to step over it so you don’t fall. Then later on, it reappears, not as a trap but as an escape
route: you have to jump and hit the ceiling to discover there’s a loose ceiling piece that
you can knock down from below. Later on, you can use one to kill a guard by dropping it
on his head, to jam open a pressure plate, or — a new kind of trap — to accidentally
break a pressure plate so that you can never open it again.
It was necessary to makePrince of Persiamodular because the memory of the com-
puter was so limited. The smooth animation of the character, with so many
intermediate frames and so many moves, was taking up a huge percentage of that 64K
computer. When efficiency is not an issue, you can always add production value to a
game by throwing in a completely new environment or special effect or enemy, but
when you’re literally out of RAM and out of disk space, you have to think creatively.
Which in turn forces the player to think creatively. There’s a certain elegance to taking
an element the player already thinks he’s familiar with, and challenging him to think
about it in a different way.
Prince of Persiais really a simple game to control, especially compared to mod-
ern action games. Was that a design goal of yours?
Absolutely. That was a very strong consideration in bothKaratekaandPrince of Persia,
and I spent hours trying to figure out how to integrate certain moves. Should it be up
with the joystick or up with the button? Personally, I have a strong prejudice against
games that require me to use more than one or two buttons. That’s a problem, actually,
that I have with modern action games. By the time I figure out whether I’m using A, B,
X, O, or one of those little buttons down at the bottom of the controller pad that you
never use except for one special emergency move, I’ve lost the illusion that it’s me
that’s controlling the character.
Ideally, you want to get the player so used to handling the joystick and the buttons
that the action starts feeling like an extension of him or herself. The trick there, obvi-
ously, is that when you bring in a new movement that you haven’t used before, you want
the player to somehow
already “know” what
button or what combi-
nation of actions is
going to bring off that
move. InPrince of Per-
siathere were moves
where I thought, “This
would be great, but I
don’t have a button for
it, so let it go. It would
be cool, but it doesn’t
help the game overall.”
A major constraint was
keeping the controls
simple and consistent.
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 325
Prince of Persia