“My rule is that the player needs to have a clear goal – a desire – at every moment. The goal can be as simple as ‘get to the right edge of the screen’ and it can keep changing throughout the level – it can turn out to be a mistaken goal – but you must always have one,” states Mechner.

“This sounds self-evident, but I didn’t realise how fundamental it was until quite late in the game’s development. Once I did, I tore down all the levels I’d built and rebuilt them from scratch. It’s a basic principle of screenwriting – a story doesn’t move until a character wants something. A game doesn’t move until the player wants something.
You can have the most spectacular action, but if you’re not able to interpret it in terms of how it’s moving you relative to your goal, then the boredom clock starts ticking away. It’s amazing how many games don’t do this, even today.”

Prince Of Persia took three years to develop, an eternity by the standards of the era. But by 1989 the Apple II market was on the wane, and despite positive reviews sales were limited. Surprisingly, the subsequent MS-DOS version on PC was also a failure. But although neither of Mechner’s versions were hits, the game finally found its audience on the Mac and the burgeoning console market.

The console versions were produced by a variety of different companies, with the foreign and console rights going to the likes of Konami, Sega, Nintendo, Bandai, Domark and Hudson Soft. “In 1991 or ’92, these versions started to hit,” remembers Mechner, “and suddenly the Brøderbund accounting people were coming in with strange looks on their faces because we were getting royalty cheques for hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies they’d never heard of. Prince Of Persia sold two million copies and most of that was the console versions.”