and that was OK — that was what it was.Last Expresswas different because it was such
a large project. With the machine that we constructed with hundreds of people and net-
worked computers, every day was expensive, so changing the design in midstream was
not an option. There I spent a lot more time at the beginning trying to work out the
game in detail. You just have to pray that the original design is solid and doesn’t have
severe flaws that will reveal themselves down the line.
But your earlier games did change significantly over the course of their
development?
Oh yeah. One example:
Prince of Persia was
originally not supposed
to have combat. One of
my bright ideas there
was an answer to what I
saw as the clichéd vio-
lence of computer
games. I wanted the
player to be an
unarmed innocent in a
hostile world full of
spikes and traps. There
would be lots of gory
violence directed
against the player,
which it would be your job to avoid, but you would never actually dish it out. That was
also a way of dealing with the fact that I didn’t think there was enough computer mem-
ory to have another character running around on the screen at the same time. Luckily, I
had stalwart friends who kept pushing me to add combat. When your friends tell you
your game is boring, you’d better listen.
Shadow Man, the character, was a serendipitous accident because I thought,
“There’s no way to add another character in there, we don’t have the memory for it.”
Only if the character looked exactly like the Prince, if he used the same animation
frames. I can’t remember who suggested it, but by shifting the character over by one bit
and then exclusive ORing with himself you got a black shape with a shimmery white
outline. So I tried that, and when I saw Shadow Man running around the screen I said,
“Cool, there’s a new character.” So that suggested the whole plot device of the mirror
and jumping through the mirror and having an evil alter ego who would follow you
around and try to thwart you by closing a gate that you wanted to be open or by dropping
things on your head. And then there was the resolution, where you fight Shadow Man at
the end, but you can’t kill him, since he’s yourself, and if you kill him you die. So you
have to find a way to solve that. Call it Jungian or what you will, it was a way to take
advantage of the fact that we didn’t have that much memory.
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Prince of Persia