A nameless traveler scales the walls of a Persian palace just to catch a glimpse of the Sultan’s daughter, who is more beautiful than the new moon. A jealous vizier imprisons them both, one in the top tower and the other in the lowest dungeon. The traveler does not despair; the road to rescuing the princess is difficult and time is of the essence.

Most people think of time as a river that flows swiftly and surely in one direction, but this intrepid young adventurer has a very special relationship with time. He sees its face, he fights it, he uses it as a weapon against his enemies. This man fights the corruption of the gods, rearranges the threads of history on a whim, but finds that history is changing him too. There are always consequences for the careless traveler, and traps come in many forms. Time, this hero, this prince tells you, is a stormy sea, and he sails these dangerous waters with the grace of a dancer and the strength of his sword. The prince waits for no one.

His story is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before.

Once Upon a Time

When Doug Carlson finished writing his first computer game in 1979, he and his brother Gary founded a company focused solely on marketing the game. Broderbund is a German, Swedish, and Danish-inspired word that roughly translates to “Bruderbund.” The first game in the Galaxy Saga, Galactic Empire, gave players 999 years to conquer the known universe. It took Broderbund just a decade to gain market share with its strong series Choplifter and Where’s Carmen Sandiego?. Although half-hearted attempts to expand the company failed, the Carlsons continued to search for new products to boost their profile.

They found what they were looking for in Karateka, a surprisingly advanced bachelor’s project by Yale student Jordan Mechner.

Mechner studied psychology and loved animation as a child, but he never got good enough at drawing to make his own cartoons. Instead, he turned to computers. His big idea was to give equal importance to graphics and gameplay, with some priority given to animating the movements of human avatars. Most other game designers limited themselves to spaceships and weirdly stationary creatures and put less effort into animation… after all, they didn’t make cartoons. That was Mechner.

Karateka sent players on karate missions across feudal Japan to save Princess Mariko from the evil warlord Akuma and his pesky eagles. It was beautiful for a side-scrolling game in 1984, featuring fluid sequences of character movement. There were plenty of running scenes, which were strangely charming. Combatants bowed before punching each other in the face. Karateka also featured an early regenerative medicine system, but it didn’t really take off until nearly 20 years after its release on the Apple II.

Karateka was a huge success for Broderbund, selling half a million copies. They wanted another game for Mechner, and he began thinking about a location. He believed part of Karateka’s success was due to its exotic Asian setting…ironically, even Asian-produced games are rare in the United States. He eventually settled on the fantastical Middle Eastern world of The Thousand and One Nights. To this framework, Mechner added game mechanics from two games he recently enjoyed: Lode Runner by Brøderbund and The Castles of Dr. Creeping. The new protagonist, the Prince, must use the energy of the Doctor to navigate a labyrinth full of puzzles and traps. So does Henry Jones Jr. The opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which Indiana Jones, an archaeologist and wealth warrior, is half a step ahead of dangerous booby traps and slowly closing gates, was also a major influence.

Mechner wanted to extend that eight-minute thrill to the entire game. To increase the tension, he put players under time pressure. Everything should happen in real time.

Prince relied heavily on acrobatics to survive, requiring a much more extensive set of moves than the one-on-one combat of a karateka. The game proved that good graphics could attract and sustain attention in a crowded games market, so the question became how to improve Karateka’s look. Rotoscoping was the answer. Mechner cast her brother David (based largely on David’s willingness to work for free) and filmed him running and jumping around in baggy white pants, then traced and scanned the frames into the computer. Her father Francis wrote the Persian music.

Prince of Persia was released on the Apple II in 1989 and was an immediate success.

It didn’t seem so complicated at first. Jafar, an evil vizier with a mixture of carnal desires and political ambition, locked a beautiful princess in a high tower and gave her one hour to marry or die. Instead of choosing an annulment, the princess leaned towards option B. Her only hope was the prince (no relation), her common-law lover, whom Jafar left to rot in the dungeons. After a hasty escape, the prince raced up the tower in time to meet the deadline.

And the only way to do it was to run. Players had just 60 minutes to reach the top and defeat Jafar, with plenty of pressure plates along the way. Guards were dueled in a patient series of retreats, advances, hits and parries. If you were impaled by a spike trap, sliced ​​by a skeleton warrior, or if part of the ground below you gave way, the game would send you back to the start of the level as the clock continued to tick. Losing time exacerbated issues like lost souls, and the Prince’s health was reduced to nearly zero. To make matters worse, this “Shadow Prince” played on the other team, harassing you at every opportunity. A real sense of danger permeated every moment, bolstered by seamless animations and rudimentary physics that gave the Prince some real weight. It always felt like he was on the verge of being killed. And often enough, he was. This made his escapes all the more exciting.

Prince of Persia started with players feeling the pressure, and it just ramped up the pressure from there. Then Mechner added an unexpected twist. Killing the Shadow in a duel killed the Prince, but simply walking over and the two grew together again. Reaching Ja’far required a “leap of faith” across a bottomless abyss. It asked players to think about their actions in a way that few other games did, but simply taking the time to stop and think would waste the precious few minutes they had left. It was wonderfully evocative.

Mechner and Brøderbund won numerous awards and accolades, were praised for setting new standards in game mechanics and graphics, and, whether intentionally or not, a significant number of their ideas and images were soon featured in POP for Disney’s 1993 smash hit Aladdin Speedrunning became a major obsession in the gaming world. Others spent years trying to unravel his mysteries.

Prince of Persia stood out in a year that also saw the release of Arkanoid, MechWarrior, SimCity, and Super Mario Land. A game this good, original, and successful seemed destined to have a sequel.

Royal Pain

Instead, Mechner enrolled in film school at New York University. While Broderband was porting POP to every conceivable platform, he traveled to Havana to make Waiting for Dark, an award-winning short documentary about everyday life in Cuba under Castro. When the pair reunited for the Persian sequel, four years had passed.

It had lasted less than two weeks for the prince. He’d married the princess and become heir to the Sultan’s kingdom, and Ja’far was back. Prince of Persia 2: Shadow and Fire begins with the former vizier using dark magic to disguise himself as the prince, thus accomplishing all of the goals of the first game in one fell swoop and revealing the true prince’s hidden identity. By illusion. Unbeknownst to the princess, the prince struggles to escape the palace, hopping aboard a ship just as it is leaving port. With Jafar’s magical help, he soon finds himself shipwrecked on a deserted island, abandoned except for a cave full of traps, a sword-wielding skeleton, and a very convenient flying carpet.

Of course, the player has a full 75 minutes to complete the remaining 11 levels and rescue the princess after she sees through Jafar’s deception at the top of level 4.

Mechner served primarily as creative consultant on POP 2, while Brian Ehler (producer on POP 1) and Sherman Dickman took over project management. Prince of Persia was so far ahead of its time that it didn’t need a major graphical update despite a four-year hiatus; other developers have only recently caught up. Instead, they added cutscenes and audio commentary, but left the basic idea unchanged, developing a new and completely evil set of puzzles. A vile example near the end required the player to ignore every instinct and let the prince die. Mechner, Eherer and Dickmann did the franchise justice, and sales of The Shadow and The Flame reflected that.

Now the Prince used his shadow self to control the blue flame and turn the unsuspecting Jafar to ash. But at the last moment it was revealed that the witch who had been helping Jafar from the beginning also had a deadly connection to the Prince’s mysterious past, setting up the story for the third Prince of Persia game.

That never happened. Mechner turned his energies to completing The Last Express, an acclaimed crime thriller set on the Orient Express, with branching gameplay and distinctive Art Nouveau-style cel-shaded graphics. Unfortunately, Broderbund’s marketing offensive fizzled due to internal problems, and a key port to PlayStation failed when a partner pulled out. It didn’t help that Express was a point-and-click mystery that was at its core. The entire industry was rapidly moving major franchises to exciting, interactive 3D. Broderbund lost $6 million in the crossfire.

After this turmoil, Mechner decided he wasn’t playing anymore. Then he got a call from Andrew Pederson of Red Orb Entertainment, the Broderbund subsidiary behind Riven. Pedersen asked Mechner what he thought of Prince of Persia in 3D.

It’s pretty good after all. While Pedersen was putting together a team of POP-loving 3D developers, Mechner came on board to work on the design and co-write the story that sends the prince back to the dungeon. The unresolved storyline surrounding the prince’s true parentage and the witch’s plan against the prince was discarded. Instead, Prince of Persia 3D begins with a family reunion between the Sultan and his brother Assan, which the prince attends. Assun showed his true colors by killing the prince’s bodyguards and imprisoning the prince. The Sultan had apparently promised the princess a marriage with Assun’s son, Lughnar, long before the prince’s arrival, but now Assun demanded a debt. Apart from a fairly close blood relationship, Lughnar also had other shortcomings. First, he was half man and half tiger. On the other hand, his behavior and violent tendencies leaned towards the tiger half. The prince set out to save his beloved wife from his unscrupulous cousin.

Pedersen and Mechner planned to mix familiar spike traps with new stealth elements and play out over 15 levels across seven environments. Rotoscoping was gone. Motion capture was in. Invisibility potions joined the old healing potions. No one suggested POP 3D was anything other than a big production value-add to a major franchise. “Team POP” set out to faithfully translate Prince of Persia into a 3D world, and they nearly succeeded. Broderbund ran out of time first.

Three years ago, Doug Carlson tried to buy educational game publisher The Learning Company. In 1998, the tide turned. The Learning Company bought Broderbund and began to carefully choose what to keep and what to throw away. Five hundred people, nearly half of Broderbund’s workforce, were laid off within the first month.

Fortunately, Mechner was well known at Mindscape, TLC’s games division. He had helped former Broderbund programmer and POP rotoscoper Robert Cook on D/Generation, a well-received isometric horror shooter released by Mindscape in 1991. POP, as a franchise, had essentially secured its own survival. Prince of Persia 3D was still in the works under the original development team, but now Prince’s production faced a tighter deadline than ever before. The game went gold in 1999, six years after The Shadow and The Flame, without any proper quality assurance testing.

Unsurprisingly, POP 3D became known for having more than its fair share of game-breaking bugs and glitches. Topping the list was poor camera control, which plagued players trying to perform simple movements in trap-filled caves, with brick walls sometimes blocking the Prince’s view. This fixed camera, placed directly behind the Prince, also bore an uncomfortably strong resemblance to Tomb Raider’s design, and was made worse by puzzles that involved pushing and pulling a series of blocks across a grid-based map. The tight controls that have been a hallmark of the series felt sluggish this time around. Critics praised the level design, graphics, story, and atmosphere. They knew that somewhere inside Prince of Persia 3D was a very good game, but a long list of problems obscured it too much. The game flopped badly, and TLC suffered a devastating financial blow.

That same year, Mattel bought The Learning Company, and disgruntled investors forced Mattel CEO Gilles Barad out. Her successor handed TLC over to a buyout company in 2001, giving them only a promised share of the proceeds from selling Albatross.

French publisher Ubisoft was immediately interested.

Sands through the Hourglass

While the POP catalog was owned by Ubisoft, the intellectual property rights for Prince of Persia belonged to its creator, Jordan Mechner. After two disastrous experiences in a row, Mechner had no desire for a third.

A producer working for a small Ubisoft subsidiary in Montreal publicly pointed out Prince of Persia, but no one seemed willing to do anything about it. A good portion of the Montreal team had been busy for a year programming Splinter Cell, their first high-profile project after years of subpar Playmobil and Donald Duck games, but Yannis Marat wasn’t on the team. His team had just delivered a Rayman port for the GBA, and now they were starting to brainstorm ideas on what to do if they got their hands on The Prince. The conversations turned out so interesting that Mallat secured the resources, did some motion capture, and created some test animations.

In May 2001, Mallat invited Mechner to see his AVIs. They were rough, hasty, and unfinished, depicting the prince running along a wall and jumping off to grab a ladder.

This struck Mechner as a great extension of the POP idea, opening up a whole new world of gaming possibilities. A deal was signed to license POP, Mallat’s team got the go-ahead from above, and Mechner agreed to advise. He was then hired to write the story and script. He then gave instructions to the voice actors in the studio. In the summer of 2003, Mechner gave up fighting the inevitable and moved with his family to Montreal to become a full-time designer. In November of that year, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was released for PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC.

The villainous Vizier still caused trouble and the Princess still needed to be rescued, but otherwise the Sands of Time cleared the air. Having successfully concluded a war in India against his father, the King, the brand new Prince plundered some lovely souvenirs: a fancy looking Dagger of Time and a giant, glowing hourglass. When the traitorous Vizier tricked the Prince into unlocking the hourglass with the dagger, the Prince unleashed the Sands of Time, instantly destroying the kingdom and turning nearly everyone in it, including the Prince’s father, into sand monsters. To undo the damage he’d caused and prevent the Vizier from becoming a god, the Prince willingly teamed up with the beautiful Princess Farah, daughter of the powerful Maharaja his army had just defeated.

This was the 3D Prince Charming everyone wanted. Fast and dynamic, full of acrobatic combat, clever puzzles, adventure and adventurous romance…Sands of Time blew everyone away. It looked great and played even better. Classic elements were removed and replaced with better features. The one enemy per screen limit was replaced with balletic multi-enemy brawls. The healing potion disappeared – Mekner figured the thirsty guards would drink it all anyway – but any source of water would heal the Prince. Instead of racing against time, the Prince used it to his advantage. Powered by retrieving sand, the “Dagger of Time” allowed him to turn back the clock ten seconds, stop time, speed up or slow down, and destroy monsters. This brilliant mechanic changed the entire game, and the level design complemented it perfectly.

The Sands of Time was named Game of the Year by multiple sources and won eight DICE Awards. Sales were solid, but it fell short of the blockbuster Ubisoft had hoped for as one of the PS2’s highest-rated titles. But it was enough to warrant a sequel.

The Dark Side

Marat had an idea. His biggest gripe with Sands was that using the dagger to undo past events essentially freed the Prince from the harm he had caused. Even Farah’s death (the result of the Prince’s misplaced suspicions) was neatly undone, though it erased their relationship from the timeline. The Prince would never get off so lightly again.

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was released a year later, and using the same optimized Jade engine as Sands of Time, it had the shortest latency between POPs ever. Seven years later, the Prince was on the run from the Dahaka. The Dahaka guards murdered him and tried to undo all the timelines he had distorted. Wanting to avoid this fate, the Prince hatched a plan to stop the existence of the Sands of Time by confronting the Empress of Time. Every step of his violent and selfish acts had innocent victims. Years of flight from the Dahaka had stripped him of his charming and adventurous spirit, turning him into a single-minded, rugged, aggressive and tormented character. The entire game reflected that attitude.

Platform gameplay remained largely the same. The focus shifted to combat with a variety of new moves and abilities, as well as a lot of blood and Ninja Gaiden-style decapitation. Time manipulation was achieved via Pharah’s locket (a keepsake from a lover who didn’t remember her), and Sans’ tedious recovery of time sand was simplified. Heavy metal guitars blared over the soundtrack. Romance was replaced by sexed-up bitches in thongs. All of this led to the series’ first M rating.

Not everyone agreed with this dark turn of events. Mechner, who left the company to work on his own projects, openly admitted that he didn’t like the sordid side of things. He didn’t recognize the Prince, who would occasionally claim, “It would be an honor to die by my sword!” It wasn’t a success, but it did work for Empress Kaileena, who apparently met the Prince in the “true” ending, was killed, came back to life and returned home. Ubisoft argued that the change reflected both the story and the needs of the market, and that the numbers ultimately proved them right. Warrior Within didn’t receive nearly as much critical acclaim as Sands of Time, but sales did increase. Marat focused on closing the circle. Prince of Persia: Kindred Blade went straight into the critical phase without any pause in production.

A playable demo and trailer were shown at E3 2005, sending mixed signals. The game looked straightforward. The trailers introduced a story that maintained the dark tone of Warrior, with dire fates throughout, and Kaileena’s suicide at the forefront.

Mallat’s plan for the finale of the Sons of Time trilogy was to mash up the first two games, starting with the Prince himself, and they omitted the vocals and music from the much-maligned Warrior, returning to the audio set straight for Sons of Time. Dizzying acrobatics gave way to brutal one-hit stealth kills. The E3 trailer was much less dark. Everyone was shooting for the midfield, hoping to score. The Prince would finally stop cheating fate and instead face it head on and defeat it. After the name change, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones was released in December 2005.

Well rested and much better, the Prince and Kaileena returned home to the city of Babylon, only to find it engulfed in flames. Too late, the Prince realized that he had reversed the events of the Sands of Time, leaving the evil Vizier alive, still craving immortality. The Vizier instantly slew Kaileena, merging with her soul, and once again releasing the sands to ravage the city.

Again the Dagger of Time saved the Prince, but the sands infected the Prince with their corruption, splitting him into two personalities: the noble hero of “Sands” and the evil Prince of Darkness of “Warrior”. Shadow Princes from the original game. The dark side of the Prince’s personality reveled in violence, and he wielded a razor whip with a dagger tail embedded in his skin. The player has no control over his transformation into the Dark Prince, and unless he finds a water source to transform into in the past, corruption will kill him. The section of the game with the Dark Prince was pretty unpopular, as it offered no real advantage.

Meanwhile, Pharah and her bow are back in the picture, and her stunning visuals make her more beautiful than ever. The chariot racing sequence was a great addition, and the boss fight required more strategy than just pounding on keys.

Defeating the Vizier, who was transformed into a grotesque winged creature, freed Kaileena’s soul, but the game did not end. The Prince’s final battle was against himself, the Prince of Darkness, and all the anger, fear, greed, and pride that had brought him his seven-year ordeal. Farah helped him leave these aspects of himself behind before they consumed him completely, destroying the Prince of Darkness forever. Now free, the Prince and Farah began to rekindle their romance, telling their own story back to the beginning.

Thrones could never surpass Sands, but it did provide a solid and satisfying conclusion to the epic trilogy. And just like in a fairy tale, Marat finished the Prince’s chapter.

Now and Again

Since then, the Prince has been “happily ever after”. Mostly.

Battles of Prince of Persia, a turn-based strategy game depicting the events between the Sons and the Warriors, was released in the same month as Thrones for the DS, but quickly disappeared from the scene. Few believed that the Prince would wait for his chance. Rival Swords, an enhanced port of Two Thrones for the PSP, released in April 2007, performed slightly better. Even better, Gameloft S.A. remastered the original Prince of Persia game using character models from Sands of Time and released it on Xbox Live the following June, and on mobile devices soon after. Prince of Persia Classic received Jordan Mechner’s stamp of approval; it was different enough, he argued, that his old reflexes were a major hindrance.

But as early as 2006, leaked documents suggested that Ubisoft was planning to bring the prince out of retirement. News then surfaced that Mechner had purchased the domain Princeofpersiaprodigy.com, hinting at a new game. Yannis Marat, now CEO of Ubisoft Montreal, was also responsible for the 2007 action title Assassin’s Creed, and attentive gamers saw more than just a prince in the wild acrobatics of professional assassin Altair. In early 2008, screenshots and concept art appeared on the Internet and set pop culture ablaze. Their prince was back.

The simply titled Prince of Persia ran on the Scimitar engine, also used in Assassin’s Creed, and was released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in time for Christmas. One attitude. There are no countdowns, no spike traps, and no disruption to the space-time continuum: instead, an unnamed wanderer journeys through an open environment centered around a beautiful garden… or more specifically, the prison of Ahriman, the psychopathic god whose corruption is slowly seeping into the world.

The Prince’s job is to stop the spread of infection, but fighting back the corruption puts the issue in focus elsewhere. No matter what order the player tackles the levels, the difficulty increases as they progress. This Prince may not have access to temporal powers, but he is fully equipped with a clawed gauntlet, which adds a whole new list of moves to his repertoire, adding further dimension to the revamped combat system. From traps to fearsome soldiers, the corruption takes many forms, so he’ll need them all. The one-on-one battles are also reminiscent of the original game, allowing Ubisoft Montreal to equip opponents with powerful AI.

This chapter in the Prince of Persia chronicles was received with mixed feelings. Few could complain about the stunning graphic style, which perfectly showcased the Prince’s acrobatics and created an epic fantasy world. But certain design decisions fell foul of player expectations. The biggest was that the Prince couldn’t die. Even if he tried to jump off a wall and fall into a pit of pure corruption, Elika was there to pull him back at the last moment. Many said that this took away the challenge from Prince of Persia, but some would argue that Prince of Persia’s frequent saves encouraged players to try out more of the Prince’s wide repertoire of moves, rather than just handing him a random death every few minutes as a teaching tool.

Ubisoft has yet to announce a sequel to this new chapter in the Prince of Persia series (and if they do, hopefully the Prince won’t be such a pauper. Why is he actually acting so Westernized?), so instead they’ve jumped to the Sands of Time trilogy for the latest installment in the Prince’s legendary adventures.

The Prince Goes Hollywood

Fans of the Prince of Persia series have been hoping for a film adaptation for years, but Hollywood’s checkered (and mostly unsuccessful) track record with the game series has certainly tempered those expectations. Could filmmakers pull it off? A film adaptation of the

games was first announced in 2004. Development of the planned film was fueled by meetings between Disney, Pirates of the Caribbean producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and Mechner. Mechner painstakingly put together a video, selecting select footage from the Sands of Time game and conveying his vision for the film’s tone. Done. The project was greenlit and began to take shape in earnest in May 2008 with the casting of Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Atheron in the lead roles of Dustan and Tamina.

Gyllenhaal, known for his work in Donnie Darko and Brokeback Mountain, seems to really know his craft. “I played more of this game when I was really younger. I know the whole story of this game,” he said. “When I started researching material for the role, I looked it up online, because what was really important to me personally was not to bring some realism to a world that’s not necessarily entirely based in reality. A lot of times it’s very easy to get lost in that stuff. To find out what the real Prince of Persia looks like and who the Prince of Persia is in the video game.”

Bruckheimer and the studio have a charismatic director with the blockbuster skills of Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet), who brought the film to shore (Fire). The cast worked on location in Morocco and at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England, over the course of more than 100 days of production.

IGN Movies visited the set on the 57th day of shooting, and what we saw there was impressive. Sets filled Pinewood’s legendary 007 soundstage and nearly every stage around it. PoP was one of the largest productions ever staged in the UK. The fictional ancient city of Alamut was meticulously recreated, with each stage filled with tons of sand, hundreds of extras, dozens of horses and even donkeys. But the production wasn’t limited to the UK, with filming also taking place in the Moroccan cities of Marrakech, Ouarzazate and Erfoud, at altitudes of up to 2,700 metres in the scorching heat.

Newell worked from a script by Doug Milo, Carlo Bernard, Boaz Yakin and game developer Mechner. Mechner seems to know where to draw the line when it comes to faithfulness to the original. On the differences between the game and the film, he said: “There are no sand monsters in the film. Turning everyone in the world into sand monsters was very beneficial for the game because it would create an inexhaustible supply of enemies. But this is a story that is meant to be played with a controller in your hands, and the film is meant to be shared with an audience.” So I didn’t want to make a movie about fighting monsters.

“The film is largely based on the game Sands of the Time,” Mechner continues, “but I approached Jerry in 2004 about making a story that, rather than retelling the game word for word, would combine the characters and elements to make a great film. If you’ve played the game, you won’t know what happens in the film. It’s a different story.” But you’ll recognize the characters and the situations. I think it’s very much in keeping with the spirit of the game” to make his own ascension clear. If you think he sounds a lot like the Vizier, the main villain from the Sands of Time game, you’d be right. As Mechner says, while not a direct adaptation, the film is clearly inspired by the game of the same name.

A good action-adventure needs a beautiful leading actress, right? Gemma Atheron, who played Bond girl Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace, is more than up to the task in Prince of Persia. “It’s a really action-packed role,” Atheron says of her character. “But she’s a high priestess, so she’s not your typical heroine with a weapon. She’s very spiritual, so it’s interesting to have someone who’s action-packed but also has religious beliefs.” “He’s an interesting character.”

If The Sons of Time is as successful as Disney hopes, we can expect numerous sequels in the coming years.

Just as the Prince’s film hits the big screen, Ubisoft’s latest film is coming to consoles. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands returns to the last generation trilogy that began with The Sands of Time. The film is set in this world, making it a natural backdrop for a new game that will be released at the same time as the film’s release. The Forgotten Sands takes place between the episodes “The Sands of Time” and “The Warrior Within,” in which the prince heroically attempts to save his brother Azad’s kingdom from a mysterious army. When he decides to use sand to repel the invasion, things get out of hand: everyone in the kingdom is transformed into sand creatures. Now the prince must find a way to repair the damage he caused — and stab a few sand monsters in the process. From the get-go,

Prince of Persia has taken the art of video game graphics and storytelling to a new level, centered around a dashing hero who will challenge and delight everyone. Other men may take the throne, but there will always be a prince who will fight all odds, elements and time to save his loved ones, and we will always be there, enjoying the ride.