01 Sword-fighting is about timing your thrusts and
parries, and knowing when to advance or retreat.
02 With only an hour to save the day, sometimes the
Prince had to throw caution to the wind.
03 Getting caught between one of these snap-happy
nasties was a particularly gruesome way to die.B
efore the days of fancy
motion-capture studios,
game makers had to come
up with cheaper, more
inventive alternatives for realistic
animation. Designer Jordan Mechner
smartly decided to adopt the cinematic
technique of rotoscoping, tracing over
individual frames of footage of his
brother in white clothes to create the
movements of the titular hero. For
the swashbuckling sword fighting,
meanwhile, Mechner used stills from
Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone’s duel in
The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The results set a new standard for
character animation in video games.
But more than that, they added to the
sense of horror when you sent the poor
Prince plummeting to a violent death.
The Tower he had to escape to rescue
a princess from the merciless vizier
was so stuffed with traps, spikes and
enemies that it made your average
Uncharted level look like a children’s
ball pit. And with just an hour to
achieve your goal, every death meant
something – so once the visual impact
of a skewering was dulled by repetition,
it still felt like a serious setback.
Precise and economical, it remains a
memorably distinctive experience more
than a quarter of a century on.03
02
The Prince’s shadowy doppelgänger presented
an intriguing dilemma: how do you kill your own
reflection, especially since damaging it meant
you felt the same pain? The answer, of course,
was to merge with it, an epiphany that few
players would forget.
CLASSIC MOMENT
When it came down to it, Jaffar was every bit as
mortal as anyone you’d fought so far – falling
quickly to some well-timed thrusts of your
sword. In some ways it was anticlimactic, but it
served the narrative beautifully: he wasn’t
a super-villain, just a really nasty guy.
CLASSIC BOSS