Most people think time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction, but this dashing young adventurer has a very special relationship with time. He sees the face of it, struggles against it, uses it as a weapon on his enemies. This man, who fights the corruption of gods, re-arranges the threads of history to his liking on a whim, only to find history changing him as well. Always, there are consequences for the unwary traveler, and traps take on many forms. Time, this hero - this Prince - will tell you, is an ocean in a storm, and he sails those dangerous waters with the grace of a dancer, the potency of a sword. The Prince waits for no man.
His is a tale like none we've ever seen.
Once Upon a Time
When Doug Carlson finished writing his first computer game in 1979, he and brother Gary founded a company solely to market it. Br?derbund was a made-up word roughly translating as "band of brothers" from mashed-up German, Swedish and Danish, and Galactic Empire, the first game in the Galactic Saga, gave players 999 years to conquer the known universe. It only took ten for Br?derbund to conquer their share of the industry with powerhouse franchises Choplifter and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. A few half-hearted attempts to expand the company fell through, but the Carlsons kept looking for new properties to boost their profile.
They found one in Karateka, a surprisingly advanced undergrad project put together by Yale student Jordan Mechner.
Mechner was a psychology major who grew up in love with animation, but couldn't draw well enough to make cartoons of his own. He turned to computers instead. His big idea was to put equal focus on graphics and gameplay, and give some priority to animating the human avatar's moves. Most other game designers stuck to using spaceships or oddly static creatures, and didn't put much effort into animating either... they weren't making cartoons, after all. Mechner was.
Karateka sent gamers on a karate-fueled mission in feudal Japan to save Princess Mariko from evil warlord Akuma and his pesky eagle. It looked fairly stunning for a 1984 side-scroller, showing off a fluid array of character movements. Running sequences, of which there were many, were strangely mesmerizing. Combatants bowed before pasting each other in the face. Karateka also included an early regenerative health system, something that wouldn't fully catch on until nearly two decades after its release on the Apple II.
Half a million in sales made Karateka a big win for Br?derbund. They wanted another game out of Mechner, and he started thinking about locations. Part of Karateka's success, he believed, was the exotic Asian setting... ironically rare in the U.S., even from Asia-produced games. He eventually settled on the fantastic Middle Eastern world of One Thousand and One Nights. To that framework, Mechner added gameplay structure from the two games he'd recently been enjoying: Br?derbund's own Lode Runner and The Castles of Dr. Creep. The Prince, his new protagonist, would navigate a puzzle and trap-filled labyrinth, and he'd do it with the energy of Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. The opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where archeologist and fortune hunter Indiana Jones stayed half a step ahead of instantly lethal booby traps and slowly closing gates, became another huge influence.
Mechner wanted to stretch out the thrills of those eight minutes to fill an entire game. For urgency, he put players on the clock. Everything would play out in real time.
The Prince relied heavily on acrobatics for his survival, requiring a far more extensive set of moves than the karateka's one-on-one throwdowns. That game proved stellar graphics could grab attention in a crowded gaming market and keep it, so the question became how to upgrade Karateka's look. Rotoscoping became the answer. Mechner cast his brother David (largely based on David's willingness to work for free), filmed him running and jumping around in baggy white pants, then traced and scanned the frames into the computer. Their father, Frances, wrote the Persian-themed music.
Prince of Persia released in 1989 on the Apple II, and was an instant success.
At first, it didn't seem so complicated. Mixing carnal lust with political ambition, the evil Vizier Jaffar imprisoned a beautiful Princess in a high tower and gave her an hour to marry him or die. Rather than go for an annulment, the Princess leaned towards Option B. Her only hope was her commoner-lover, the Prince (no relation), who Jaffar left to rot in a dungeon. One swift escape later, the Prince was running up the tower to beat the deadline.
And running was the only way to do it. Players had just sixty minutes to reach the top and defeat Jaffar, and a ton of pressure-plates to hit on the way. Guards were actually dueled in a patient series of retreats, advances, strikes and parries. If spike traps skewered you, or a skeleton warrior chopped you, or a section of floor collapsed under you, the game whisked you back to the start of the level while the clock kept ticking. Lost time compounded issues like loosing your soul, which cut the Prince's health to almost nothing. Worse, that "Shadow Prince" played for the other team, harassing you at every turn. A real sense of danger permeated every moment, helped by seamless animations and rudimentary physics that gave the Prince real weight. It just felt like he was always about to be killed. Often enough, he was. That made his escapes all the more thrilling.
Prince of Persia started with players under the gun, and let the pressure build from there. Then Mechner added twists nobody expected; killing the Shadow in a duel killed the Prince, but simply walking into it merged them back together. Reaching Jaffar required a "leap of faith" over a bottomless chasm. Gamers were challenged to think about what they were doing in ways few other games did, but taking the time to simply stop and think ate into the precious few minutes you had left. It was wonderfully tense.
Mechner and Br?derbund took home armfuls of awards and accolades, hailed for setting new standards in gameplay and graphics, and more than a few of their ideas and images ended up in Disney's 1993 blockbuster Aladdin, intentionally or otherwise. Speedrunning "POP" soon took over as the big obsession in gaming. Others spent years figuring out its riddles.
Prince of Persia stood out in a year that also introduced Arkanoid, MechWarrior, SimCity and Super Mario Land. A game that good, that original, that successful, seemed predestined for a sequel.
Royal Pain
Instead, Mechner enrolled in NYU's film school. While Br?derbund ported POP to every platform known to man, he traveled to Havana and filmed the award-winning documentary short Waiting for Dark, about everyday life in Castro's Cuba. By the time they came together again for a Persian sequel, four years went past.
For the Prince, it'd been less than two weeks. He'd married the Princess and become heir to the Sultan's kingdom, and Jaffar was back. Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and The Flame opened with the ex-Vizier employing dark sorcery to disguise himself as the Prince - achieving all his goals from the first game in one fell swoop - and cloaking the real Prince's identity under an illusion. Unrecognizable to the Princess, the Prince fought his way out of the palace and leapt aboard a ship just as it left dock. Magically assisted by Jaffar, he soon ended up shipwrecked on a deserted isle. Deserted, except for trap-heavy caverns, sword-wielding skeletons and one very convenient magic carpet.
Naturally, once the Princess figured out Jaffar's deception at the top of Level Four, players got a whole seventy-five minutes to complete the remaining eleven levels and save her.
Mechner served primarily as the creative advisor for POP 2, while Brian Eheler (producer on POP 1) and Sherman Dickman took over as project leads. Prince of Persia was so ahead of its time that, despite the four year gap, severe graphical updates weren't really necessary. Other developers had only just caught up. Instead, they added storytelling cutscenes and an audio narration while keeping the basic premise intact and devising a new and entirely evil set of puzzles. One devious example, towards the end, required players to ignore every instinct and let the Prince die. Mechner, Eheler and Dickman did the franchise proud, and sales for The Shadow and The Flame reflected it.
Using his Shadow self to gain control of the blue Flame, the Prince reduced Jaffar to ashes this time, leaving no room for doubt. But the final moments relieved that the witch helping Jaffar from the start also had deadly ties to the Prince's mysterious past, setting up the story for a third Prince of Persia game.
It never happened. Mechner put his energy into completing The Last Express, a critically acclaimed murder-mystery set on the Orient Express, complete with branching gameplay and unique art nouveau cell shaded graphics. Unfortunately, the Br?derbund marketing push collapsed due to internal problems, and when partner companies pulled out, a vital port to the PlayStation fell through. It didn't help that Express was a point-and-click mystery going against the tide; the entire industry was rapidly shifting all their major franchises to exciting, interactive 3D. Br?derbund lost six million dollars in the crossfire.
After that mess, Mechner decided he was done with games. Then he took a call from Andrew Pederson at Red Orb Entertainment, the Br?derbund subsidiary behind Riven. Pedersen asked Mechner how he'd feel about a 3D Prince of Persia.
Pretty good, as it turned out. While Pedersen put together a team of POP-loving 3D developers, Mechner came in to work on design and co-write a story that put the Prince right back in the dungeon. Dangling plotlines surrounding the Prince's true lineage and the witch's plans for him were discarded. Instead, Prince of Persia 3D began with a family reunion between the Sultan and his brother, Assan, with the Prince tagging along. Assan showed his true colors by assassinating the Prince's bodyguards and locking the Prince up; the Sultan apparently promised the Princess's hand to Assan's son, Rugnor, long before the Prince came along, and now Assan was calling in the debt. Ignoring their rather close blood relation, Rugnor had other faults. For one, he was a half man/half tiger beast. For another, his behavior and violent tendencies leaned towards the tiger half. The Prince set off to save his beloved wife from her ruthless cousin.
Pedersen and Mechner planned out fifteen levels played out across seven environments, mixing familiar spike traps with new stealth elements. Rotoscoping was out. Motion capture was in. Invisibility potions joined the old health potions. Nobody pretended POP 3D would be anything other than a major production, benefiting a major franchise. "Team POP" committed themselves to faithfully translating Prince of Persia into a 3D world, and they nearly succeeded. Br?derbund ran out of time first.
Three years previous, Doug Carlson had tried to buy educational game publisher The Learning Company. By 1998, the tables turned. The Learning Company bought out Br?derbund, and started cherry-picking what to keep and what to dump. Five hundred Br?derbund employees, nearly half the company, were laid off in the first month.
Luckily, Mechner was known inside Mindscape, the gaming division of TLC; he'd helped former Br?derbund programmer and POP rotoscope model Robert Cook on D/Generation, a well-received isometric horror-shooter published by Mindscape back in 1991. As a franchise, POP practically made its own case for survival. Prince of Persia 3D was still a go under the original dev team, but now the production was on a deadline as strict as any the Prince ever faced. The game went gold in 1999, six years after The Shadow and The Flame, without proper QA scrutiny.
Not surprisingly, POP 3D became known for carrying more than its fair share of game-defeating bugs and glitches. Top of the list: poor camera controls that plagued gamers trying to make basic moves in trap-lined caves, sometimes with a brick wall blocking their view of the Prince. That fixed camera, positioned directly behind the Prince, also looked uncomfortably close to Tomb Raider design, made worse by a chunk of push/pull block puzzles set to a grid-based map. Tight controls, a hallmark of the series, now felt sluggish. Critics praised the level design, the graphics, the story, the atmosphere. They could tell a very good game was hiding somewhere in Prince of Persia 3D, but the laundry list of problems hid it too well. The game tanked, and TLC took a disastrous financial hit.
That same year, Mattel purchased The Learning Company, and angry investors forced Mattel CEO Jill Barad out over it. Her successor passed ownership of TLC to an acquisitions firm in 2001 for nothing more than a promised cut of whatever could be gotten for selling the albatross off.
French publisher Ubisoft took an immediate interest.
Sands through the Hourglass
Ubisoft held the POP catalog, but the Prince of Persia IP belonged to its creator: Jordan Mechner. After two disastrous experiences in a row, Mechner didn't fancy a third.
A producer working at Ubisoft's tiny Montreal subsidiary noticed Prince of Persia out in the open, and nobody seemed to be doing anything with it. A good chunk of the Montreal team was a year into coding Splinter Cell, their first high-profile project after years of low-grade Playmobil and Donald Duck games, but Yannis Mallat wasn't on that team. His team had just delivered a Rayman port for the GBA, and now they started throwing ideas around for what they'd do if they had a crack at the Prince. The conversation got so interesting, Mallat secured a few resources, did a little motion capture, and put together a few test animations.
In May, 2001, Mallat invited Mechner up to show him their AVIs. They were crude, hasty, unpolished things, showing the Prince running along a wall and leaping off to catch hold of a ladder.
That struck Mechner as a brilliant expansion on POP's conceits, opening up a whole new realm of gameplay possibilities. A deal was made to license POP out, Mallat's team got the green light from above, and Mechner agreed to consult. Then he was hired to write the story and screenplay. Then he directed voice actors in the studio. By the summer of 2003, Mechner stopped fighting the inevitable, moved his family up to Montreal and came aboard full-time as a designer. That November, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time released on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube and PC.
A spiteful Vizier still stirred up trouble, a Princess still needed saving, but otherwise Sands of Time wiped the slate clean. An entirely new Prince, finishing off a successful war in India with his father-king, looted a few neat souvenirs: a nifty-looking Dagger of Time and a gigantic glowing hourglass. When the treacherous Vizier tricked the Prince into unlocking the hourglass with the Dagger, it unleashed the Sands of Time, instantly annihilating a kingdom and turning nearly everyone in it - including the Prince's father - into sand monsters. The Prince cheerfully teamed with the beautiful Princess Farah, daughter of the powerful Maharajah his armies just defeated, to undo the damage he'd caused and stop the Vizier from becoming a god.
This was the 3D Prince everybody wanted. Fast, kinetic, full of acrobatic combat, ingenious puzzles, high adventure, swashbuckling romance... Sands of Time floored everybody. It looked great, played even better. Classic elements were dropped, replaced by better features. One enemy per screen limitations gave way to balletic multi-enemy brawls. Health potions vanished -- Mechner figured thirsty guards would drink them all, anyway -- but any water source healed the Prince. Instead of racing against time, the Prince used it to his advantage; powered by retrieving the Sand, the Dagger of Time could reverse the clock ten seconds, freeze time, speed it up or slow it down for some monster-bashing shenanigans. That one brilliant mechanic changed how the entire game played, and the level design complemented it perfectly.
The Sands of Time took Game of the Year honors from more than a few sources, and earned eight DICE awards. Sales were solid, though not the blockbuster figures Ubisoft expected from one of the PS2's best-reviewed titles. It was enough, however, to warrant a sequel.
The Dark Side
Mallat had one in mind. His big complaint with Sands was how using the Dagger to undo past events essentially let the Prince off the hook for all the harm he'd done. Even Farah's death (a consequence of the Prince's misguided suspicions) was neatly reversed, though it also erased their affair from the timelines. No way would the Prince get off so lightly again.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within released one year later, the shortest wait ever between POPs, on the same optimized Jade engine as Sands of Time. Set seven years later, the Prince was on the run from the Dahaka, temporal guardians out to kill him and restore all the timelines he distorted. Desperate to escape that fate, the Prince hatched a plan to prevent the Sands of Time from ever existing by confronting the Empress of Time, and innocent casualties littered every step of his violent, self-serving quest. Years on the run from the Dahaka had eroded his charming, adventurous spirit, leaving him single-minded, harsh, aggressive, haunted. The whole game reflected that attitude.
Platforming stayed largely the same. Focus shifted to combat with a host of new moves and abilities, plus buckets of Ninja Gaiden-like bloodshed and decapitations. Time manipulation happened through Farah's medallion -- a keepsake from a lover who didn't remember him - streamlining the clunky time-sand retrieval from Sands. Heavy metal guitar wailed over the soundtrack. Romance was replaced by sexed-up vixens in g-strings. It all added up to the series' first M-rating.
Not everybody agreed with the dark turn. Mechner, who bowed out to work on his own projects, publicly admitted the meaner edge didn't appeal to him. He didn't recognize a Prince who occasionally claimed "You should be honored to die by my sword!" Hardly a smooth pick-up line, but it apparently worked on Kaileena, the Empress of Time, whom the Prince killed, resurrected, and sailed home with in the "true" ending. Ubisoft insisted the changes reflected both story and market demands, and ultimately the numbers bore them out. Warrior Within didn't rake in Sands of Time's level of acclaim, but sales went up. Mallat turned his attention to closing the circle. Prince of Persia: Kindred Blade went right into crunch without a break in production.
A playable demo and trailer debuted at E3 2005, sending off mixed signals. The game looked lighter. The trailer showed a story that kept Warrior's grim tone intact, with doomed fates all around and Kaileena's suicide prominent.
Mallat's plan for his finale to the Sands of Time trilogy called for blending the first two games, starting with the Prince himself. They jettisoned Warrior's much-derided vocals and music, going straight back to Sands' audio set. Dizzying acrobatics flowed into brutal one-hit stealth kills. The darkness in the E3 trailer was scaled way, way back. Tonally, they aimed for the middle while resolving to settle all accounts. The Prince would finally stop cheating fate, and instead face it and beat it head-on. A name change later, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones made its December 2005 release date.
Well rested and looking much better, the Prince and Kaileena arrived home in the city of Babylon, only to find it on fire. Too late, the Prince realized he'd undone the events of Sands of Time, leaving the evil Vizier very much alive and still hungry to achieve immortality. The Vizier quickly murdered Kaileena, merging with her soul and again releasing the Sands to devastate the city.
Once again, the Dagger of Time saved the Prince, but not before the Sands infected him with their corruption, splitting him into two personalities; the noble hero from Sands, and the vicious Dark Prince from Warrior, in a nod to the original game's Shadow Prince. The dark side of the Prince's personality reveled in violence, wielding a Daggertail razor-whip imbedded in his skin. Players couldn't control their transformations into the Dark Prince, and if they didn't find a water source to change back in time, the corruption would kill him. Minus any real overpower benefits, the Dark Prince sections of the game tended to be less than popular.
On the other hand, Farah and her bow were back in the picture, and stunning graphics made her more beautiful than ever. Chariot racing sequences were a nice addition, and boss battles required more strategy than button-mashing.
Dispatching the Vizier -- transformed into a grotesque winged creature -- freed Kaileena's soul, but didn't end the game. The Prince's final match was against himself, the Dark Prince, and all the anger, fear, greed and pride that led to his seven-year ordeal. Farah helped the Prince leave those aspects of himself behind before they consumed him utterly, destroying the Dark Prince for good. Free at last, the Prince and Farah started rekindling their romance as he reached back to the beginning to tell his tale.
Thrones didn't surpass Sands, but it did deliver a solid, satisfying ending to an epic trilogy. And with that, in true storybook fashion, Mallat closed the book on the Prince.
Now and Again
The Prince has stayed in "happily ever after" ever since. Mostly.
Battles of Prince of Persia, a turn-based strategy game covering events between Sands and Warrior, released on the DS the same month as Thrones, and quickly fell off the radar. Few believed the Prince would ever wait his turn. Rival Swords, an April 2007 expanded port of Two Thrones for the PSP, faired a little better. Better still, Gameloft S.A. remastered the original Prince of Persia using Sands of Time character models, released on Xbox Live the following June and on mobile not too long thereafter. Prince of Persia Classic got the Jordan Mechner seal of approval. It played just differently enough, he claimed, that all his old reflexes hampered him badly.
But as far back as 2006, leaked documents indicated Ubisoft planned to bring the Prince out of retirement. Then word surfaced that Mechner had bought the princeofpersiaprodigy.com domain, hinting at a new game. Yannis Mallat -- now CEO of Ubisoft Montreal -- also oversaw their 2007 actioner Assassin's Creed, and astute gamers detected more than a little Prince in professional assassin Altair's wild acrobatics. By the start of 2008, screenshots and concept art found its way to the internet, whipping the POP culture up into a froth. Their Prince was returning.
Running on the Scimitar engine used by Assassin's Creed, the simply-titled Prince of Persia landed on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in time for the holiday season.
Ubisoft started over with a new Prince, a new story, and a new attitude. No countdowns, no spike traps, no mucking around with the space-time continuum. Instead, a nameless wanderer will journey an open environment hubbed by a beautiful garden... in fact, the prison of the psychotic god Ahriman, whose corruption is slowly seeping out into the world.
The Prince's job is to stop the spread, but beating the Corruption back concentrates it in other areas, so whatever order players tackle the levels in, it's only going to get tougher the further in they go. This Prince might not have time powers to fall back on, but he does come fully equipped with a clawed gauntlet, adding a whole new list of moves to his repertoire and added dimension to the revamped combat system. As the Corruption takes many different forms, from traps to horrific soldiers, he'll need them all. One-on-one fights hark back to the original game, too, allowing Ubisoft Montreal to pack heavy-duty AI into the opposition.
This chapter in the Prince of Persia chronicles was met with mixed praise. Very few could complain at all about the incredible art style which really showed off the prince's acrobatics and delivered a magnificent fantasy world. However, certain design choices crashed against the expectations of gamers. The biggest sticking point was that the Prince cannot die. No matter if he takes a flying leap off the side of a wall into a pit of pure Corruption, Elika is there to pull him back at the last second. Many said this robbed Prince of Persia of its challenge, but it can be argued that instead of dishing out arbitrary death every few minutes as a teaching tool, Prince of Persia's repeat saves encouraged you to experiment more with the Prince's vast move set.
Ubisoft has yet to announce a follow-up to this new chapter in the Prince of Persia line. (Hopefully, if they do, this Prince won't be such a boor. Really, why is the Prince being a Westernized jerk?) Instead, it jumped back to the Sands of Time trilogy for the newest installment of the Prince's fabled adventures.
The Prince Goes Hollywood
Fans of the Prince of Persia series have been anticipating a movie adaptation for many, many years. But Hollywood's hit-and-miss (mostly miss) track record with game franchises has surely tempered those expectations. Can the filmmakers pull this one off?
The movie version of the game was first announced back in 2004. The prospective film's development was spurred by a meeting between Disney, Pirates of the Caribbean producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Mechner. Mechner pulled choice footage from the Sands of Time game and meticulously pieced together a video pitch intended to convey his vision for the tone of the movie. It worked. The project was given the green light and began coming together in earnest in May 2008 when Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arteron were cast in the lead roles of Dastan and Tamina.
Gyllenhaal, of Donnie Darko and Brokeback Mountain fame, seems to actually know his stuff. "I played the game a lot more when I was really young -- I know the game in its entire version," he said. "I went online when I first started researching stuff for the role because what was really important was not, for me personally, to bring some sort of realism into a world that is not always fully based on reality. Often you can just hide in all that stuff so easily. To look at what … a real Persian prince would look like, and then who the Prince of Persia is in the videogame."
Bruckheimer and the studio landed a charismatic director with blockbuster chops in the form of Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). The cast worked on the 100-plus day production on location in Morocco and at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, UK.
IGN Movies visited the set on day 57 of the shoot, and what we witnessed was impressive. The sets filled Pinewood's fabled 007 sound-stage and pretty much every stage surrounding it -- PoP was one of the largest productions ever undertaken in the UK. The ancient fictional city of Alamut was created there in meticulous detail, each stage filled with tons of sand, hundreds of extras, scores of horses and even a donkey for good measure. And yet production wasn't just limited to Britain, with the shoot also hitting the Moroccan cities of Marrakech, Ouarzazate and Erfoud, in raging heat and at altitudes of up to 9,000 feet.
Newell worked from a script by Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard, Boaz Yakin, and game creator Mechner. Mechner, to his credit, seems to know where to draw the line when it comes to faithfulness to the source material. Addressing the differences between the game and film, he told us, "There are no sand monsters in the movie. For the game, turning everybody in the world into sand monsters was really useful because it created an inexhaustible supply of enemies. But that's a story that's meant to be played with a controller in your hand, and a movie is meant to be shared by an audience. So we didn't want to make a movie about fighting monsters.
"The movie is mostly based on the Sands of the Time [game]," Mechner continues. "But rather than try to do a literal retelling of the game, what I pitched to Jerry in 2004 were the characters and elements reconfigured into a story that makes a great movie. If you've played the game, you won't know what happens in the movie. It's a different story. But you'll recognize characters and situations. I think it's very true to the spirit of the game."
Oscar-winner Sir Ben Kingsley plays the wicked Nizam, who plots to kill his brother King Shahrman and then aspires to pin the murder on Dastan, clearing the way for his own ascension to the throne. If you think that sounds a lot like Vizier, the main bad guy in the Sands of Time game, you'd be right. While it's not a straight-up adaptation, as Mechner says, the movie was clearly inspired by the eponymous game.
Every good action-adventure needs a lovely leading lady, right? Prince of Persia has that covered. Gemma Arteron, who played Bond girl Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace, more than fits the bill. "It's a real full-on action role," Arteron says of her character. "Although she's a high priestess so she's not your typical kind of gun-wielding [heroine]. She's very spiritual, so it's an interesting take to have someone that's action-driven but that has got religious beliefs. It's an interesting character."
If Sands of Time is as successful as Disney hopes, you can expect a string of sequels in the coming years.
Just as the Prince's movie hits the silver screen, Ubisoft's latest leaps to consoles. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands returns to the previous-gen trilogy kicked off with Sands of Time. The movie exists in this universe, making it a natural setting for an all-new game timed with the film debut. The Forgotten Sands takes place between Sands of Time and Warrior Within episodes. This Prince is valiantly attempting to save his brother's kingdom of Azad from a mystical army. When the decision is made to use the Sands to turn back the invasion, things go sideways. Everybody in the kingdom is turned into sand creatures. Now the Prince must find a way to undo the damage he has done. And stab a few sand monsters while doing so.
From the very beginning, Prince of Persia has elevated the art of visuals and storytelling in video games, centered on a dashing hero whose challenged and thrilled all comers. Different men may take up the mantel, but there will always be a Prince fighting the odds, the elements, and the clock to save his lady-love. And we'll always be there to enjoy the ride.
![Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time [GBA]](https://assets-prd.ignimgs.com/2022/10/03/popsands-1664824786521.jpg?width=114&crop=1%3A1%2Csmart&auto=webp)
