Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia appeared in 1989 on the Apple II and looked unlike anything else from its first seconds. Jordan Mechner filmed a real person moving and traced the footage frame by frame, so the prince did not hop along a grid like other platform heroes of the day: he built up speed, overshot, caught a ledge with his fingertips and fell like something with weight. On top of that sat one merciless idea, an hour of real time to complete the rescue. The game was therefore about caution and haste at once, about memorised traps, blades and collapsing tiles, and about swordplay that felt more like a shoving match than a string of combos.

At the turn of the nineties the game spread to Amiga, DOS, Amstrad CPC, Master System and Mega Drive, with console versions often adding extra levels; the 1993 sequel Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame pushed harder on colour and pace but never quite matched the original's spell. The real resurrection came with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2003, where wall-running, acrobatics and the ability to rewind a botched jump became the new template for the action adventure; the darker Warrior Within and the more reconciled The Two Thrones completed the trilogy. Without that revived approach to movement, today's action games about climbing and flowing through a city would look very different.