March 11, 1991
Prince 2 doesn't have to be groundbreaking. It just has to be acceptable, and get done on time. If I aim too high, it could easily suck up another year of my life, and my development as a screenwriter/filmmaker/human being would be the only casualty. I’ve got to remember that, and resist my tendency to expand it into some grandiose, technically ambitious folly.
What everybody expects is Prince 1 in new clothes, with a flashy front end and a few new twists. That’s what the job calls for. That’s what I should deliver.

So you thought the Prince and Princess would live happily ever after, right? Well, the Vizier pulls some nasty tricks by disguising himself as the hero, and attempts to take command of the country by tossing him in the dungeon. Not willing to sit down and let himself capture like he did last time, he grabs a sword, jumps out the nearest window and begins his quest to uncover the Vizier's scheme, again. The story is told through still cutscenes and full voiceover, which was pretty impressive for a floppy based game. There are even some impressively animated sections where the Prince rides his magic carpet through the skies or brings a horse statue to life.

While the first game had for the most part been a 1-man production, Prince of Persia 2 was scheduled as the highest budgeted title Brøderbund had ever done by then, with a complete team of programmers and artists assigned to the project. Jordan Mechner still delivered the design bible and was involved in the level design, but his involvement during the later development stages had been rather sporadic:

June 28, 1992
Prince 2 is looking good. It feels cool, being the young game designer who lives in Paris and breezes into town for the week to look in on the project that’s going to keep him rich for a few more years. I like the nuts-and-bolts aspects of working on this project, too. I hate to admit it, but it’s more fun than 16mm student filmmaking.

Since the game now had a whole team of artists working on the backgrounds, you finally get to leave the dungeons in exchange for slightly more exotic locales. You begin the game running across the castle rooftops, only to escape on a barge and end up on a desert island. You trek through caves, ruins and the usual castles, at least giving a change of scenery, which was desperately lacking in the original. There's the occasional of background music to the game, which tends to get a bit repetitive, although the sound effects (especially the death screams and the splat sound effect) are priceless. One of the more amusing additions is that you can now actually control the shadow from the original game. The penalty is steep - you lose a lot of your life bottles, permanently - but you can trek around the levels without fear of being killed. The graphics are more infinitely detailed, there are more enemies, even a bigger variety of puzzles - it's everything a sequel should be.

Prince of Persia 2 (DOS)

Except for the fact that the inherent problems with the original game - the wonky controls - are still present. It can be even more frustrating than its predecessor, especially with the new enemies like the incredibly annoying snakes. It makes you wish they'd given it more than a cosmetic overhaul and maybe made it just a little less difficult. The time limit (75 minutes) doesn't start until about halfway through the game, but that doesn't make the constant play-die-restart cycle any easier to deal with.

By the time Prince of Persia 2 came out the IBM-PC had been established as the dominating computer platform, so there weren't nearly as many ports this time. The Macintosh version can run at a higher resolution, making it a look a bit nicer, but otherwise they're the same. In Japan the sequel at least made it onto the PC-98 and FM-Towns thanks to the completely unknown publisher Infoprog. They are the pixel-perfect equal of the DOS original, but feature CD audio and even Japanese voiced narration for the intro.

Oddly enough, the game was only released for one console. The Super Nintendo version by Titus came rather late, in 1996, and it's a very weird port. The game seems to run slightly faster than its computer counterparts, the time limit begins at the start of the game, and the music is just all kinds of messed up. There's no voices in the cutscenes, and some segments (such as riding the horse) are told through stills rather than the cool animated scenes from the original. Most of the coolest sound effects are entirely gone, too. Almost all of the graphics have been redrawn, and it's a mixed bag all around. The cave sections look much nicer, but the later castle stages are changed from the awesome blood red to a duller brick color, although the gore remains intact. And for some weird reason, the entire final level was excised entirely. Which is unfortunate, since the final stage is one of the coolest parts of the game, where Jaffar whizzes you to some messed up alternate dimension full of chess pieces, mirrors and (immobile) giant spiders.

A Genesis version had also been in the works, but it was canned for unknown reasons. Later a beta ROM has been leaked, which looks closer to the original than the SNES port, but has some hideous music.

Other than the first game, the version that can be unlocked in the Xbox version of The Sands of Time is based on the DOS version, which has been upscaled & filtered to once again fill about 50% of the screen. While the unlockable Prince of Persia only had passwords to restart at any given level, The Shadow & The Flame now supports save states and can thus be saved & loaded at all times, which make the game much easier.

When Prince of Persia finally became the hit Mechner had hoped for, his plans for the series became quite lofty. Before the second game was finished, he had cooked up plans for a third and a fourth one:

August 2, 1991
Spent the day studying Spanish verbs and working up a Prince 3 storyline. Yes, Prince 3 – I know I’m getting close to wrapping something up when I find myself thinking about the sequel. I’ve got some great ideas for Prince 3. The Princess and the mouse. It’ll be a milestone in computer gaming, a classic, a megahit. If only I ever get to do it.

Well, he didn't get to do it. Doom came out and first person shooters became the next big thing, sweeping 2D platformers for the PC under the Persian rug. Only when Tomb Raider came out in 1996, everyone made the keen observation that it felt just like Prince of Persia, but in 3D. So someone at Red Orb Entertainment, a former division of Brøderbund, decided to bring the series into the 3rd dimension, and failed miserably at it.

Somehow, the developers actually succeeded in taking the problematic aspects of the previous games and making them even more annoying. But at least the old games didn't require you to randomly run around brick hallways until you find what you're looking for, which gets especially annoying given the total infrequency of save points. The controls are even more terribly awkward - the Prince turns far too slowly, and the simple act of jumping feels uncomfortable, which is a terrible mark of doom for a game whose primary focus is platforming. Trying to pull yourself up on a ledge is likewise far more difficult than it should be, largely due to the camera that always hovers right behind your head. Finally, the fighting controls are actually worse than everything else. The Prince can string together attacks from three directions into combos and special moves, at least theoretically. In execution it's next to impossible to figure out the system, but it doesn't matter since button mashing is usually the best strategy, anyway. Devoid of any of the skill required in the 2D games, sword matches end up being poorly animated exercises in frustration with little depth, despite the large number of moves.

It's not like Prince of Persia 3D isn't full of interesting ideas, though. One can easily imagine how much fun it would be to explore the fantastic areas with their strange contraptions and inventive deathtraps with some decent controls. The good intentions are clearly visible when the Prince tiptoes like mad near a pit to avoid falling down—it only doesn't work that well. The prince gets a proper oriental-looking sword this time, and can also find a bunch of more exotic weapons during the course of the game. For the first time he also wields a bow and arrows. They are most useful for solving certain puzzles, although of course you can also take out guards from afar, especially when you've got magically enhanced arrows. Many of the elements that made the later games so great can already be found here, even the occasional cinematic panorama shot and some of the spectacrobatics, only much more awkward. It is also the first game in the series with a slightly more complex plot. The villain Assan this time around is actually the sultan's brother, who wants to force him to give up his daughter for marriage with Assan's son Rugnor (which the Sultan had actually promised him in the past) to support his power plays. The game is also genuinely funny, with a lot of slapstick cutscenes featuring the stupid guards.

The graphics are actually pretty good for a game from that time, and there's some impressive architecture later in the game. But the death scenes are lame—the Prince simply slumps to the ground when he should be cut in half—and the designers pile on annoyance after annoyance. If you can make it out of the prison without being thoroughly aggravated and quitting too see the more interesting parts of the game, bravo to you, but it doesn't get any less frustrating afterwards, either.

While it met with lukewarm reviews when it was initially released for the PC, it was published for the Dreamcast in 2000 by Mattel, who at the time owned the remains of Brøderbund. For some reason the game was renamed to Arabian Nights, with Prince of Persia remaining merely as a subtitle. The Dreamcast version als looks a bit better thanks to very atmospheric colored lighting, and even the platforming controls have been reworked and feel much more fluid. The Prince now also has an inventory and can store potions for later usage for the first time. Combat has been changed up as well, though not necessarily for the better. Especially when enemies are rapidly attacking at close range, it is barely controllable at all, anymore. Unfortunately, while the PC version let's you save at any time, the DC port sends you back much too far whenever you die, making the game even more frustrating than on the PC. There are also bits of changes in the level design here and there, but it's all in the details. Two levels, however, have been excised in their entirety, and good riddance. They were the most annoying pair of the bunch and would have been virtually unplayable with the limited saving system. (One of them is in all actuality unfinishable with an unpatched game. The patch, by the way, has the tendency to cause the game not to recognize the original CD, anymore.) It also isn't plagued by quite as many bugs as the PC version, but all things considered, the Arabian Nights version is still not a good game.

Shortly before Ubisoft should bring back the Prince in full swing, then budding mobile game developer Gameloft filled in the gap with a little sidestory in between. Prince of Persia: Harem Adventures imitates the gameplay of the original, but the setting is so much sillier. The ever-evil vizier has stolen the whole sultan's harem this time, either to blackmail the sultan into giving up his throne or to conduct "experiments in abstinence," depending upon which version is played.

In seven short stages, the prince is sent out to rescue the ladies, and is rewarded with supposedly sexy images of them. There's no time limit, instead the timer counts up to save the best clearing time. Given their small size, the levels make good use of the basic gameplay concepts, but they lack the higher finesse seen in the more difficult sections of the original with elements like timed switches, tactical use of falling plates and the like. They also contain the occasional reset point in case the prince should die, upon which he is turned into a cloud of dust: There's no blood in this game (enemies just fall out of the screen when slain). They botched the fighting, though, as the best method in any fight is just bashing the attack button as fast as possible. The initial guards are later replaced by ghosts, but it makes no difference other than their color.

As a mobile game, Harem Adventures' biggest problem of course are the controls. Besides having to deal with your phones keypad, there's no seperate button for cautious steps. A direction is shortly tapped instead of pressed, instead. Needless to say that this doesn't always work out for the player, especially not in difficult and exciting situations.