I wanted that Raiders of the Lost Ark excitement you could die any minute': how we made hit video game Prince of Persia

"Programming was very open back in the 1980s. You had to teach yourself, either from magazines, or by swapping tips. When you wrote a video game, you submitted it on a floppy disk to a publisher, like a book manuscript. In my freshman year at Yale university, I sent Deathbounce, an Asteroids-esque game for the Apple II computer, to Broderbund, my favourite games company. They rejected it, but took my next effort, Karateka, a side-scrolling beat-'em-up."

"I started in October 1985, videotaping my brother David in the parking lot of our old high school, running, jumping, climbing: all the movements needed. But there was no animation software in those days, so I had to digitise everything manually. First, I photographed still frames of the videotape, got the films developed, then retouched the images in two-tone black and white the only colours the digitiser could pick up. It took months."

Programming in the 1980s was open and self-taught, with games submitted on floppy disks to publishers. An initial Asteroids-like game was rejected by Broderbund, but a later side-scrolling beat-'em-up, Karateka, was accepted. Inspired by The Castles of Dr Creep and the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the developer conceived a puzzle-platformer combining switch-based puzzles with fluid rotoscoped animation and a story about rescuing a princess within one hour. Development began in October 1985 by videotaping the developer's brother to capture movements, then manually digitising photographed frames into two-tone black-and-white images. The manual process took months, and moving to Broderbund's offices in San Francisco did not prevent the project from taking four years to finish.

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