This was the first game I played on a PC and the game and it will be forever in my heart.

I will always have a soft spot for the original Prince of Persia. It was one of those games I played constantly as a child, although only when my dad would let me use his Apple ][c.

I only realize it now but it had some very unique game mechanics that even today you don't see very often (ok maybe that's a bit of a stretch but the mechanics were novel to me back then):

- Notably you have 60 minutes to finish the game. Dying doesn't reset the timer, so there is constant pressure to keep moving.

- There is a satisfying parry mechanic. This is still rare to see in 2d platformers.

- Incredibly smooth animation. This could be nostalgia goggles but the rotoscoped animation really stood out compared to other games of the era.

If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend watching the "War Stories" video on the making of Prince of Persia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54

On a related note, I also highly recommend the "War Stories" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o

This is serendipitous as I'm just reading the making of Prince of persia from stripe press.

Goes into lots of detail as what was going on through the journal entries of the dev. Honestly it has encouraged me to start journaling again myself as I can see the value in being able to read back to a day in the last.

Such an absolute classic. My brothers and friends and I played this so much when we were kids that we had a notebook written up to overcome the game's "DRM", which required you to find a letter in a particular page/paragraph/sentence in the game's manual. You then drank the potion with the right letter floating over it. If you got the wrong one, you died and had to restart the game, but this was only at the end of level 1 so that wasn't a huge setback. Theoretically you didn't have this manual if you pirated it, but kids have nothing but time so our notebook ended up quite complete.

The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. And my god, the vertical chopping blades you have to carefully jump through...those things are brutal.

When I was a kid, my grandparents were involved in a pretty decent intercontinental floppy disk piracy ring. They would buy and clone software sold locally and send it forward and get copies of games in response. My parents ran a small business converting peoples university notes/recordings into well written essays. My grandparents had a PC with Prince of Persia, and as payment for my parents essay writing services one of their friends from Hong Kong used to come around and teach me how to play. See he couldn't speak or understand english very well, but he had memorised the potions you needed to drink to get past each level, and also the fighting technique of most of the bad guys.

These are some of my earliest memories of computing, and the conversations I had with that guy, who was doing computer science, plus the things he opened up for me on the computer really pushed me into the industry.

I ended up visiting the US with my grandparents sometime later, and got to see the original disks most of my games had been cloned from. They even had the original F-15 Strike Eagle box from memory.

Just buy - The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 (Book #2 in the Mechner Journals Series) By Jordan Mechner

highly recommended as 90s gamer

> The Apple II was dying as a platform by the time the game came out [...] it was rereleased on PC in the US and sales picked up. You wouldn’t get that second chance today.

On a much smaller scale, I was actually part of something similar a few years ago. The game Wavetale was originally a Stadia exclusive but launched just before the platform shut down. We were allowed by Google to port it and release it for every other platform, and I ended up being one of four programmers doing that work; I mainly focused on optimizing the switch version.

The Stadia version barely got noticed, but the other versions, especially Switch, did quite well. The game was even featured on AGDQ, which was really cool.

Just reading "Prince of Persia" and in my head starts playing the oriental background music (by pc speaker! No sound card back then, at least for me).

Also, the steps, the gates and all other sound FXs.

Most people are/were fascinated by the fluid animations, but this game was perfect from every angle.

I have a soft spot for Prince of Persia, but I have an even softer spot for Karateka, its (rotoscoped) predecessor on an ancient green phosphor Apple //e, a computer (and an age) where everything seemed possible.

Yeah, plenty of "wasted" hours playing that game.