Taking place in medieval Persia, players control an unnamed protagonist who must venture through a series of dungeons to defeat the evil Grand Vizier Jaffar and save an imprisoned princess.

For this process, Mechner used as reference for the characters' movements videos of his brother doing acrobatic stunts in white clothes[4] and swashbuckler films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood.

The game was critically acclaimed and, while not an immediate commercial success, sold many copies as it was ported to a wide range of platforms after the original Apple II release.

Each time the protagonist is damaged (cut by sword, fallen from two floors of heights, or hit by a falling rock), the player loses one of these indicators.

Subsequently, the game is restarted from the beginning of the stage in which the protagonist died but the timer will not reset to that point, effectively constituting a time penalty.

A unique trap encountered in stage four, which serves as a plot device, is a magic mirror, whose appearance is followed by an ominous leitmotif.

Creep and Lode Runner,[7] literature such as the Arabian Nights stories,[8] and films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark[9] and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

I did my VHS/one-hour-photo rotoscope procedure, spread two-dozen snapshots out on the floor of the office and spent days poring over them trying to figure out what exactly was going on in that duel, how to conceptualise it into a repeatable pattern.

To create the protagonist's platforming motions, Mechner traced video footage of his younger brother running and jumping in white clothes.

[12] To create the game's sword fighting sprites, Mechner rotoscoped the final duel scene between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

"[13] Also unusual was the method of combat: protagonist and enemies fought with swords, not projectile weapons, as was the case in most contemporary games.

Mechner has said that when he started programming, the first ten minutes of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark had been one of the main inspirations for the character's acrobatic responses in a dangerous environment.

[15] However, due to finding the gameplay to be dull and after incessant demand from Tomi Pierce, a colleague of his, Mechner added sword fighting to the game and created Shadow Man, the Prince's doppelgänger.

[16] Mechner was offended by the cover art for the Sega Genesis version, which depicts the prince as a Luke Skywalker lookalike about to cut down a helpless black guard, but by the time he made his objections it was already being printed.

[15] For the Japanese computer ports, Arsys Software[17] and Riverhillsoft[3] enhanced the visuals and redesigned the Prince's appearance, introducing the classic turban and vest look.

Prince of Persia received a positive critical reception, but was initially a commercial failure in North America, where it had sold only 7,000 units each on the Apple II and IBM PC by July 1990.

It was then ported to various different home computers and video game consoles, eventually selling 2 million units worldwide by the time its sequel Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1993) was in production.

[62] Reviewing the Genesis version, GamePro praised the "extremely fluid" animation of the player character and commented that the controls are difficult to master but nonetheless very effective.

[67] Prince of Persia influenced cinematic platformers such as Another World and Flashback as well as action-adventure games such as Tomb Raider,[3] which used a similar control scheme.

The remake, titled Prince of Persia Classic, was released on June 13, 2007, to the Xbox Live Arcade, and on October 23, 2008, on the PlayStation Network.

[72] Reverse engineering efforts by fans of the original game have resulted in detailed documentation of the file formats of the MS-DOS version.

[75] In April 2012, Jordan Mechner established a GitHub repository[76] containing the long-thought-lost[77] original Apple II source code for Prince of Persia.