Jordan Mechner, designer
Programming was very open back in the 1980s. You had to teach yourself, either from magazines, or by swapping tips. When you wrote a video game, you submitted it on a floppy disk to a publisher, like a book manuscript. In my freshman year at Yale university, I sent Deathbounce, an Asteroids-esque game for the Apple II computer, to Broderbund, my favourite games company. They rejected it, but took my next effort, Karateka, a side-scrolling beat-’em-up.
I wanted to do a platform game next, inspired by 1984’s The Castles of Dr Creep, where you could throw switches that opened doors and closed traps. I thought it would be cool to combine those puzzle elements with the same kind of fluid rotoscoped animation as Karateka, which was unusually realistic for the time. The opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark was also a big inspiration; I wanted the same excitement, like you could die at any moment. I devised a story about a princess locked in a tower by an evil vizier – and you have one hour to save her. It came from an unconscious place: the game describes the hero as an adventurer from a foreign land, but I realised later I was echoing my family’s history as Jewish refugees.
I started in October 1985, videotaping my brother David in the parking lot of our old high school, running, jumping, climbing: all the movements needed. But there was no animation software in those days, so I had to digitise everything manually. First, I photographed still frames of the videotape, got the films developed, then retouched the images in two-tone black and white – the only colours the digitiser could pick up. It took months.
I moved to San Francisco a year later, to work in Broderbund’s offices. It was exciting being surrounded by real programmers, like Will Wright, who later made Sim City. I thought being there would make me more efficient – but finishing Prince of Persia ended up taking four years.
After the character animation, I built the levels. But just avoiding traps wasn’t that much fun. My girlfriend at the time, Tomi Pierce, who was programming in the same office space, kept saying: it needs combat. But my animation was so fluid I had maxed out the Apple II’s 48K memory, which is less than the average email today. Out of desperation, I used a technique called byte-shifting to produce, without using any more memory, a polarised “dark” version of the prince: the Shadowman. After the player creates him by jumping into a mirror, he runs around stealing your potions and closing gates in your face. It was the opponent the game needed. So I reprogrammed everything to free up enough memory for the sword-fighting animations and some extra guards. I rotoscoped the combat moves from a six-second sequence in the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood when you can see Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in profile.
The Apple II was dying as a platform by the time the game came out in 1989. But after it did well on other platforms in Europe and Japan it was rereleased on PC in the US and sales picked up. You wouldn’t get that second chance today. I was relieved, vindicated, happy. It created an action-adventure template for platform games that influenced the later 3D wave: Tomb Raider and Uncharted are its direct descendants.
I helped adapt our own 3D follow-up Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, into the 2010 movie with Jake Gyllenhaal. Just prior, I had spent all my savings on developing another game, The Last Express, an artistic folly that flopped commercially. So Prince of Persia ended up rescuing me too.
Doug Carlston, publisher
Jordan was one of five or six independent developers working in our attic space. The problem for a lot of programmers is that they get 90% done, and don’t have the stamina to finish the last 10% – which is boring. Jordan’s finish quality was always superb; he’s a very detail-oriented guy. He would disappear for months at a time, though – I didn’t know it then, but he wanted a career in Hollywood.
The time away was probably good for the game. I liked it a lot more than Karateka: the gameplay and the story were much stronger. It had an intangible quality: you kept thinking about it when you weren’t playing it. It was one of those times when everyone in the company knew they had a hit on their hands.
Because it defined its own genre, its reputation needed to grow before it took off. Eventually, it went platinum and sold over 2m copies, which was a pretty big deal then. It was an outlier in the video games industry at the time in its use of animation, which was traditionally a Hollywood talent. The tools that were relevant to one industry were becoming relevant to the other, similar to how Pixar started out creating graphics software for Lucasfilm. It was a harbinger of film and technology getting closer.