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 the complex side, in terms of the number of weap-
ons and the number of moves. It’s not the kind of game that I would design for myself.
But they were aiming at a particular audience. I think the core audience as they saw it
were people who were a lot more hard-core gamers than I was with the firstPrince of
Persia.
How didPrince of Persia: The Sands of Timecome about and how did you get
involved with the project?
In 2001 Ubisoft approached me with the idea of bringing backPrince of Persiaand doing
a new game for consoles. I went up to Montreal to meet Yannis Mallat who was the pro-
ducer of the project and the small team that he’d assembled.
Had they already started development?
It was actually kind of
interesting the way
they started. They
showed me some AVIs
that they had done in
the couple of weeks
before. These were
really quick AVIs. They
didn’t focus on the look
of the world or any
graphic kind of bells
and whistles. They
were very crude, and
had an animated char-
acter running up a wall,
jumping onto a ladder.
Just very quick little demos of the kind of gameplay they had in mind. The great innova-
tion that was already apparent was here was a guy who could run on walls. So they’d
really taken the dynamic ofPrince of Persia 1, which was a 2D side-scroller, and brought
it vertically into a third dimension. Which was something I hadn’t seen done in any
Tomb Raiderstyle action-adventure game. It was just a brilliant idea that opened up a
whole world of possibilities as to how this game could capture the excitement of the
old-time side-scrollers in a modern real-time 3D game. So based on that we made the
deal for Ubisoft to go ahead and start this project. My involvement increased. I had orig-
inally thought I would just be a consultant on the project, but I came on board to write
the story and the screenplay, and once I’d done that I ended up directing the actors in
the voice recording, and finally joined the project full time as a game designer. I was
commuting between L.A. and Montreal and my trips kept getting longer and more fre-
quent until for the final stage of the project I moved up to Montreal with my wife and
kids. That was the last four months, the summer of 2003.
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 345
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time