The ending is a pretty devious trick, where if the player approaches the prin-
cess in the “attack” stance she’ll kick him. How did you come up with that?
It seemed like a fun lit-
tle trick. You only have
one life in that game:
you get as far as you
can, and if you’re killed,
it’s “The End” and you
have to start the movie
from the beginning
again. So I figured that
most players, when
they finally got to the
end, would just run
right into her arms. But
it’s not a total cheat,
there’s a little clue
there, where she puts
her arms out to you, and then if you run toward her she lowers her arms. So that’s a sign
that something’s not right.
But I don’t know that anybody ever played that game and did it right the first
time.
Yeah, in retrospect that was pretty nasty. I don’t know if we could get away with that
today. The other thing that we got away with onKaratekawas that if you played the flip
side of the disk, if you put the disk in upside down, the game plays upside down. I was
hoping at least a few people would call Broderbund tech support and say, “The screen is
upside down, I think something’s wrong with my monitor or my computer.” That way
the tech support person could have the sublime joy of saying, “Oh, you probably put the
disk in upside down.” And the customer would happily hang up thinking this was true of
all computer software. I thought it was extremely brave of the publisher to increase the
cost of goods by twenty-five cents just for a gag.
So didPrince of Persiagrow out of your experiences onKarateka?
Well, there was a big gap betweenKaratekaandPrince of Persiain terms of my own life.
I finished school and I took a year off. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do another computer
game. The most direct inspiration there was a game by Ed Hobbs calledThe Castles of
Doctor Creep, which didn’t get too big a circulation, probably because it was only avail-
able on the Commodore 64. My college dorm mates and I spent a lot of hours playing
that game. It had these ingenious puzzles of the Rube Goldberg sort, where you hit one
switch and that opens a gate but closes another gate, and so forth. So the one-sentence
idea forPrince of Persiawas to do a game that combined the ingenuity ofThe Castles of
Doctor Creepwith the smooth animation ofKarateka. So when you ran and jumped you
weren’t just a little sprite flying through the air, your character actually felt like it had
weight and mass, and when you fell on the spikes it felt like it really hurt.
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 323
Karateka