June 11, 2026
Parkour, piracy, and pure nostalgia
How we made hit video game Prince of Persia
The game was built with a camcorder, family help, and fans still losing their minds
TLDR: Jordan Mechner revealed he made Prince of Persia by filming his brother and painstakingly copying the moves by hand, helping create one of gaming’s most influential adventures. Fans responded with intense nostalgia, wild family piracy stories, and even a side debate over whether his earlier game Karateka deserves more love.
Before motion capture was a Hollywood buzzword, Jordan Mechner was literally filming his brother in a parking lot, then tracing those moves by hand to create Prince of Persia. That scrappy origin story already sounds like a movie, but the real fireworks are in the community reaction: gamers are treating this like a sacred text from a lost age when one obsessive creator, a floppy disk, and pure stubbornness could change gaming forever.
The strongest mood in the comments is full-on nostalgia worship. One person says just hearing the title makes the old background music start playing in their head, complete with clanking gates and footsteps from the tiny built-in speaker. Another calls the game “perfect from every angle,” which is basically the comment-section version of throwing roses on stage. There’s also a sweet mini-campaign for Mechner’s journals, with one fan bluntly declaring them a must-buy for anyone who grew up in the 90s.
But the thread also veers delightfully chaotic. One commenter casually drops that their grandparents were part of an “intercontinental floppy disk piracy ring,” which sounds less like family trivia and more like the plot of a crime comedy. Another shifts the spotlight to Karateka, Mechner’s earlier game, insisting it deserves even more love. So yes, the article is about how a classic was made with almost no tools and very little memory. But the comments? They’re a rowdy reunion of fans arguing over which masterpiece hit hardest, swapping childhood memories, and proving this game still lives rent-free in people’s heads decades later.
Key Points
- •Jordan Mechner began developing *Prince of Persia* in 1985 after the success of *Karateka*, drawing inspiration from *The Castles of Dr Creep* and *Raiders of the Lost Ark*.
- •Because no animation software was available, Mechner manually created character animation by filming his brother David and converting the footage into digitised frames.
- •Apple II memory constraints forced Mechner to use byte-shifting to create the Shadowman and later rework the game to add sword combat and extra guards.
- •*Prince of Persia* was released in 1989 as the Apple II platform declined, but success on other platforms in Europe and Japan led to a PC rerelease in the US and stronger sales.
- •Mechner says the game established an action-adventure template that influenced later titles such as *Tomb Raider* and *Uncharted*, and the franchise later extended to *The Sands of Time* film adaptation.