Prince of Persia

It seems that there were more PoP-remakes in the past few years than before that.
Why the (seemingly) sudden interest in remaking PoP?

FreePrince exists since at least 2003.
And there were no other remake attempts for a long time.

There were some fan-games in the PoPUW forum, but most of them don't look like PoP1.
And some on PoPUW, outside the forum:
1993: The Duel
2004: The Arena
2007: Arabian Nights 2D

And then "suddenly" many people started to remake PoP1:
2011: for the C64 (by mrsid)
2012: in GameMaker (Prince of Persia 2D)
2012: C#/.NET/XNA (by polipo)
2013: for the BK-0011M (Okay, I guess it's older than that, 2013 is just the year we found it.)
2013: The room-drawing code, the prequel of SDLPoP (by David)
2014: two remakes in HTML5
2014: in Unity (by ikazrima)
2014: SDLPoP (by David)
2014: in libGDX for BSc thesis (by Aliamondo on GitHub)
2015: in Phaser and HTML5 (by ultrabolido)
2015: in Clickteam Fusion (by 2233SecondAcc)
2015: using DirectX (by deckard93 on GitHub)
2015: freepop using Allegro (later renamed MININIM) (by oitofelix)
And I'm not sure what year to put the Atari ports into.
EDIT: 2016: for Roku in Brightscript (by lvcabral)
EDIT: 2017: port to BBC Master computer (by kieranhj)

David wrote:It seems that there were more PoP-remakes in the past few years than before that.
Why the (seemingly) sudden interest in remaking PoP?

There are probably so many things that play a role in this big puzzle that one could write a book about it.

Perhaps surprisingly, I think the game itself plays only a minor role. Relevant in this context are Mechner's code release on GitHub, the (re)launch of several up-to-date (modding) websites (inc. tools, docs, mods), PoP remakes being released for iOS and Android, nostalgia, maybe even the 2010 film.

But the big changes happened: 1) in society itself, and 2) in the gaming world.
1) Computers are everywhere nowadays. Gaming and using the Internet are regular activities. Even programming is becoming increasingly common. Not just as a hobby, but also as something taught to students. There are calls to make it part of the standard curriculum. This also includes things like Code.org.
2a) Game engines, SDKs and other tools have greatly simplified creating games. Many of these tools have become free to use.
2b) Several things have brought back interest in Indie(-like) and old school games. Smartphones, for example. The growth of GOG.com (formerly Good Old Games). The whole Kickstarter craze contributed to the revival of old school games, remakes, spiritual successors, etc. Companies started looking into obtaining the rights to classic video games. Gamers found such games on Steam.

What I'm trying to say, I think PoP just happens to be a good candidate to (re)implement and the game got some attention because of remakes and such, but the real changes happened in society and the gaming world in general. More people are programming, more tools are easy to use and free, revival of Indie and old school games, etc.

Norbert wrote:

David wrote:It seems that there were more PoP-remakes in the past few years than before that.
Why the (seemingly) sudden interest in remaking PoP?

There are probably so many things that play a role in this big puzzle that one could write a book about it.

Speaking for myself, consciously at least, I can't really see significant influence of the aforementioned factors in my decision to write MININIM. As I see it, three main factors contributed to its development:

1. Personal desire and will power.
2. Programming skills.
3. Free software (GNU system and philosophy + Allegro)

This doesn't explain the supposedly generalized "sudden interest", though. I'm skeptical about the idea that there are discrete, concrete and objective reasons behind this. To be honest, I'm not sure there is a particular phenomenon of "sudden interest" at all. . I tend to think people see patterns, cause and effect where actually there is none. Of course, I might be wrong.

And you forgot to mention mine

In my case it was because I purchased a Commodore 64 and find out about mrsid's port and Jordan's journals, during the reading I decided to give a try and work on a Roku version.

lvcabral wrote:And you forgot to mention mine

Sorry about that!
I already updated the first post.

Looks like Norbert and Oitofelix didn't notice that either.
Maybe because practically nobody got to play the Roku port?

(BTW, I based my post on a list I made on 2016 March 19. The Roku port was already known then, but only for a few days, though.)

lvcabral wrote:In my case it was because I purchased a Commodore 64

Is that related to the Commodore 64 programmer's reference guide I spotted here?

oitofelix wrote:To be honest, I'm not sure there is a particular phenomenon of "sudden interest" at all. .

Even in that case, at least we have a thorough list of remakes.

Should I add all unofficial ports from PoPUW?
Like the versions for the ZX Spectrum (1996), the ATM Turbo (1994), the SAM Coupé (1992), HP calculators, TI calculators (2003) ?

David wrote:Looks like Norbert and Oitofelix didn't notice that either.

I did notice it and some other things, but the premise remained (and remains) unchanged, so I simply focused on trying to answer the question.
But it's definitely easy to forget about the Roku port, not being able to play it and all.
It's such a niche. It's a billion years ago that I had a TV at home. There's not a single TV service that means anything to me.
In 2014, European law forced the Netherlands to no longer allow its citizens to download pirated content.
But we still have a private copying levy and in practice - as far as I know - nobody has ever been prosecuted for downloading pirated content.
(For just private use without distributing.)
I don't know enough about the Roku products to be sure, but it feels more like a prison to me than for instance Steam's DRM.
Maybe because the Roku is custom hardware.

David wrote:Looks like Norbert and Oitofelix didn't notice that either.

Just for the record, I did notice that.

Norbert wrote: In 2014, European law forced the Netherlands to no longer allow its citizens to download pirated content.
But we still have a private copying levy and in practice - as far as I know - nobody has ever been prosecuted for downloading pirated content.
(For just private use without distributing.)

Why do you mention that? Maybe you're doing that too?

Norbert wrote: I did notice it and some other things,

oitofelix wrote: Just for the record, I did notice that.

Right, I meant you didn't write about the missing Roku port.

Two more (second may still happen?):
- This for the MegaZeux
- This 24 page Atari-related thread

Even I was thinking one to make one with adding more variety. I would mainly remake PoP2 instead of PoP1. I hate the platform detection and the CTRL key to toggle sword on and off. I haven't really got time to think and finalise whether to do it or not, because there are other pending projects as well. Maybe in future I would do it.

I definitely agree with Norbert. Programming is becoming quite easy and more and more people are turning towards it. School kids are even taught Python (which I am always against of, because those students would have great difficulty in understanding the low-levels of programming).

It's still great to hear after so many years that people still love PoP!

Norbert wrote: ↑March 25th, 2017, 2:52 pm There are probably so many things that play a role in this big puzzle that one could write a book about it.

Maybe write it then!