Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

• 1. Introduction

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  Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time reached stores in the autumn of 2003, and its central trick was a kind of mercy. Miss a jump, fall onto spikes, and the game lets the player take it back. The Prince carries a magic Dagger that can turn the clock backward, and the whole adventure is built around that one power. Ubisoft Montreal made it, and it arrived on five different platforms. Behind the polish was a story of discarded plots, a creator who had to be persuaded to return, and a launch that started slowly. Why would designers build a game around undoing mistakes? What did it take to finish it? And how did a game that sold quietly at first end up seeding an even bigger series?

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• 2. The Undo Button

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  Patrice Désilets, the game's director, got his idea for rewinding time from playing Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers. Each time he made a mistake there, he wished he could take it back instead of restarting the entire level. That wish survived the biggest crisis in the project and became one of four guiding ideas. The others were unity of time and place, with the whole story unfolding over twenty-four hours inside the palace of Azad, plus acrobatics and combat. Combat meant filling the palace with monsters so the pace stayed fast.

  Those four ideas came only after a restart. The first story draft had nine characters, including two love interests and two villains, each standing for a political faction. It was set in the Prince's own palace. The draft was too tangled to build around, so the team dropped it and went back to the title they already liked.

  The Dagger of Time and the Sands themselves exist because the rewind needed an explanation inside the fiction. At first the Dagger simply rewound time and finished off enemies. Its powers were added bit by bit until they reached the final list.

  The team made a deliberate choice about its models. Prince of Persia 3D would not be a reference at all, and the designers looked back to the 1989 original instead. They wanted to recapture the feeling of platforming through an adventure, now in three dimensions. For the Prince's stunts they borrowed from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Ladders in combat, a magic carpet and a horse were cut early.

  The team also spent a full day together playing Ico. Désilets said they admired "how the castle in Ico seems real and you always know where you are". Farah was shaped by the same game, with a twist. He did not want her to become "a key just like in Ico, a key to a door all the time".

  Art director Raphael Lacoste pointed to a different source for the palace, the animated film The King and the Mockingbird. That film takes place in a single castle whose floors are ranked by status, with a king at the top. It inspired the idea of a climb through levels built around height, all lit with blue-tinted lights and heavy set dressing.

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• 3. Walls, Blades and Sand

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  Wall-running is the Prince's signature move. He runs up onto a wall and along it for a set distance, either to land on a platform or to push off toward one. Around it sits a larger set of acrobatics. He climbs along ledges, walks beams, swings on poles and ropes, and leaps between pillars.

  Spike pits, arrow traps, wall-mounted blades and saws, and spinning spiked stakes fill the palace. The player watches from a controllable third-person view, with a camera that shifts when the Prince enters certain areas. Large puzzles spread across multiple areas of big rooms, and many of them need Farah's help.

  Combat uses two weapons, a sword and the Dagger of Time, each on its own button. The sword triggers different moves depending on position and direction. A somersault attack and wall bounces need extra commands. Once the sword has weakened a monster, only a stab from the Dagger can finish it, and the Dagger draws out the Sands inside.

  Those Sands feed the Prince's powers. The basic one is Rewind, which undoes up to ten seconds of a fatal slip, a beating from enemies, or the loss of Farah. Further powers slow time around him, freeze one enemy, or freeze everything so he can strike at great speed. Each use spends a Sand Tank, and the strongest abilities need Power Tanks.

  Health comes back from water in pools and fountains, and hidden magic fountains raise the maximum. Large columns of Sand give visions of areas ahead and act as save points. Farah, controlled by the computer, fires a bow. Her arrows can hit the Prince if he wanders into her line of fire, and her death ends the game.

  The Game Boy Advance version is a side-scroller in which Farah becomes a second playable character and switching between the two solves puzzles. Rescuing citizens from the Sands levels up the Prince, and Rewind still helps in bosses and puzzles. The mobile version, also a side-scroller, drops the Sand powers and has just three enemy types: archers, flying enemies and foot soldiers. Linking the GameCube and Game Boy Advance versions unlocked a port of the original Prince of Persia and automatic health regeneration.

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• 4. The Tale Within the Tale

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  The Prince narrates the story from Persia in the 9th century AD, speaking to a listener who stays unseen. His father Shahraman leads an army through India to visit the Sultan of Azad. A traitorous Vizier from a Maharaja's court wants to cheat death with the Sands of Time and tempts the army into attacking the Maharaja's palace, where the Sands are stored. The Prince loots the Dagger of Time, and the Maharaja's daughter Farah is taken as a gift for the Sultan.

  At Azad the Vizier tricks the Prince into releasing the Sands. Everyone becomes a monster except the Prince, the Vizier and Farah, each shielded by an artifact: the Dagger, a staff and a medallion. The Prince escapes the Vizier and reluctantly allies with Farah to undo the damage. He doubts her motives, and he keeps seeing visions of her stealing the Dagger.

  The two slowly fall in love. In a tomb beneath the city, Farah tells him a childhood story she has never shared. They then shelter in a bathhouse and spend the night together. The Prince wakes to find the Dagger gone and her medallion left behind. He catches her at a ledge above the hourglass, but she lets go of the Dagger and falls to her death to save him.

  The Vizier offers the grieving Prince eternal life in exchange for the Dagger. The Prince refuses and stabs the hourglass. Time rewinds to before the attack, and he runs ahead to warn Farah. The story has been a confession to her all along. After he kills the Vizier, he kisses her, but she has no memory of falling in love with him, so he rewinds the kiss. He then repeats a private word she spoke in the tomb, and she realises his tale was real.

  Jordan Mechner wrote the scenario and the script. He read a translation of the Shahnameh, the epic poem written by Ferdowsi between the 10th and 11th century. It helped him picture a more mature Prince than in the first game, though he felt the character kept some "happy-go-lucky" spirit from One Thousand and One Nights. Mechner later felt that unresolved tension gave the Prince his charm.

  Mechner described the plot as "a disguised zombie horror story", with two survivors trapped in a place where a plague has turned everyone else into the undead. The theme was second chances, with an unstated anti-war thread in the opening level. Some early scenes, such as the attack on the Maharaja's palace, were meant to feel morally dubious while still building sympathy for the Prince. The Dagger's acquisition was inspired by the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  The cast was small by design. Shahraman and the Sultan of Azad, once transformed, add weight to the Prince's burden. For the narration, Mechner drew on the 1940s The Thief of Bagdad, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and films such as Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. It had to be clear to first-time players yet gain deeper meaning on a second playthrough.

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• 5. A Troubled Production

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  Work on the first concepts began in the second quarter of 2001, after Ubisoft had bought the Prince of Persia license. The underlying property still belonged to its creator, Jordan Mechner, who was reluctant to return after his poor experience with Prince of Persia 3D. Ubisoft showed him mock assets as AVI files. He was impressed, joined as a creative consultant, and soon became the designer and writer.

  Full production started in June 2001. At its peak, 65 people worked on the project, known internally as the "PoP Team". Lacoste described the crew as mostly young, with an attitude of "try and make mistakes, and have a lot of fun creating this new IP." The studio was at the same time making Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. The team read One Thousand and One Nights for research, and the game went through over 150 versions before the retail release.

  Pre-production was expected to take ten months and stretched to fourteen. Every new movement forced changes to other systems, and the Prince alone had over 780 scripted movements. That left little time to polish enemy and partner artificial intelligence, and debugging began far later than planned. Lacoste did not join until July 2002, which delayed the environments. A demo for the 2003 Electronic Entertainment Expo added pressure, and every room had to work with every move and every rewind. Producer Yannis Mallat later regretted that there was not enough time to solve these problems.

  Some things went well. The team noticed one tester who was especially good at finding severe bugs, gave her a development kit and added her to a testing group. They repeated the idea, and the number of bugs found and fixed rose sharply. After E3 the team briefly considered releasing the game as two games to keep all its content. They dropped the idea. A griffin boss meant to appear three times was cut, and it turned up in the Game Boy Advance version instead.

  The technology came from Ubisoft's Jade engine, built for Beyond Good & Evil. The team added walking and running animations and built "substance" and "glow" systems for cloth movement and magical lighting. Keeping all assets in one folder caused trouble, because too many people overwrote data, corrupted files and crashed the system. A "data monkey" fix came too late to risk, so they set up a file server to manage check-in times.

  Mallat wanted a "loading free experience". Since Jade could only render one large room at a time, the rooms were joined by large S-shaped corridors. Halfway through, the game invisibly unloaded the old room and loaded the next.

  The game was announced in March 2003. Versions were released gradually between October and November. The PlayStation 2 and Xbox editions shipped to North American stores on the 6th and the 10th of November, ahead of a planned the 11th of November date. The PlayStation 2 version reached Japan on the 2nd of September 2004, published by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, who were impressed by its western praise. The GameCube and Xbox versions included a making-of documentary.

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• 6. Persian Rock

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  Stuart Chatwood, of the Canadian rock band The Tea Party, composed the music. Ubisoft wanted Persian elements without pure Persian music, so Chatwood expanded his music library as part of his research. He blended rock with Middle Eastern melodies and Indian elements, using an Indian tabla and strings. Cindy Gomez and Maryem Tollar supplied vocals.

  The sound company Dane Tracks created most of the sound effects, and Ubisoft Montreal made the rest. For the monsters, the team avoided the usual undead sounds. Instead, it mixed "organic and evil" effects with whispering.

  Mechner supervised the voice recording, which took place at L. A. Vox and Ubisoft Montreal's sound studios. The team made an unusual choice: gameplay never stops for dialogue, so players can miss large portions of conversation. More than one thousand lines were written, and over half were cut. A graph helped the actors timing their exchanges. Farah's comments on specific actions were mostly stand-alone responses.

  Actors were chosen by how well their voices fit the characters. Yuri Lowenthal voiced the Prince and Joanna Wasick voiced Farah, recording in separate studios. In a 2008 interview, Lowenthal said he felt "that he in a way originated that role". He would return to voice the Prince in later games set after this story.

  The music had a life of its own. A soundtrack album came out in Japan on the 20th of October 2004 from Scitron Digital Content. Another album gathering music from this game and its two sequels, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones, was a pre-order bonus for The Two Thrones on the 1st of December 2005. Ubisoft released a larger digital compilation on the 3rd of January 2011.

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• 7. Slow Start, Long Tail

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  By the end of 2003, sales of The Sands of Time had reached 2 million copies, and Ubisoft highlighted its success in Europe in a quarterly business report. Europe accounted for 1.1 million sales by February 2004, and worldwide sales reached 2.4 million units by the end of March.

  North America told a different story. By December the PlayStation 2 version had sold 218,000 copies there, the Xbox version 128,000 and the GameCube version 85,000. Some speculated that the concurrent release of Beyond Good & Evil, among other prominent titles, hurt sales. Ubisoft responded by offering copies of other games free with purchases. By July 2006, the PlayStation 2 version alone had sold 700,000 copies in North America, an estimated $24 million in revenue.

  In Japan, the game reached seventh place in its week of release with 14,000 copies, a high figure for a western game. In the United Kingdom, it earned a Gold award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, meaning at least 200,000 copies. As of 2014, it had sold over 14 million copies worldwide on all platforms.

  Critics were warm from the start. Edge said that, despite difficulty spikes from respawning enemies, "the game cannot be commended highly enough". IGN's Matt Casamassina called it "a must own" for fans and casual players alike. GameSpot's Greg Kasavin said it could be recommended wholeheartedly, and the site named it the best game of November 2003 on GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Eurogamer and Official PlayStation Magazine compared its look and presentation to Ico, while 1UP.com called the camera "tricky".

  Official Xbox Magazine's Francesca Reyes found the combat difficult at times, yet praised its lasting appeal: "It's a stunning and rare achievement that makes you feel happy to be a gamer." The Windows version drew criticism for its controls and camera. The Game Boy Advance version scored lower for its scaled-down presentation. IGN's Levi Buchanan gave the mobile version 9.5 out of 10.

  Awards followed. At E3 2003 it was named "Game of the Year", and at the 2003 Game Critics Awards it won "Best Action/Adventure Game". The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences honored it in 2004 with "Console Game of the Year", among many others. At the 2004 Game Developers Choice Awards it won "Excellence in Game Design" and "Excellence in Programming". Retrospective lists came later, among them IGN's top 100 in 2005, Edge's top 100 in 2007, and GamePro's choice of it as the 13th best PS2 game in 2010.

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• 8. What Grew From the Sand

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  A year after release, the game appeared in an episode of How It's Made, in a segment about video game production. More lasting was its effect on the franchise. It is cited as the reason the Prince of Persia series, forgotten after Prince of Persia 3D, came back to prominence. Mechner began work on a film adaptation in 2004 with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and the film was released in 2010.

  The sequel, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, followed in November 2004 with a darker look. More sequels set in the same continuity came after it. The bond between the Prince and Farah later inspired the 2008 series reboot.

  Assassin's Creed began as ideas for a Sands of Time sequel. Ubisoft asked its Montreal studio for a follow-up aimed at the next console generation, and the team decided to bring the gameplay into an open world. They wanted the hero to earn the throne rather than simply wait for it. Research into secret societies led them to the Assassins and the novel Alamut. Their concept, Prince of Persia: Assassin, had the player control an assassin who served as bodyguard to a non-playable Prince. The "Animus" device explained gameplay, such as failed missions, much as the Dagger had in The Sands of Time.

  A remake was announced at Ubisoft Forward 2020. It was developed by Ubisoft Mumbai and Ubisoft Pune and scheduled for the 21st of January 2021, for Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The trailer drew criticism from fans who found the graphics lackluster. Ubisoft answered that the style was deliberate, meant to make the game stand out given its fantasy elements. The date slipped to the 18th of March, then was postponed indefinitely.

  By May 2022, Ubisoft Montreal was taking over development. In June 2024 Ubisoft announced a 2026 release under the original title. In January 2026, the remake was confirmed as one of several projects cancelled in a major company restructuring. Lowenthal had returned to voice the Prince, and Supinder Wraich had been cast as Farah.

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