There’s a parking lot in Chappaqua, New York, that helped change video game history. You’d never know it to look at it. But in 1985, a 20-year-old named Jordan Mechner stood there with a video camera, filming his 15-year-old brother David sprinting, leaping, and tumbling around the asphalt in loose white clothes. The footage was grainy. The method was improvised. And four years later this would result in Prince of Persia, one of the most important games ever made.
One Person, One Computer, One Idea
It’s almost impossible to overstate how small this operation was. Prince of Persia was created by a team consisting only of fresh-out-of-college Jordan Mechner, with some support from friends, family, and his publisher. His brother was roped in to do acrobatics on camera, serving as reference for the animations, while his father is credited as the music composer.
Mechner hadn’t come from nowhere. He spent two years at Yale writing his first published game, Karateka (1984), which went to number one on the Billboard software chart. But Karateka was a warm-up. From the moment he graduated, Mechner wanted to do something more ambitious, something that felt genuinely cinematic.
Beginning in 1985, Mechner faced a pivotal career decision: pursue screenwriting or create another computer game. Despite the success of Karateka, he grappled with self-doubt, the allure of Hollywood, and the uncertain future of the Apple II gaming industry. He chose the game. It would take him more than three years.
Mechner’s candid journals from the time capture the journey from his parents’ basement to the forefront of the fast-growing 1980s video game industry and the creative, technical, personal, and professional struggles that brought the Prince into the homes of millions of people worldwide.
The Spark: Raiders, Robin Hood, and a Thousand and One Nights
The concept for Prince of Persia drew from a surprisingly eclectic mix of influences. As a child, Jordan Mechner had enjoyed the tales from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, and the settings for the game are rooted in Persia. But the gameplay DNA came from somewhere else entirely.
Mechner has said that when he started programming, the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark had been one of the main inspirations for the character’s acrobatic responses in a dangerous environment. He wanted a protagonist who moved like a real human being, someone who hesitated at ledges, grabbed for handholds, and stumbled when he landed badly. Games of the era didn’t do that. Characters were stiff, mechanical, abstract. Mechner wanted something else.
The story he built around this movement is deceptively simple. The original Prince of Persia centers on a refugee who falls in love with a princess and is imprisoned by her father’s evil vizier, Jaffar. Jaffar then seizes the kingdom and gives the Princess one hour to agree to marry him or die. In those 60 minutes, players must escape a 12-level labyrinth of deadly traps, puzzles, and guards, where death is never further away than a mistimed parry or a poorly aimed jump, possibly onto a spring-loaded bed of hidden, impaling spikes.
That one-hour countdown wasn’t just a storytelling device, it was a design solution. The ticking clock was Mechner’s answer to creating suspense without limiting the player’s stock of lives, with the idea that players would run out of time on early attempts but quickly move through early levels on subsequent playthroughs.
The Technique: Rotoscoping on a Shoestring
Here is where the story gets genuinely fascinating, and where Prince of Persia earns its place in the history books.
Rotoscoping was not new in 1989. Disney had used versions of it for decades. But nobody had seriously attempted it in video games. The memory limitations alone seemed to make it impractical. The technique was well-known in filmmaking, but not very practical for video games, both because of the additional work required to digitize footage and the unforgiving memory limitations of computers of the time.
Mechner did it anyway.
To help create a human being on screen, Mechner enlisted his brother David, then 15, to put on loose white clothing meant to contrast sharply with his surroundings, and run and jump around the Reader’s Digest parking lot and a high school near their family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, while Jordan filmed. He then photographed frames from the VHS footage, spread the prints on the floor, and spent days studying exactly how a human body moves: where the weight shifts, how the arms follow, when the knees bend.
The animation loop for the Prince’s walk cycle alone required 12 frames. For the swordfighting sequences, Mechner turned to cinema for help. He rotoscoped the final duel scene between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood, poring over snapshots trying to figure out how to conceptualize the footwork and parries into a repeatable pattern.
The technical difficulties were considerable. Mechner ran into a series of technical issues with getting sufficient contrast in his images to enable automatic reading into the computer. In desperation, he resorted to buying a very expensive piece of video equipment with a credit card, using it, and then returning it for a full refund. This was a young man solving problems with whatever was available and sometimes with things that technically weren’t.
What kept him going through all of it was faith in the idea. As documented in his development journals, Mechner wrote at the time: “I still think this can work. The key is not to clean up the frames too much. The figure will be tiny and messy and look like crap… but I have faith that, when the frames are run in sequence at 15 fps, it’ll create an illusion of life that’s more amazing than anything that’s ever been seen on an Apple II screen.”
He was right.
What Made It Different
In an era when most platformers asked players to jump on enemies’ heads, collect coins, and scroll inexorably to the right, Prince of Persia was doing something fundamentally different.
Also unusual was the method of combat: protagonist and enemies fought with swords, not projectile weapons, as was the case in most contemporary games. The swordfighting had timing, rhythm, and weight to it. You could be beaten if you were careless. Guards had patterns that rewarded observation.
The deaths were another thing entirely. Losing a swordfight to a guard wasn’t particularly graphic, but if players failed to spot telltale holes in the floor, a sprint through an “empty” hallway could end with the Prince awkwardly slumped onto a jagged spike trap. It was brutal and oddly human. The Prince didn’t explode or blink out of existence. He died, and you felt it.
The creative director of an in-development remake of The Sands of Time later reflected: “When replaying the original Prince of Persia, of course there’s the notion of the rotoscopy that is super powerful and brings weight to the character. Every jump has tension built into it.” That weight, or the sense that your character was a real body subject to real physics and real danger, was entirely new.
But for all the technical audacity of the rotoscoping approach, Mechner himself wasn’t thinking about pushing boundaries. Though the use of rotoscoping was regarded as a pioneering move, Mechner later recalled: “When we made that decision with Prince of Persia, I wasn’t thinking about being cutting edge – we did it essentially because I’m not that good at drawing or animation, and it was the only way I could think of to get lifelike movement.”
This is the accidental nature of so many breakthroughs. Mechner solved his own limitations with the best tool he could find. The fact that the tool happened to be revolutionary was almost beside the point.
Release, Reception, and a Slow Burn to Glory
Prince of Persia was published by Broderbund on the Apple II in 1989. The game was critically acclaimed and, while not an immediate commercial success, sold many copies as it was ported to a wide range of platforms after the original Apple II release.
The timing was a problem Mechner had worried about throughout development. By 1989, the Apple II was already fading, that system was in decline through the late 1980s, and little new software was released by that year. Launching a major game on dying hardware was a gamble. But the ports saved it. The game eventually made its way to DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, SNES, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, and a dozen other platforms, each version introducing new audiences to the running, jumping Prince.
It was converted to nearly every video game and computer console in existence, selling 2 million copies worldwide.
Prince of Persia is believed to have been the first cinematic platformer and inspired many games in this subgenre, such as Another World. Wikipedia The genre it arguably invented — games where fluid animation, environmental storytelling, and a sense of physical consequence matter as much as the mechanical challenge — would go on to shape decades of game design.
A Legacy Written in Every Pixel
Jordan Mechner’s creation grew into a franchise that spawned sequels, a Ubisoft reboot trilogy, and a Disney film starring Jake Gyllenhaal. But all of that was built on the foundation of those grainy VHS tapes, those photographs spread across a floor, and one young developer’s stubborn insistence that a video game character could move like a real person.
What Mechner accomplished foreshadowed what the industry would later achieve with motion capture in 3D, he just did it first, alone, with a consumer camera and his teenage brother in a parking lot.
The original Prince of Persia was a game made by someone who wasn’t quite sure what he was making, built with a technique he adopted out of necessity, released on a platform that was already obsolete, and yet it endures. It endures because the Prince still feels real when he runs, still hesitates at the edge of a ledge, still stumbles on landing. And somewhere in that feeling is the whole point.
Not all revolutions announce themselves. Some of them just start with a kid in white pajamas jumping around a parking lot while his older brother points a camera.