One of the most memorable Apple II games of all time is now available to play on your Apple Watch thanks to the efforts of Oliver Klemenz who’s ported Prince of Persia to JavaScript making it playable on almost any device with a web browser.
Before the iPhone, iPad, and App Store came along, Apple’s devices were generally not considered to be gaming machines, although there were some notable exceptions that — at least initially — were Apple exclusives. (Most forget that at one time Halo was actually destined to be an Apple exclusive until Microsoft bought Bungie and made the game synonymous with the Xbox.)
If you had an Apple computer in the late ‘80s, it’s all but guaranteed you were obsessed with a game called Prince of Persia designed and written by Jordan Mechner. It was not only a groundbreaking platformer for a desktop computer at a time when home consoles dominated the format, the game also featured incredibly lifelike character animations that Mechner created by videotaping his brother running and jumping in a parking lot across from their high school, and then painstakingly hand-digitising the results to create fluid in-game movements. The complete story behind the game’s development is available in a book of journal entries Mechner recently published, but Prince of Persia left a lasting imprint on the game industry, and while it spawned countless sequels, the original remains a fun and challenging throwback to this day, and one you can now enjoy again on your wrist.
As much as you may have loved the original Prince of Persia, Oliver Klemenz probably loved it more than you did. As proof, according to 8bitnews, the software developer spent most of last year porting Prince of Persia to JavaScript which means that if you point your favourite browser to Princejs.com you can play the game on almost any web-connected device, including the Apple Watch, as Klemenz recently demonstrated on Twitter. Basic touch screen controls move the character around on screen, including screen taps for performing jumps, and while it runs “in near original resolution” according to Klemenz, even on the latest generation Apple Watches with larger screens, gamers who enjoyed the Prince of Persia the first time around in 1989 might find their ageing eyes struggling with this latest iteration.