The team room features a 'POP4' sign made out of mint boxes.

It's a warm fall day in Montreal, and the team behind Prince of Persia knows that the game is within inches of being done. The past few months have been filled with fixing thousands of small bugs, but now the project is in its final stage of development. As Yannis Mallat walks through the fifth-floor office, he looks over to the "POP4" sign on the wall, which is made out of Penguin mint boxes that have been taped together. There's a hint of tension in the air, but most of the team now realizes that the cuts they made in the summer have helped ensure that the game will come out for the holidays. "We were always very realistic about what we could and couldn't do," Mallat suggests. "The project was ultimately better off because we didn't try to cram a bunch of average stuff into the game. Everything that's in there now is triple-A quality."

Testers work on what could be the final version of the game.

But at the moment, what Mallat is about to put on the TV monitor isn't triple-A quality. Rather, he's pulled the first prototype disc from the black cabinet and taken it over to his PS2. Sitting on a couch, Mallat loads up the prototype from March 2002 and patiently waits for the first level to appear onscreen. As soon as it does, he gently smiles and shakes his head. "Wow, this really puts it all into perspective," he says. "We really have come so far in only 18 months." As he sits there playing the prototype, he calls out to various employees in French. Some of them break out laughing as soon as they see the first version on the screen. "It's like looking at the first painting you did in kindergarten or something," one passing employee says.

The Evolution of a Game

See how Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time evolved over time.
These three images show the same game level at three different states of production:
summer 2002, late 2002, and the final version.

Twenty-four bottles of champagne wait for the team.

The team may have come a long way in 18 months, but right now 24 bugs are left in the game code. Three of them are serious A bugs, or "crash bugs"--errors in the code that cause the game to crash during play. (Already the team has eliminated all the Z bugs, which are bugs that prevent the player from successfully finishing the game.) And while there are 24 bugs left, most of them are very obscure. One, for instance, involves the disappearance of the head of the female character, Farah, if you leave the game on for more than 12 consecutive hours.

With the bug list shrinking as the hours tick by, Mallat knows the end of the project is near. As evidence of this fact, 24 bottles of champagne have been placed on a table in the middle of the war room. The message Mallat wants to send to everyone on the team is clear: We're almost there--get ready to put the champagne on ice.

A whiteboard next to Mallat's desk is used to track the game's schedule.

A few hours later, the team gets to the point where the last bug appears to be fixed. Not surprisingly, the final bug is another obscure one: If a player goes back and forth between two levels without killing any enemies, Farah, the computer-controlled sidekick, will forget what she has to do in a level. It takes only a few minutes to fix the bug. After that, Mallat tells his programmers to burn what could be the final version of the game. The team thinks it has fixed the last bug, but the final verdict rests with Sony, which will test the game one last time before it is cleared to be released on the PS2.

Yannis Mallat is visibly tired after staying awake for 48 hours.

Sony's approval will take a few days no matter what, so in the intervening days Mallat works hard with the team to finish up the Xbox, GameCube, and PC versions, which will all arrive slightly after the PS2 release. At the same time, Mechner--who returned to Los Angeles two weeks before the final hours--patiently waits at his house for word on whether the game has "gone gold," industry slang for finishing the product. "Your fate is in the hands of the console company, so you can't really do anything. You just wonder: Will they approve it? Will they find any bugs? There are a lot of unknowns," he says.

The team begins its celebration of the game going gold.

But on Friday, October 15, what was unknown becomes known: Word comes back from Sony Europe that Prince of Persia for the PS2 has been approved for duplication. (A few days later, the US version is approved.) When word reaches the team in Montreal, the champagne bottles are popped open, and the team celebrates its accomplishment late into the night. For some, it's unbelievable that the game is actually done. "This is the first game I've worked on where I'm really proud of what we've accomplished," admits Richard Dumas.

At 3:00am, the team is still busy celebrating.

After the celebration ends late at night, Mallat returns home and goes to bed at 3:00am. So relieved that the game is finished, Mallat sleeps through the day Saturday and doesn't wake up until early Sunday morning. And when he does wake up, he realizes that at a duplication plant somewhere in Europe, hundreds of thousands of discs of his game are being made. In a matter of a few short weeks, The Sands of Time will be on store shelves all over the world.