So it’s not that you prefer working in a more linear form. It’s more of an alter-
nate pursuit for you.
It’s a different form, but a lot of the challenges are surprisingly similar. With a computer
game, although it’s a non-linear means of telling a story, you still have the fascinating
mystery of what is it about a particular world or a particular set of characters that makes
that game thrilling and gripping. What makes people say, “I want to play this game, I
want to be Mario,” and then look at another game that might be technically just as good
and say, “I have no interest in being this character in this world.” Same with a film.
There’s some mysterious chemistry between an audience and a storyteller that causes
the audience to decide, even based just on the trailer, whether or not they want to live
this particular story.
The two art forms are not all that dissimilar when it comes to sitting down and
wrestling with a set of elements and trying to get them into some kind of finite shape.
The challenges of taking an established genre and breaking new ground with it some-
how, of making it surprising and suspenseful, of economically using the elements at
your disposal, are very similar whether it’s a game or a film. The hardest thing with
KaratekaandPrince of Persiaon the Apple II was coming back to it day after day, looking
at something that had taken me a week to program and saying, “You know what? I got it
working, but now I have to throw it out and find something different.” Same with
screenwriting. You have to be willing to throw away your own work repeatedly over the
course of a long project in order to arrive at that finite set of elements that works just
right.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that film was the dominant art form of the 20th
century, and now games are going to dominate the 21st century. As someone
who’s worked in both games and film, I wondered if you wanted to comment on
what you think of the future of the two mediums.
I don’t know. I sort of scratch my head about that type of statement. Is film more domi-
nant an art form than music? What does that really mean? I think film and video games
are very different art forms. We’re going through an interesting period right now where
video games are more like movies, and movies, or at least a certain type of summer
blockbuster movie, are more like video games than they have been at any time in the
past. There’s a great interest in Hollywood and the video game industry of creating
these kind of cross-marketed properties so that you can have the hit movie and the hit
video game and the hit theme park ride all come out at the same time. But that doesn’t
mean that every single film that’s made has to be a summer popcorn movie. It also
doesn’t mean that every video game that’s made has to be this sort of spectacular,
story-driven, film-friendly thing. The extreme example of a game that has no movie
potential is something likeTetris. It succeeds purely as a game. The gap betweenTetris
and Krzysztof Kieslowski’sBlueis pretty huge. [laughter] So there’s plenty of healthy
room for innovation in both fields, and that’s not going to change any time soon.
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 353