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Making Prince of Persia: Jordan Mechner

Prince of Persia came out in 1989 and has since spawned a slew of sequels and now a major motion picture. While video games movies aren’t exactly a new concept anymore, the fact that one of the folks credited on the screenplay is original series creator/designer Jordan Mechner has me confident the movie will be slightly better than most video game movie fare. Even excluding Uwe Boll’s oeuvre, there’s some pretty bad stuff out there.

Anyway, Mechner’s got a great blog which contains excerpts from his personal journals from the late 80s and early 90s developing the original Prince of Persia. It feels like you’re reading a making-of documentary of the game, what with his travels to California, dueling with marketing departments and Brøderbund, finding funding for screenplays and such. He even meets pre-prequel-insanity George Lucas at Skywalker ranch!

You can feel his excitement and giddiness when the ball starts rolling on his ideas for the game, such as creating the iconic animations for the Prince. My favorite example is here, an entry which details the concept of the Shadow Man, still one of the coolest things I have ever seen tossed at a player in any game.

The Shadow Man is a creature that springs from a magic mirror and appears throughout the latter chunk of the game, stealing health potions or generally screwing with the player via traps. When the player finally confronts him, he pulls out his sword and you duel. However, each time you hit him, you only injure yourself. The solution to defeat him is so elegant and lovely that every time someone brings up PoP I can’t help but babble about it.

These sorts of ideas make me lean towards “yes” in the games-as-art debate, which I will be chiming in on in the near-future; it’s concepts like these that make games art, not pretty graphics or design (cough BioShock cough Final Fantasy)

The man’s an artist, and his old journal is a fascinating trip back in time.

He’s not out there as a famous name like Will Wright or Peter Molyneaux (gaming’s own James Cameron) yakking about how Fable III is going to change gaming FOREVER. He’s simply made great games, and from the start wanted to craft a unique and entertaining experience for a player, and that’s really what video games should be all about, art or otherwise.

Even though the initial critical reaction to the Prince of Persia movie so far has been fairly tepid, I’m still pretty excited about seeing the movie. I see it as an opportunity to at the very least congratulate Mechner in a way for being one of the best in the industry. Who knows, maybe the success of Prince of Persia will lead to that other great Mechner classic, The Last Express, being turned into a film. Apparently Paul Verhoeven has been toying with the idea.

[Source - jordanmechner.com]