Prince of Persia

A slender figure breaks into a run, leaps across a chasm, and at the last moment catches the edge of a ledge — Prince of Persia on the Commodore 64 brings one of the smoothest and most realistic movement models of its time to an eight-bit computer. The game that changed the perception of what animation in a video game could look like tries, even in this version, to preserve the tension of a race against relentlessly ticking time.

At the core of the experience is the so-called cinematic platformer: the hero isn't controlled with arcade briskness but with realistic inertia, so that every jump and every duel demands deliberation. You claw your way through a labyrinth of palace dungeons full of traps — collapsing floors, spikes, and pits — and fight sword duels with guards. Above it all hangs a crushing one-hour limit within which you must rescue the princess from the power of the evil vizier Jaffar.

The original was created by Jordan Mechner and the game first came out on the Apple II in 1989. Mechner became renowned for using the rotoscoping technique, in which the character's animations were created based on filmed movements of a real person, which gave the game a hitherto unseen credibility. Conversions to a range of platforms including the Commodore 64 then carried this ambitious design onto weaker hardware, where fluid animation represented an exceptional challenge.

The cultural significance of Prince of Persia is fundamental. The game became a model for an entire genre, influenced later action-adventures, and its brand survived into the modern era, when the Ubisoft studio brought it back to life in a series of 3D games. Mechner's work with animation and storytelling foreshadowed the direction game design would take in the following decades.

On the Commodore 64, Prince of Persia is prized as a technically bold achievement and proof that even eight-bit hardware could carry a game built on detailed animation and atmosphere. For those who remember it, it's a return to a title that took your breath away; for newcomers, a glimpse of the roots of modern platforming.

Why play: For its pioneering realistic animation and a suspenseful race against time that laid the foundations of the entire cinematic-platformer genre.