Prince of Persia is a platform game originally created by Jordan Mechner and published by Broderbund in 1989 for the Apple II. Its success was due, in part, to the remarkable fluidity of animation achieved in the characters, through a technique called rotoscoping. Because of its success, the game was later published in a wide range of platforms.
In 2012, over 20 years after the first version of the game was published, Jordan Mechner released the source code. The story is curious: Jordan backed up onto floppy disks the original source code of the game and left forgotten them. 22 years later, Jordan’s father sent him a box containing the floppies with the original source code. Curious story, for a fantastic game…
I discovered this history reading the development blog of MrSid, which explains the process of conversion Prince of Persia to the Commodore 64. This conversion was performed by reverse engineering the original Apple II code (go figure!!!).
And why I tell you all of this? Because I’m somewhat interested in the world of game programming, especially using HTML5 technology and i found very interesting to test it by reprogramming a game for which I have good memories. So I analyzed the HTML5 game frameworks and certainly the most i liked by their maturity, quality and community wasPhaser. And this is my challenge: converting the original Prince of Persia to HTML5 by using the Phaser framework. Obviously I can not promise anything, I’m not specialist in finishing what I start.
Prince of persia MS-DOS loading screen