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.
Last Expressseems to have not sold well because of the lack of an adventure
game market. Yet adventure games used to be very popular. I’m wondering if
you had any idea what happened to all of the adventure game players.
That’s a good question, and I have to say that I was caught by surprise when I woke up
to find the adventure game market was dead, because I’d never really thought that
much in terms of genres. Even doingLast Express, the fact thatPrince of Persiawas an
action game whileLast Expresswas an adventure game, I just wasn’t thinking about it
that way, right or wrong. As a game player, I’m not a big adventure game player myself,
for a lot of reasons. Usually the graphics weren’t very good, the story lines were kind of
arbitrary and contrived, the characters and the plot just didn’t stand up in terms of the
kind of story that I would want to see in a movie or a novel.
So withLast ExpressI wanted to do a game that would have what I saw as the quali-
ties that were missing from most of the adventure games that were out there. So as a
player, I guess I have to assume my share of the guilt for not supporting the adventure
game market. I think I underestimated the degree to which the games market had been
stratified by the different genres. You had people out there who saw themselves as
action game players, as strategy game players, as role-playing game players, or as
adventure game players. I never shopped for games that way, but I guess over a period
of a few years there in the early ’90s, even computer game publications started to strat-
ify games according to genre. So did publishers, so did shops, and I guess I didn’t see
that coming.
So you don’t have any ideas about why the adventure game market dried up?
Well, I can only look at my own experience as a player. I enjoyed playing adventure
games back in the Scott Adams days, and then I kind of got bored with them. I think
adventure game makers need to stop asking, “Where did the market go?” I think the
question is, “Why do people no longer find these games fun to play?” Maybe it’s some-
thing about the games themselves.
Your first two games,KaratekaandPrince of Persia, were both solo efforts, where
you did all of the designing, writing, programming, and even drew the art. How
do you compare working with a large team onLast Expressto working by
yourself?
It’s a lot more exciting and rewarding than working alone, because you have the chance
to work collaboratively with a large team of talented people who are really dedicated
and who excel in their own specialties. It was one of the most thrilling experiences of
my professional life. The downside, of course, is that you spend all your time worrying
about where the next payroll is going to come from. One thing that was really nice about
the old days was that the cost of developing a game was negligible. Once you’d paid the
two thousand dollars for the computer and you’ve got five blank floppy disks, it was
basically paid for. Whereas with a large project there’s a lot of pressure to meet budgets
and schedules.
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 339