“I wanted the excitement of Raiders of the Lost Ark – you could die at any moment”: How we made the hit video game Prince of Persia | culture

Jordan Mechner, designer

Programming was very open in the 1980s. You had to educate yourself, either from magazines, or by exchanging advice. When I wrote a video game, I submitted it on floppy disk to a publisher, like a book manuscript. In my first year at Yale, I sent Deathbounce, an Asteroids-like game for the Apple II computer, to Broderbund, my favorite game company. They rejected it, but took my next attempt, karateka, which is a sideways pass.

I wanted to make 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 these puzzle elements with the same kind of fluid animation as Karaketa, which was extraordinarily realistic for the time. The opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark was also a huge inspiration; You wanted the same excitement, like you could die at any moment. You’ve created a story about a princess locked in a tower by an evil minister – 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 later realized I was echoing my family’s history as Jewish refugees.

I began in October 1985, videotaping my brother David in the parking lot of our old high school, running, jumping, climbing: all the moves required. But there was no animation software in those days, so I had to digitize everything by hand. First, I shot still frames from the videotape, developed the films, and then retouched the images in black and white—the only two colors the digitizer could capture. It took months.

She moved to San Francisco after a year to work in Broderbund’s offices. It was exciting to be surrounded by real programmers, like Will Wright, who later made Sim City. I thought being there would make me more competent, but it took four years to finish the Prince of Persia tournament.

After character animation, I built the levels. But just avoiding the traps wasn’t that fun. My girlfriend at the time, Tommy Pierce, who was programming in the same office, kept saying: It needs a fight. But my animation was so smooth that I reached the Apple II’s 48KB memory limit, which is less than today’s average email. Out of desperation, she used a technique called byte shifting to produce a polarized “dark” version of The Prince: Shadow Man, without using any other memory. After the player creates it by jumping into the mirror, he runs in, steals your potions, and closes portals on you. He was the opponent the game needed. So I reprogrammed everything to free up enough memory for the sword fight animation and some extra guards. I photographed the fighting movements 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 game was dying as a platform by the time the game came out in 1989. But after doing well on other platforms in Europe and Japan, it was re-released on PC in the US and sales rebounded. You won’t get that second chance today. I felt relieved, vindicated, and happy. It created a template for action-adventure platformers that influenced the subsequent 3D wave: Tomb Raider and Uncharted are its direct descendants.

I helped adapt our 3D series Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time into a 2010 film with Jake Gyllenhaal. Just before that, I had spent all my savings developing another game, The Last Express, a technical crap that failed commercially. So Prince of Persia ended up saving me too.

Doug Carlston, Publisher

Jordan was one of five or six independent developers working in our loft space. The problem with a lot of programmers is that they get 90% of the work done, and don’t have the stamina to finish the last 10% – which is boring. Jordan’s finishing quality has always been great. He is a very detail oriented guy. He would disappear for months at a time, though, and I didn’t know it at the time, but he wanted to work in Hollywood.

Maybe the lost time was good for the match. I liked it much better than Karateka: the gameplay and 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.

Since she had defined her own genre, her reputation needed to grow before she could take off. In the end, it went platinum and sold over two million copies, which was a pretty big deal at the time. It was an anomaly in the video game industry at the time in its use of animation, which was traditionally Hollywood talent. Tools that were relevant in one industry became relevant in another, similar to how Pixar started creating graphics software for Lucasfilm. It was a harbinger of the approach of cinema and technology.