Game Design

breaks the experience. The idea was that you’d just sit down and play, and when you stopped playing, you could just quit and go ...

her compartment, and if you walk through the train you hear her playing Bach partitas, tuning up, playing scales, and so forth. ...

have to deal with that somehow. You can avoid that problem by throwing the body out the window, but if you do that, then the bod ...

be right for another. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to use theLast Expressengine to do a game that wasn’t set on a train. La ...

Computer games seem to be one of the only art forms that have shifted from being predominantly solo endeavors to being more coll ...

small, but the size of those hits is bigger than ever. If you’re a publisher with aMystor a Tomb Raiderthat sells two or three m ...

self-delusion that most of us in the software industry indulge in just to get ourselves out of bed in the morning. Even games th ...

an express train in 1914, but I don’t think that’s really what the industry needs. What’s more interesting to me is experimentin ...

do is just keep trying to do that, and quit griping about the glorious bygone early years, ’cause they’re over! So how involved ...

So did you come up with any good solutions to 3D-space navigation inPrince of Persia 3D? For me,Prince of Persia 3Dis a bit on t ...

So you were sucked back into game development against your will? That’s a good choice of words. [laughter] The other word I woul ...

before that the films of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks in the ’30s. So all of that was also an inspiration forSands of Time. ...

The storytelling inSands of Timeis very elegant, but the plot is actually quite simple. Do you think that more games should stri ...

However, within that, I think we did a pretty good job of keeping the controls simple and consistent. We didn’t have the kind of ...

Do you hope to one day get rid of the cut-scenes entirely? Oh absolutely. The more we can create a seamless experience where the ...

and that was OK — that was what it was.Last Expresswas different because it was such a large project. With the machine that we c ...

So later on you must have found some more memory so you could put in the other characters. A lot of the time that goes into prog ...

So it’s not that you prefer working in a more linear form. It’s more of an alter- nate pursuit for you. It’s a different form, b ...

Jordan Mechner Gameography Karateka, 1984 Prince of Persia, 1989 Prince of Persia 2, 1993 The Last Express, 1997 Prince of Persi ...

Chapter 19 The Design Document ................. Chapter 19 The Design Document................... “It wasn’t untilUltima IV: Qu ...