Another inspiration was the first eight minutes ofRaiders of the Lost Ark. I wanted
to make a game with that kind of action feeling to it. And then there was theArabian
Nightssetting. I was looking for a setting that hadn’t been done to death in computer
games, and a couple of animators at Broderbund, Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliot,
suggested this one. I went back and reread theArabian Nightsand it seemed to offer a
lot of promise. It had all those great story possibilities which have been absorbed into
our collective unconscious — genies, the voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin’s cave. It was just
crying out to be made as a computer game.
You said you had taken some time off before makingPrince of Persia. What
finally made you want to come back and do another game?
That was the year I wrote my first film screenplay. It was optioned by Larry Turman, a
very nice man who had produced about fifty films includingThe Graduate. We had a year
of meetings with directors and studios and came close to getting it made, but in the end
it didn’t come together. Later I found out that for a first-time screenwriter, that’s not
considered a bad start at all. But I’d been spoiled by computer games, and I thought,
“My God, I’ve just spent six months here in Los Angeles waiting for something to hap-
pen, and the film isn’t even getting made.” In comparison, I knew that if I finished
Prince of Persia,it would get published. So I figured I’d better stick with that. At the
point when all this good stuff had started to happen with the screenplay, I was about six
months intoPrince of Persia, and I’d put it aside for almost a year to focus on
screenwriting. It was pretty scary going back to programming after so much time off; I
was afraid I wouldn’t be able to remember my own source code. But I went back, picked
it up again, and finished it.
One thing aboutPrince of Persiais that it takes this finite amount of game ele-
ments and stretches them out over all of these levels. Yet it never gets dull or
repetitive. How did you manage that?
That was really the
challenge of the design.
It was modular in that
there were a finite
number of elements
that could be recom-
bined in different ways.
It’s the same thing you
try to do in a movie.
You plant a line of dia-
log or a significant
object, and fifteen or
thirty minutes later
you pay it off in an
unexpected way. An
example in Prince of
Persiawould be the loose floors. The first time you encounter one it’s a trap: you have
324 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner
Prince of Persia