If you ask them now, plenty of people say they saw it coming. At the time, most weren’t so prescient – their memory of the game being rewritten by nostalgia as surely as the prince rewrote his past. They were the lucky ones, for the moment of realisation waiting for them at the end of the game was like the finest unlockable ever imagined. For most of your adventure, your only companion – the only other human creature – is Farah, the princess of the kingdom your father’s army has ransacked. She is haughty and suspicious, and the prince responds in kind, taunting her with an archness that seems rather overdone: “Skinny little thing, aren’t you,” he jibes, as she wriggles through yet another crack. Their trials bring them together, of course, though not without mishap and mistrust. Eventually, they consummate their attraction in a sumptuous bathhouse, choked with steam and scent. They are threatened, rescued, separated, reunited. And then Farah dies. The prince, who has used his control over time to rewind himself from countless gruesome deaths, stands helpless over her crumpled corpse.



The Prince Of Persia series has always done flesh and bone very well. The excellence of the animation, the fluidity of the motion makes its characters human in a way few games achieve. In TSOT, this physicality extends to give Farah and the prince a tangible sexuality. You may have seen nothing more than a hint, but the game has made it plain that these are people who have loved each other, emotionally and physically. Now one lies dead at the feet of the other. But the prince is a hero, and a greater wrong must be righted than the death of his lover. And so the prince, battered and bereaved, stabs his dagger into the cold heart of the sands and in a moment, everything that is, wasn’t.

Scenes from his adventure flash before you as you rewind to the beginning, but this full circle doesn’t signal an ending. The evil vizier must be executed, the Dagger of Time protected. And so the prince sets off to find Farah and warn her. As he enters her bedchamber, he finds the woman he last saw dead alive, safe, asleep. But as she opens her eyes, you remember that she will not know him. “You may wonder who I am,” says the prince, softly. “Sit down, and I will tell you a tale.” As he says these words, your mind races back to every nuance of the story your actions have helped to tell. The teasing words which sounded so overdone all those hours ago take on a subtle charm when you realise they are being recounted direct to an indignant, uncomprehending Farah. The moments of intimacy become even more charged when you know that he’s describing every touch to a woman who can’t understand why this stranger seems to know her inside out. It’s a beautiful and elegant trick. This reversal is what makes you want to do some time travelling of your own, rewinding to the start of the game so you can hear the tale again, only this time with Farah’s ears instead of your own. The words won’t change, and nor will your actions. The palace grounds will remain the same and identical traps will hiss down identical corridors, but the story will change because you have changed.

But the tale of Farah and the prince, however bewitching, isn’t the real story of TSOT. The real story has the same shape – an extraordinary adventure that nearly changed the world, but in the end left us back where we started – but it isn’t about fictional characters. The real story is that TSOT should have changed the way games are made forever, and it hasn’t. When it arrived, it felt like a revolution. By resuscitating a stagnant genre – the 3D platformer – it formed a blueprint for how to build a future for games on the very best foundations of the last 25 years, of how to streamline and modernise everything that’s precious in gaming’s heritage. And yet, now, time seems to have reset. Now, it seems unlikely to have the influence it deserves, and the proof of that is evident in its sequel, Warrior Within.



Warrior Within preserves the movement which is the core component of TSOT’s excellence. Even now, it’s still extraordinary. Graceful, muscular, precise and forgiving, it revolutionised expectations of how liberating a 3D space could be. The whole game became a giant climbing frame, a big-top extravaganza where you got to be the star turn and the enraptured audience rolled into one. With this key feature maintained, it was fundamentally impossible for Warrior Within to be a bad game. But in almost every other respect, it turned back the clock TSOT had pushed forward. The Sands Of Time is an astonishingly simple game, lean and economical. A ten-hour trip, it pulled the player along a single line. Close your eyes and you can see your path through the whole game as one continuous, golden thread – looping out of windows and across courtyards, down wells and twining around traps. At a time when most games are fighting to boast about their replayability, branching narratives and ample unlockables, TSOT said simply: here is the game. Begin at the beginning. Fight to the end. And then you will have seen everything we have to give you, everything you paid for.

The mechanics are equally stripped down. You are a prince with a sword, and you move through a world of water and sand. Water is life and sand is death, and you’ll need both to survive. There is nothing to collect, no complex armoury to complete. The rigour of the logic behind the system gives the game a cohesion which is noticeably lacking in Warrior Within. In TSOT, your enemies are infected with the Sands of Time, which it is your goal to recover. Killing them lets you collect the sand, and the more you collect, the more powerful the dagger becomes. WW takes the same system and twists it, losing its simplicity. Time powers mysteriously become available as you travel through the palace’s portals. Enemies contain sand which you can still collect, despite no longer having a dagger to do it with. The same sand has conveniently accumulated in jars and barrels which dot the palace, forcing you into the Neanderthal game behaviour that TSOT had left behind – ‘me need, me smash’. Bonus chests dot the audience chambers and vaulted dungeons, ready to bark out ‘New Artwork Unlocked!’ in the event of you ever becoming sufficiently absorbed to forget you were playing
a videogame.