Prince of Persia – Dreams of Speedrunning

Some time ago, I started following Jordan Mechner (creator of the original Prince of Persia games) in Twitter. I think that’s how I found out about his amazing book, Replay, which I already made an unboxing video about some time ago.

Well, some weeks ago he decided to organize a speedrunning contest powered by TwinGalaxies, to promote this same book; the top 3 spots competed for a signed version of the book, while the top 20 would get steam keys for the amazing “The Making of Karateka”, which I will be covering soon.

It had been over 20 years since I last played Prince of Persia, but I felt like I just couldn’t ignore this challenge coming from the creator of the game himself. So I jumped into it. My hope was that not too many people would hear about the challenge, especially not many hardcore speed-runners, so if I managed to just make a normal time… maaaaybe I could sneak into the top 20?

I started with princejs.com, an open source web-playable version of game. It’s actually a complete recreation of the DOS game made in JavaScript with phaser, reverse-engineered and with a lot of systems just replicated by hand (like combat!); the version that is deployed there is a fork of the original port.

It was one of the ways suggested in the challenge page to participate; however, as I would later find out, it’s far from being an accurate 1:1 port of the DOS version… many things work differently, movement and combat feel faster, and there are still many bugs here and there. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a COOL project, great for someone who would want to experience the game quickly (and it even supports loading fan-made levels!), but the more I got into it the more I wondered why it was allowed as an option to compete. I even managed to complete a run in princejs.com, but I didn’t get a score!

(In any case, nobody used princejs.com in the end; the contest page was later updated saying you could use it but you’d have to track your time manually? Afterwards I felt curious if I could get a better time that way (you can also skip the time between levels!) but after some attempts it just didn’t work with combat being so different (and seemingly skipping battles being harder)).

So, I jumped back into the original DOS version of game, and even got to install LiveSplit, a tool used to keep track of your time, split by stages. It was very useful to know when a run was ruined already, and to overall keep track of my progress.

Anyways, it was some weeks of getting a bit better at it, and obsessing a little bit too much about it. I went from failing around level 8, to failing on level 11, failing on level 12, scoring 8:06, scoring 6:27, scoring 23:17, scoring 30:48 and having a lot of many promising runs failing by some stupid mistake. In the background of all this efforts was my daughter, watching my nightly runs in this weird looking old game.

In the end, I managed to submit a run with a score of 35:17, which placed me at #11 in the leaderboard. It was less than perfect, especially in the first levels, but it was the best I could put together. I was also a bit depressed when I made this run, because the Colombia soccer team had just lost the final match vs. Argentina in Copa America.

It was a great time remembering this classic from childhood, a little surprise project heavily inspired by this experience is coming soon!