Contents The Prince of Persia creator has found himself at the center of an accidental renaissance in the past year thanks to three separate projects lining up at once, some of which he had no hand in. First came Digital Eclipse’s The Making of Karateka, a playable documentary about Mechner’s first hit Apple II game that paved the way for Prince of Persia.
Deathbouce and Karateka When I meet Mechner in person for the first time, I feel like I already know him. I’d seen the inner workings of his brain months ago when I played The Making of Karateka, an interactive documentary that includes several interviews with Mechner about creating his first masterpiece. The man I’d meet at GDC would match the one I saw quietly recalling details about Karateka’s creation from a piano bench alongside his father.
While The Making of Karateka largely focuses on the highly influential Karateka itself, a PC game that set the stage for cinematic storytelling in games, it isn’t the only project featured in the collection. It begins with Mechner’s first true failure, a game called Deathbounce that he’d abandon after several failed revision rounds with its potential publisher. It’s in discussing Deathbounce that a unifying wisdom emerges that comes up several times through our conversation.
“With Prince of Persia, for the longest time, I was determined that this would be a non-violent game,” Mechner says. “It would be about escaping traps and avoiding death, but the player would never fight. My friend Tomi kept telling me that this game needs combat. I resisted.
“There were two projects,” Mechner says. “One was a AAA open-world Prince of Persia game. The second project was a 2D sequel, the third episode in the original 2D Prince of Persia trilogy. It was going to be called Princess of Persia. Back in 1993, when I did Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame, I imagined that as the middle episode of a trilogy. The idea was going to be to complete that trilogy today with a small, simple 2D game.
“Writing and drawing every page of a 320-page graphic novel, if it’s like anything, is like coding and doing the graphics for an Apple II game,” Mechner says. “On the one hand, it’s a multi-year project where you need to manage your time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. But day to day, the craft of drawing one panel or the expression of one gesture is not unlike the challenge of coding a particular subroutine to be as efficient as possible. In that sense, it’s a return to that rhythm.
Source: Gaming Daily Report (gamingdailyreport.net)
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