How The Original 'Prince Of Persia' Changed Video Game Animation

When Prince of Persia was first released for the Apple II in 1989, it was unlike anything the gaming world had every seen. A swashbuckling platformer, it featured a unique visual style with remarkably lifelike animations. Amazingly, this visual effect was created by a lone programmer with rudimentary technology and virtually no budget. 

To look back at how he made the game, which would give birth to a wide-ranging media franchise that includes numerous sequels and even a big-budget action movie, I spoke to Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner. In his own words, here’s how the original game’s animation effect was achieved when he first started working on the game in 1985. 

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My first attempts to animate a character on the Apple II were so bad, it was clear that no amount of tweaking would get me to the quality I wanted. I needed a real animator, and I didn’t have one. So I used a trick the early Disney animators had done with Snow White: I filmed live-action footage of actors doing the movements I needed for the game, and then I rotoscoped it.

The original Price of Persia game used rotoscoping to achieve its animation effect.

This meant tracing the outline of the character on each frame of film, and mapping it somehow to the screen, pixel by pixel. For Karateka in 1982, I shot on Super-8, loaded the film into a Movieola and traced the frames on tracing paper. The next step was to somehow get the tracings into the computer. For this I used a gadget called a VersaWriter, which was basically two potentiometers hooked together to make a pantograph that plugged into the Apple’s game paddle port. It worked pretty well. 

By the time I started my next game, Prince of Persia (in 1985), home video had been invented, so I was able shoot my 16-year-old brother David running and jumping on VHS tape. Of course the Apple II had no video input, so I still had to jerry-rig a process to get the frames into the computer so I could rotoscope them. I set up a 35mm still camera on a tripod, took pictures of each freeze-frame on the TV screen, and got the roll developed at Fotomat. That gave me a starting point to trace the 3×5 prints. It was a laborious process. To get the first simple cycle of eight frames of a character running, it took weeks of setup and tool-building, followed by days of work. Each frame had to be captured and cleaned up by hand, pixel by pixel. 

But the result was worth it. The moment I finally saw the character running across the screen, I got chills. As rough and pixel-y as it was, I recognized my brother’s way of running, his physical personality. It was the illusion of life.