The Prince of Persia as a hanging Lego ornament
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/26
Prince of Persia took a big gap out of my high school time back in the mid 1980’s (:
So I am really glad with the recent revival which besides new material from the original author [Wayback/Archive] Jordan Mechner (@jmechner) / X, also leads to interesting other posts including the LEGO ornament (given the size likely from big Duplo bricks) on the right from:
[WaybackSave/Archive] Mike Mika on X: “Pretty much the coolest Lego thing ever.”
Merry X-mas!
NB: It’s not the original, but it’s hard to find as the original is at least 10 years old.
This is the oldest I could find was this 2014-10-30 one [Wayback/Archive] Imgur: Lego Prince of Persia via [Wayback/Archive] Lego Prince of Persia : r/gaming which has a lot of nice little details on the game its development.
Oh: the skin colour isn’t exactly what’s in the Apple ][ character either, see the first picture below, but it’s close enough.
--jeroen
![Prince of Persia in colour on Apple ][](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GbABoa9X0AA2DBg.jpg)
Prince of Persia in colour on Apple ][
Limitations and constraints encourage and enhance creativity.
I think about this a lot when remembering how Prince of Persia for Apple II was originally made despite a lot of limitations of the hardware at the time, which was an impressive feat by its own.
I remember the times when Figma/Sketch/Framer/Spline/Rive were non-existent and we designers had to build stuff with whatever we’ve had at the time. In my case it was an early version of Adobe Photoshop, a built-in Windows text editor, Filezilla for uploading local files to a server and a website with an old version of WordPress with tons of HTML/CSS/PHP code that I’ve had only a general understanding of.
I loved that time of my life. Everything was more difficult, yet somehow simple. I didn’t have the luxury of being open to thousands of design courses because there weren’t many at the time, if any. Heck, even Youtube was just starting out at the time, there were no design videos at all. But the lack of information only strengthened my curiosity and made me go get my feet wet and learn everything on my own.
It was a time of pure imagination, no limits, and possibilities that sparked curiosity on a daily basis. The world was not yet prepared for the upcoming thing that was going to completely change the industry forever – the release of the iPhone. This single event has changed the world forever. It gave birth to entire markets. Apps in your pocket – how cool is that! They were powerful, and they were making tons of money. Now suddenly everyone needed developers who could build apps and designers who could design them. Entire companies came to exist just because of this one device changing the game.
Design has never been the same since then. We are where we are now because of the set of events that spiraled because of the release of the iPhone. For better or worse, the world is moving forward, now even more new industries are being created, we see a huge rise in the AI space. We’re yet to see where it takes us, but design is as important and as popular as ever, and many young people are either considering or already taking a design path and consider it to be the work of their life and it’s awesome!
Yet, I do miss those simpler times when things were a little more genuine. I think it’s important to remind ourselves where we came from and sometimes exposing ourselves to relics of the past to appreciate the long road we’ve already walked.
![Prince of Persia diskette for Apple ][](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F_Kgo-MWsAAogFL.jpg)
Prince of Persia diskette for Apple ][
[WaybackSave/Archive] Ron’s Computer Videos 🧍♂️🖥️ 📼 on X: “Floppy Disk Friday! Prince of Persia (by @jmechner – published by Brøderbund) #appleii #broderbund #floppydiskfriday #vintagecomputing #vintagegaming #retrogaming”
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Leave a comment