before that the films of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks in the ’30s. So all of that was
also an inspiration forSands of Time. But when you get down to the details of what can
the game character do and how do you control it, we didn’t feel compelled to follow the
rules that had been set up in the ten-year-old 2D side-scroller. And I think that was all to
the good.
To take one example, potions: you find a potion, you drink it, it restores your
strength. That was fine inPrince 1, but wouldn’t work in the new game. Because why
would you have useful magic elixirs sitting around in a dungeon, waiting for someone to
find them and drink them? Why wouldn’t they have been drunk already by a thirsty
guard or prisoner? In a 1989 2D side-scroller, you can assume a certain suspension of
disbelief. But when you have a realistic environment that’s lavishly rendered with all
the painterly beauty and lighting effects and so on that the PS2 or Xbox are capable of, it
just doesn’t make sense. Ultimately we went with the concept that water itself is the
substance that revives you. Water is a natural feature of Islamic and Persian palaces and
gardens. You’ve got fountains and waterfalls. That was a way to take a feature of the
environment and make it useful and important for the gameplay. So any place you find
water in the game, even if you’re standing in a pool, if you drink, it restores your
strength. That’s one example. If you’ve playedPrince 1andSands of Time, you can see
that when you get right down to it, nearly every game feature is different. It’s just the
overall feeling, the spirit, that has been preserved.
The dagger is a really nice element in the game, because it is really important
both to the gameplay and the story. Did that start out as a gameplay mechanic
or a story device?
Rewinding actually started out as a gameplay wish from creative director Patrice
Desilets. When you die and have to restart, you kind of break the spell of the player’s
involvement in the game. Patrice thought rewinding would be a nice, organic way to
allow the player to continue to play uninterrupted, without dying so often. That then
gave rise to an engineering challenge, which was “Can this be done on the PS2, on a
console system that doesn’t have a hard drive?” The engineers worked on that for a
while and ended up proving that it could be done. So it was a gameplay idea that gave
rise to an engineering innovation that then led to the story question of “How do we jus-
tify the player having this ability?” and to the concept of the dagger and the Sands of
Time.
The Sands of Time serve a number of functions in the story. First of all, they’re the
substance that enables you to turn back time. As the player, you have to find ways to
collect the sand, and then as you turn back time you use it up. Second, the way that you
collect the sand is by killing these sand creatures that are possessed by the sand.
They’re like undead monsters in the sense that you can hit them as many times as you
want with your sword, but the only way to get rid of them for good is to use the dagger
to retrieve the sands that possess them, then they disintegrate. So the sand gives you
an incentive and a reason to want to fight these enemies. All the other powers of time
— being able to freeze your enemies, move at hyper-speed, the sand vortex that when
you enter it gives you a glimpse of what’s to come — came out of trying to take the cen-
tral idea and weave it through as many aspects of the game as possible, while keeping
the story as clean and simple as possible.
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 347