What began as a simple idea to make our Astro default 404 page less generic slowly escalated into something far more unnecessary and therefore much more fun: a fully playable retro game hidden inside the K3B website.

Javi, who loves game design programming, started exploring how a retro game could actually be implemented inside a 404 page. The team explored several arcade classics along the way, including Pac-Man and Arkanoid, but Prince of Persia stood out for one reason: the open source JavaScript recreation was incredibly complete and surprisingly faithful to the original game.

Originally released in 1989 by Jordan Mechner, Prince of Persia became famous for movement and animations that felt unusually realistic for its time. Mechner even filmed his younger brother running and jumping frame by frame to create the game’s iconic motion sequences.

At its core, Prince of Persia is a story about love, escape, and survival: a refugee falls in love with a princess and is thrown into a deadly dungeon by the evil vizier Jaffar. With only one hour to save her, players must fight their way through a 12-level labyrinth filled with traps, guards, impossible jumps, and very little room for mistakes.

Even more impressive: The entire game had to run on Apple II hardware with around 128 KB of memory.

And somehow it still delivered cinematic animation, combat, physics, traps, tension, and one of the most stressful countdown timers in gaming history.

So naturally, we thought: This belongs in a 404 page.

Try getting lost on our website sometime.

P.S. If you can’t wait to dive into Prince of Persia, there may or may not be a broken link waiting for you below.