo developer betting an enormous amount of time on an animation technique nobody else in games was using at that scale.
Movement as the core mechanic
Prince of Persia is a side-scrolling platformer, but unlike anything that came before it. The prince moves with real weight — he walks, runs, jumps, grabs ledges, and tumbles with convincing momentum, and rushing leads to mistakes. Combat uses a one-on-one sword fighting system that feels surprisingly tactical: guards block high and low attacks, forcing you to read their stance and time your strikes. Health is a row of hit points extendable by finding life potions, and across the game’s twelve levels you’ll navigate pressure plates, gates, guillotines, and cunning trap layouts — some potions restore health, others poison you, and learning which is which is part of the challenge. It’s worth comparing Prince of Persia to the small handful of other games chasing similarly cinematic, physically grounded movement around the same time, like Delphine Software’s Another World a couple of years later — both titles treat the player character’s body as something with real weight and consequence, a philosophy that was still genuinely rare in action games of the period.
Common mistakes new players make
Don’t hold the run button through unfamiliar territory; momentum makes overshooting a ledge or triggering a trap far easier than in most platformers, so approach new rooms cautiously the first time through, then optimize your route once you know what’s there. In sword fights, watch the guard’s stance before attacking, since blocking is genuinely reactive and button-mashing gets you killed against anyone past the first couple of guards. Don’t drink every potion on sight; the game deliberately mixes healing and poison bottles with no reliable visual tell, so save before testing an unfamiliar one. And remember the clock never stops, so open-ended backtracking isn’t really an option the way it is in most platformers of the era.
Running it today (and where to buy it legitimately)
Not sure how to run DOS games? Our complete DOSBox setup guide covers everything you need, and our list of free DOS games is worth browsing afterward. Extract the downloaded archive, mount the folder with mount c C:\Games\PrinceOfPersia, switch to the drive with c:, and run PRINCE.EXE. One caveat worth being upfront about: Prince of Persia is a commercial title, not freeware, so look for an official re-release on GOG or Steam.
Does the rotoscoping still hold up?
What makes Prince of Persia stand the test of time is Mechner’s insistence on making movement feel real — every animation frame was painstakingly traced from real footage, the prince stumbles when landing hard, and he catches his breath after a long run. The puzzle design is excellent, built around observation and timing rather than reaction speed, and the 60-minute limit creates genuine tension without being unfair. My honest criticism: the controls demand a precision that feels stiff next to how forgiving modern platformers are about ledges and timing, so expect some restarts while you adjust to how deliberately everything moves. The Apple II original actually came first, which explains a few of the design’s more conservative choices — this is a game built to work within tight memory and performance limits, and the DOS version’s job was mostly to make an already-finished design look and sound better on more capable hardware, not to redesign it from scratch. Broderbund’s marketing at the time leaned on the animation as the headline feature, and for once that wasn’t just sales copy — nothing else on shelves in 1989 moved quite like this. The prince’s twelve-level journey also has a clean three-act shape to it: early rooms teaching the movement vocabulary in relative safety, a middle stretch introducing sword fights and harder traps together, and a final run where the game expects you to combine everything at once under real time pressure. That structure is a big part of why it still gets cited as a design touchstone decades later — few platformers of any era teach their systems this cleanly without ever resorting to an explicit tutorial screen. If you’ve only played the 2008 reboot or later Prince of Persia games, the original will surprise you with its restraint and difficulty.
Watch Gameplay
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