Prince of Persia clone

SDLPoP

Prince of Persia is one of the best 2D platform and adventure games of all time. Originally released in 1989 at the end of the 8-bit era and developed by Jordan Mechner on an Apple II, the game was remarkable for several reasons. The first was its realistic character animation. The sideways animations for the main character and his various enemies were all drawn by hand from actual video footage of Jordan Mechner running, jumping, and sword fighting. This gave the game an uncanny realism that was only matched when motion capture became prevalent many years later. Another reason the game was so compelling was its game play. You start in a palace dungeon with only 60 minutes to escape and save the heroine. Through countless hours of play testing, the game difficulty and playability was fine-tuned perfectly, making the quest not too difficult but not too easy either. The gaps between platforms were perfectly placed, as were the enemies and challenges in finding your way out. There was just enough variety and challenge to keep you hooked, as many of us were.

While the original game has never been released as open source, and the franchise continues on modern hardware, the hand-assembled original has now been decompiled and the resultant code rebuilt using SDL, creating SDLPoP. It's a perfect recreation of the original game, including the graphics, sound, music, and immortal gameplay. Even now, with the game more than 30 years old and modern games bundling ray tracing, AI, and hundreds of simultaneous online players, Prince of Persia is a lot of fun to play. This version also includes cheats (skip level, room navigation, kill and resurrection keys, and slow falling), mod support, and the ability to record video replay videos and save games, which also make it more accessible to a younger generation – or perhaps to those of us without the same wits and agility of our youth.

Project Website

https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP

Prince of Persia has some great sword fighting sequences, modeled on Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood.