Prince of Persia – Creating The Sands of Time Trilogy

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Prince of Persia marked its 35^th anniversary on October 3, and we're continuing the celebration throughout the month with a series of retrospective articles in which we speak with developers who worked on the legendary series about their experiences behind the scenes. Last week, we spoke with series creator Jordan Mechner and others about the creation of the very first game in 1989. Today, we'll take a look back at a series that captured the hearts of fans and proved foundational to Ubisoft's early-2000s success: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (which celebrates its 21^st anniversary this November) and its sequels, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones.

"It began when [Ubisoft CEO] Yves Guillemot called me in 2001," says Jordan Mechner, creator of the Prince of Persia series; Ubisoft had recently acquired the portfolio of defunct publisher Broderbund and was interested in creating a new game at a new studio in Montréal. "There was a team there that was excited about doing a new Prince of Persia, and the inspiration was to go back to the first 2D games to try to recapture that spirit - the fluidity and the speed - on the PlayStation 2 generation of consoles."

"It was a small team of passionate people," says Raphael Lacoste, who joined The Sands of Time in 2002 as art director. Some members of the team were just out of school, he says, and most were between the ages of 20 and 26. "It was a mood of, 'try and make mistakes, and have a lot of fun creating this new IP.'"

That new IP would become 2003's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Rather than continue Mechner's earlier series, it introduced a new Prince who accidentally unleashes the titular Sands and turns a vast palace's inhabitants into sand zombies. To set things