IN2010 – Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia)

The soft-spoken Jordan Mechner

One of the delights of attending the Interactive Exchange and other conferences is meeting the legends in the industry and hearing them talk about the good ol’ days. If you’re not familiar with Jordan Mechner, he is the man who most famously created Prince of Persia, but perhaps most importantly for me, he created Karateka. Karateka was the game that made me desire an Apple II at the age of four, and thus is partly responsible for the entire journey that allows GameNorth to exist as it is today. But understandably, he wasn’t there to talk about Karateka.

Prince of Persia was inspired by movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Thief of Baghdad (1924), which would explain its eventual and natural transition into a movie in 2010. Mechner started out playing Donkey Kong in the arcade when he was young (he showed us some old family photos), and this sparked his interest to try to make games for the Apple II. Since motion capture didn’t exist way back in 1985, he filmed his brother doing all the motions that you see in the game. The videos he showed us were both amazing and amusing, as they matched the animations in the original Prince of Persia precisely.

Another interesting revelation by Mechner was that Prince of Persia was originally intended to be non-violent. He really wanted a protagonist that did not fight and just evaded traps and solved puzzles, but after much play testing from a friend and a forced self-admission, he was convinced to add combat in order to spice up the gameplay and prolong interest in the game. To this end, he tried videotaping himself fencing, which, unlike the previous video, was just amusing and not amazing. Seeing that his motions could not be classified as exciting combat, he eventually found a three-second clip from a Robin Hood movie that he could reference. The sword fight from the movie was actually quite good, and that spawned eight frames of animation that he would reuse in different orders to create the dynamic combat in the game.

Unfortunately, the project took about three years and by the time of its release in 1989, the Apple II audience had moved on. Prince of Persia did not see great success until it was ported onto virtually every other platform by 1993. The attempted revival in the form of Prince of Persia 3D in 1999 was not to Mechner’s liking as he couldn’t get past the second stage due to crashing. Mechner thought it was a good run for a series and put it aside until he got a fateful phone call from Ubisoft. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was released for multiple platforms in 2003 and went on to become one of the most critically acclaimed games of that generation. It breathed new life into a stagnant action/adventure genre that Tomb Raider clones had left in their collective wake and solidified Ubisoft Montreal’s position as rock stars of the development world. The ignition of The Sands of Time brought about several sequels and other iterations that Mechner did not discuss.

Old school footage was delightful to watch

However, he did discuss the film. As IN2010 was very focused on transmedia (the new hip term for intellectual properties that go across multiple media), Mechner spoke about how he pitched the idea for a film to Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney in 2004. He put together his own trailer for the pitch, and despite Hollywood’s uneasiness of letting the creator of a franchise write the screenplay for a film, they asked him to come back with a movie.

The rest is history. Mechner did share some other helpful and interesting notes. He said that if he knew he had to make a transmedia property from the outset, he probably would’ve been overwhelmed and unable to make anything. Perhaps surprisingly, it was the tunnel vision of trying to make a good game that allowed him to turn Prince of Persia into a franchise that could cross media. When working on the movie, he said he was quite aware that he could not stick to the original plot of the game and yet could still remain loyal to the franchise. He was aware that there were two stories told in every game: the story of the narrative or plot and the story of the player. The second narrative is important to games and drives decisions such as how the curse is released and everyone is turned into sand monsters at the beginning of the game, but such a device would make a horrible movie. He went on to say that it was helpful to go back to the source of the source – that is, reference the movies that originally inspired the Prince of Persia game in order to recreate the same atmosphere for the movie.

I personally have not seen the movie yet, but listening to his talk instilled a desire to do so. Although from the looks of the score on Metacritic, I may regret it. If you are interested in learning the in-depth thoughts behind in Mr. Mechner’s mind at the time this was all going on, check out these journals he posted on his site recently. They are very interesting and includes the videos and photos I mentioned above.

Thanks to our friends at Toronto Thumbs for the photos!