Prince of Persia BTS Video Reveals Why Its Animations Are So Realistic
A look into how the realistic animation style of the original Prince of Persia was revealed on Reddit. The first Prince of Persia was published in 1989 by Broderbund. It is a fantasy-themed cinematic platformer game where an unnamed protagonist, a trait which has stayed throughout the entire series, rescues a princess from an evil Vizier. The series has since gone through some reboots, and become much more action-based since, but it's stayed true to its original fantasy-themed setting.
Cinematic platformers are a subgenre which, as the name implies, feature more realistic and cinematic action than comparable games like Super Mario. The 1989 Prince of Persia is sometimes considered to be the first of this genre, later inspiring the animation styles of games like Another World, Flashback, Heart of Darkness, Abe's Exodus, and Weird Dreams. As technology and animation techniques have advanced over, the term's usage has died down, but Prince of Persia made itself memorable by being the one of the first games to have such a realistic animation style.
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A video dropped on Reddit, giving a behind-the-scenes look at how the animation in Prince of Persia achieved its cinematic and realistic look. As Reddit user MulciberTenebras posted, "Designer Jordan Mechner used rotoscoping to animate the movements of the game's characters, tracing video footage of his younger brother running and jumping". Rotoscoping is an animation technique where animators draw over video footage of real people to capture more realistic feeling movement. The technique has been used in other cinematic platformer games like Eric Chahi's Another World,and movies like Ralph Bakshi's Lord of
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