[HN Gopher] A platform-jumping prince - History of Prince of Per...
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A platform-jumping prince - History of Prince of Persia's 1990s
Ports
Author : michelangelo
Score : 162 points
Date : 2025-09-26 04:29 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jordanmechner.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jordanmechner.com)
| toonewbie wrote:
| > "For the first time I felt what it's really like to play Prince
| of Persia when you're not the author and don't already know by
| rote what's lurking around every corner."
|
| This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't
| write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own
| assumptions.
|
| I remember seeing the following short but extremely interesting
| documentary about makings of the game as well:
| https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54?feature=shared - Essential viewing
| for anyone interested in game development history.
| jezzamon wrote:
| I've actually had the same experience the author describes --
| me and a friend worked on a web game for 6 years together, and
| then later my friend made a steam port and extended the game.
| The experience was pretty awesome playing it for the first
| time; the connection to code review feels pretty trite in
| comparison.
|
| The experience is more like discovering there was an extra book
| in a series you've read 20 times over. Except you were the
| original author!
| gethly wrote:
| > This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who
| didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your
| own assumptions.
|
| It's not just that. It's anything creative, really. It can be a
| tech startup, it can be a book... you name it. The thing is
| that creators become blinded by their own perception as they
| lose the ability to see flaws.
|
| The longer they work on a thing, the less they are able to
| understand that other people might not understand a lot of
| things. I experienced it myself few times with my coding
| projects. It's actually quite bad as you just cannot fix a
| problem as you do not see it. Even if someone points it out to
| you, it takes quite some time to admit it is a problem.
|
| This is why having teams of people is useful. Single startup
| founders, game designers, writers... have inherent blind spots
| in their entire work.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| One trick when doing music mixing is to play the mix from
| some really low-end speakers. In one studio they had a small
| radio someone could have in their kitchen. There are a lot of
| reasons to do this but you also get some perspective this way
| since you become deaf to your own work indeed very quickly.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| As a teenager I did odd jobs at a small company that
| produced studio equipment (rack mounted reverbs and that
| kind of stuff) and was told this was one of the main
| features of mastering a CD - ensuring it sounded good on
| shitty kitchen radios and large stadium sound-systems.
|
| I was told, somewhere, some guy was blasting himself with a
| giant speaker array tweaking the levels on Hit Me Baby One
| More Time, before it could be printed to masters. A mental
| scene that has lived rent free in my mind for decades.
|
| It still blows my mind that consumer grade CDs and LPs were
| the source for radio broadcasts and such.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Years ago a thing people would do is make an initial mix,
| dump it to ordinary cassette tape and then just drive
| around with the cassette playing on an ordinary car stereo,
| similar thinking.
| daeken wrote:
| Not quite a cassette anymore, but in 2013 I was in the
| studio with some friends and we'd do initial downmixes to
| MP3 and bring them to the car. World of difference, just
| getting the less-ideal and more realistic listening
| experience.
| danwills wrote:
| One suprising thing that seems to work with video/footage
| (a shot) once you've watched it a few hundred times and
| can't really 'see' it naturally any more, is to 'flip' it
| (horizontal mirror (or negation)) the result is usually
| surprising at least and can reveal things you couldn't see
| before! Or, if flipping has run out of juice too, even
| flopping (vertical mirror or negation, yes the shot is
| upside-down now, so not as helpful as flipping) but
| either/or and their combinations can definitely provide
| some extremely useful new perspective on the visual content
| one is trying to produce (VFX day job as Pipeline TD now,
| FX artist previously and this idea helped me numerous
| times!)
| jawilson2 wrote:
| We did this when I was in a band 25+ years ago. Record the
| song, quickly burn it to a CD, then drive back to campus in
| our shitty Honda Civic or band pickup truck and listen to
| it. It was 90% just to listen to what we made, but hearing
| it outside of the studio was good as well.
|
| At this same time, this feels like No Speaker Left Behind.
| Now that I am middle aged and have a nice sound system at
| home and in my car, I sort of want a mix optimized for
| THAT! Like, don't hold me back just because we're still
| mixing for AM radio in a 1983 Pontiac Firebird!
| xoxxala wrote:
| I saw this at Interplay in the early 90s. Our audio
| director had a range of set ups, from high-end monitors to
| cheap Radio Shack speakers, and could switch between them
| with one knob.
|
| (The artists, on the other hand, always worked in dark
| rooms and with their monitor contrast cranked up. We'd
| constantly complain about the dark, hard to see graphics.)
| close04 wrote:
| > You can't unsee your own assumptions.
|
| It's why you can't escape a prison of your own making
| (literally or figuratively).
| dunewalker547 wrote:
| If you find the columns jarring, run this in the console:
|
| document.querySelectorAll('.col-50').forEach(d=>d.classList.repla
| ce('col-50','col-100'));
| bapak wrote:
| Thanks! As usual people favor look over usability and
| readability.
| smig0 wrote:
| Or use reading mode (F9 in Firefox)
| msephton wrote:
| It's a shame that's a ~40MB single page of all blog posts. IMHO
| each blog post should have its own page, to make it easier to
| share.
| Waraqa wrote:
| How did you measure it?
|
| I saved the page as mhtml and it was only 24.4 MB
| sph wrote:
| I used to blame the kids for creating 40MB SPAs, but the author
| has written a popular game on an Apple II :(
|
| To be fair, he probably has better to do today than keep up
| with web technologies. I know I would.
| Cosi1125 wrote:
| He didn't mention the excellent, fan-made Atari 8-bit port of PoP
| [1].
|
| [1] https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-
| prince-o...
| karmakaze wrote:
| I saw this video for it[0]. The best 8-bit version IMO, though
| the Apple II one is the iconic classic.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sMaY9BRHG8
| spankibalt wrote:
| My favorites will always be the PC and GameBoy releases but the
| SNES version is certainly worth a look.
| animal531 wrote:
| I quickly tried it (having only ever played the PC version when
| I was a kid).
|
| They really upped the level and detailing on the art and the
| audio/music is quite good as well.
|
| Design-wise they added a button to perform a forward jump which
| is really welcome.
| spankibalt wrote:
| Here's [1] a deeper look into the Amiga port, and MobyGames
| provides a very handy overview [2] that shows how the ports
| differ visually for anyone interested.
|
| 1. [https://shot97retro.blogspot.com/2019/06/prince-of-
| persia-in...]
|
| 2. [https://www.mobygames.com/game/196/prince-of-
| persia/screensh...]
| cubefox wrote:
| > Elaborate production values and doubled playtime helped make
| SNES PoP a huge hit. I especially loved the fantastic box artwork
| by Katsuya Terada.
|
| For those who wondered:
|
| https://www.therage.ie/products/prince-of-persia-snes-japane...
|
| https://x.com/Danny8bit/status/1196862172174811136/photo/1
| spapas82 wrote:
| I remember that I was playing the DOS version of PoP on a
| computer with Hercules Graphics Card
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card) so I
| suppose the DOS version also supported Hercules (beyond
| CGA/EGA/VGA).
|
| The music, even though was playing from the PC beep speaker
| haunts me to this day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcI8lQvX8Ng
|
| Finally, after all these years I still remember running it with
| "prince megahit" to enable cheat mode so I'd be able to pass the
| levels using ctrl+l...
| m000 wrote:
| > I suppose the DOS version also supported Hercules (beyond
| CGA/EGA/VGA).
|
| IIRC, Hercules cards were more pro-oriented (monochrome
| graphics, but higher resolution than their contemporaries), so
| I doubt anyone would bother to make a game port specifically
| for them.
|
| If you ran the game on a Hercules, most likely it was the CGA
| version run on top of a CGA simulator [1].
|
| [1]
| https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php
| spapas82 wrote:
| I don't remember having such a CGA simulator. I suppose it
| would be a TSR program that I needed to run before prince,
| but definitely I wasn't doing that.
|
| From some research it seems that hercules was actually
| supported:
|
| https://www.dosbox-staging.org/getting-started/enhancing-
| pri...
|
| and from
|
| https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/Games/game_prince.php
|
| > Intel 8088/8086 CPU, 512 KB of RAM (640 KB for MCGA/VGA
| version) Graphics support for Hercules _, CGA_ , Tandy/PCjr
| _, EGA_ and MCGA /VGA (320 x 200 max. resolution in 256
| colours)
|
| Notice that PoP was one of the _few_ games I was able to play
| with that hercules monitor :|
| m000 wrote:
| It seems you're right. I vaguely remember using simcga on a
| friend's PC (where we also played PoP) but I can't recall
| for which game.
|
| Given that the PC version of PoP was launched in 1990 and
| CGA simulators existed since 1986, I would guess that even
| embedding the simulator to the game, so that it works out
| of the box, would have been a viable option.
| ciupicri wrote:
| I also played it on a PC with Hercules too and I don't
| remember having to resort to an emulator or any other
| program.
| Narishma wrote:
| The game directly supports Hercules [1]. Plenty of games did
| back then, 500+ according to Mobygames [2].
|
| [1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/196/prince-of-
| persia/specs/do...
|
| [2] https://www.mobygames.com/attributes/attribute/4/
| andrepd wrote:
| The one (only?) platform I ever played Prince of Persia on is not
| listed: a monochrome Siemens phone from the early 2000s!
|
| I found someone briefly showing on yt :)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQW4M5azj_0?t=60
| pavlov wrote:
| The two-column layout is quite confusing here.
|
| You're supposed to read the entire left-hand column first, then
| scroll back up where it continues with "Presage had an excellent,
| seasoned lead Mac programmer..."
|
| This works in print where you can guarantee that both columns fit
| on the page, but on the web it's just weird.
|
| The columns are responsive, so a quick usability to fix is to
| make your browser window narrow enough that the other column goes
| away.
| bluedino wrote:
| My friends parents used to clean a business on the weekends, and
| as kids we got dragged along, but we had permission to play games
| on one of the office computers.
|
| It was an unassuming 286 running DOS, but it had a modem and a
| couple bulletin boards in the phonebook.
|
| Prince of Persia was one of the games we played the most. Paired
| with a Soundblaster and a small set of speakers, playing that
| game in a dark office was a great experience.
| ct0 wrote:
| Sounds way more fun than my childhood, all I had was Raisins.
| qmr wrote:
| Jordan's books "The Making of Karateka" and "The Making of Prince
| of Persia" are delightful stream of consciousness journals of his
| time working on these early pioneering titles and are a
| fascinating look into the history of the personal computer and
| computer gaming revolutions.
|
| Full of his hopes, thoughts, fears, struggles, aspirations,
| setbacks, and successes. Old sketches and screen captures. Just
| reading about his workflow for the animation on Prince of Persia
| is fascinating.
|
| Jordan has a way with storytelling.
|
| https://x.com/jmechner/status/1831585901350158436
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The column layout is a very poor choice here. I started reading
| on the 2nd column because the images push the beginning of the
| article so low.
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