It's the 25th anniversary of the release of Prince of Persia! Which is a fact I hadn't actually realized until this afternoon - I’d had this video in the works for a month or so and it was just an amazing coincidence that it was ready to go up today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrxk_VaSm6E&hd=1

Since I was about seven years old I've been a massive fan of Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia. It's an excellent, carefully-made game which invented the "cinematic platformer" sub-genre, and was notable for featuring a character who actually looked and moved like a human being - a mundane thing in a game today, and so it's difficult to express just how outstanding this was at the time.

As it was released as the 8-bit era was ending and the 16-bit one was beginning, it was feverishly ported to just about every console in existence by very disparate teams, and this video examines the success or otherwise of each interpretation of the game.

Sit back and explore with me... this is a good one!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruw81L7aXCs

In tribute to the great people at AGDQ this year, here is the only game that I've ever made an attempt at speedrunning - it's Prince of Persia on the PC. I used to play this all the time a few years ago, trying to take seconds off my time... but I hadn't played it since 2006 and a whole plethora of new techniques have been discovered since then, making my time look unimpressive in comparison. So to do something a little different, here I attempt to get to the game's end in the practice mode, which reduces your timer to 15 minutes so that - theoretically - you can't complete the game.

This is without a doubt the most exhausting video I have ever produced.