The game’s plot and setting were also inspired by cinema, in particular the British 1940 version of The Thief of Baghdad. But apart from a small number of silent-movie-style title cards the game’s entire plot is communicated only through the player’s actions and some brief in-game cutscenes.

“What makes it live and breathe, what makes the world specific, are the details,” insists Mechner. “The characters’ personality is expressed through action, through the way they’re animated, the gameplay and the way the levels are laid out. When you actually play the game, you find out the story has twists and turns and lots of characters – the guards, the shadow prince, the white mouse – but it’s a story you play, not a story that’s told to you. And that was something new in videogames.”

For the game’s swordfighting, Mechner turned to the classic final duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in 1938’s The Adventures Of Robin Hood. “For a few seconds, the camera angle has them in exact profile. This was a godsend. I did my VHS/one-hour-photo rotoscope procedure, spread two-dozen snapshots out on the floor of the office and spent days poring over them trying to figure out what exactly was going on in that duel, how to conceptualise it into a repeatable pattern.”

Originally, however, there were no plans for any combat in the game, in part because of concerns about a lack of memory to store the extra animation frames, but also because Mechner wanted the Prince to be entirely nonviolent.

“The trouble was, the game wasn’t much fun. My friend Tomi, every time she saw it, said the same thing: ‘Combat, combat, combat!’ After two years of resisting, I gave in to the inevitable and figured out a way to squeeze swordfighting in. And, of course, it made the game.”

Although the animation, storytelling and design of the puzzles and levels were all well ahead of their time, playing the game today the most striking element is how forward-thinking it is in terms of difficultly level. In an era when merciless punishment and rote learning were still rife, Prince Of Persia was hugely progressive in its demands on the player. Even the ostensibly restrictive realtime limit of a single hour proves essential to maintaining pace and forward momentum – while leaving most players with more than enough time to beat the game.