Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has been added to the GOG Preservation Program, bringing widescreen support and a set of technical fixes to the 2003 action platformer, Polygon reported. The programme, launched in 2024, is aimed at preserving the availability and compatibility of classic games on modern and future PCs.
Our team has gone deep into the sands of the original Scimitar engine, rebuilding our early experimental work into a lightweight wrapper designed to address the challenges of running this 2003 classic on modern hardware.
What the update changes
- Widescreen and ultrawide display support
- Customisable camera scaling
- The ability to choose a preferred frame rate
- A new in-game overlay for changing field of view and other settings on the fly
Before the work, running Sands of Time on modern hardware was plagued by physics and display issues that required frustrating workarounds. The game now runs natively without them.
A video released by GOG points directly at Ubisoft's cancellation of the Sands of Time remake as the reason for repairing the original PC version instead, and goes into detail on how the team reverse-engineered the game to make the fixes work. It is not the remake Ubisoft had been building before it was cancelled, but it does leave the original playable on current hardware, and the video doubles as a look at how a game of that era was put together and what is involved in making it run today.
A wrapper built to be reused
One detail from that video has implications beyond a single game: the core wrapper architecture GOG built for Sands of Time is game agnostic, meaning it can serve as the basis for updating other DirectX titles, although each new game will still need its own custom reverse engineering.
To mark the game's induction into the Preservation Program, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is on sale for $2.99 until August 23.
