Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is one of the funnest games I've ever played. It's an action adventure game where you can perform a lot of parkour type moves such as running on walls, climbing up beams and ledges to get from point A to point B, while killing monsters that get in your way. An added dimension to the game is the Dagger of Time that allows you to control time. For example if you miss a jump, you can reverse time up to a degree so that you can redo it. Additionally, you can speed up time, slow time down, etc.

This week I went to a talk by Jordan Mechner, the creator of the Prince of Persia series. He created the original Prince of Persia for the Apple II back in 1989. He only had a small amount of disk space at his disposal, the size of a small jpeg (can't remember the exact number of kbytes), to write this program. Aside from the feat of putting a game into such a small amount of disk space, what was also impressive about the game was the animation. He rotoscoped the prince's movements, which gave the animation a more realistic and fluid look. Rotoscoping is the tracing of live action footage to create 2D animation. He used an old Errol Flynn Robin Hood fight scene to create the swordfighting movements.

In 2010, a Prince of Persia movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer will be released. The story will be different from the game, but Mechner did write the screenplay. What I found most interesting about the talk was when Mechner described some of the challenges of adapting the story from a video game to a movie.

There are different schools of thought on the purpose of the story for video games. For Mechner, the story is largely unimportant. It's just a wrapper to service gameplay. At it's core, the story for Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time is pretty basic: a princess gets captured and you must save her. The gameplay is the driving force and the goal was to create a game where you could free run to avoid traps and kill bad guys. The gameplay creates a unique story for the player. When you tell your buddies that you played Prince of Persia, you don't talk about how utterly romantic and heroic it was that the prince saved the princess and righted all wrongs. You talk about how your health meter was down to its final blow but you managed to withstand the last minute of the boss fight without a scratch, thus ensuring victory. To keep the focus on gameplay, you don't want to have endless cut scenes or have the character constantly meeting people and chatting with them. To avoid this, in the beginning of the game a curse is unleashed so that all the people are turned into essentially sand monsters that you can kill and not have to talk and have tea and crumpets with. Prince of Persia:Sand Monsters::Resident Evil:Zombies. However, if you make a movie based on this plot, the main character would spend the whole movie running around and killing monsters never uttering a word. Something has to change. Developing a strong cast of characters to populate the world might be one.

Also, the game device that allows you to control time is the dagger. This Dagger of Time was introduced to service the gameplay so that players can reverse a portion of time to retry a dangerous jump or attack without having to restart the level. If the dagger in the movie had the same abilities as in the game, then there would be little danger to the prince. He could reverse time on a whim and get out of any situation. The audience would not be as invested in the character and his fight for victory if there was no threat of failure. Therefore in the movie, the power of the dagger must be reduced somehow. Point is, the story of the game cannot be adapted exactly.

If you think about bad video game movies, which there are a lot of, maybe this helps to explain why it's so difficult to make a good movie based on a game. Film is a very different medium. A movie tells us a story and lets it unfold. We listen. The characters in the story interact and overcome challenges. We become invested. For games, where having a strong plot or characters is not as important, it makes it much more difficult to derive a movie out of (ie Doom and Resident Evil - although I admit I kinda liked the Resident Evil movies, but you can see how they're quite different from the games). This is not an excuse for bad video game movies, but it provides insight as to why a video game movie may not be completely faithful to the source and if not handled well, could result in a very poor movie. I hope the Prince of Persia movie doesn't fall victim to the bad video game trend. Mechner was inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark, so hopefully the movie will be good adventure movie. And since it's being produced by Bruckheimer, it's certainly aimed to be a Pirates of the Carribbean type movie.

On a side note, regardless of the dangers of making a video game movie, I would very much like a movie based on The Legend of Zelda to be made. The Zelda series has a rich mythology and unlike Prince of Persia has a much larger focus on telling a story, which may or may not make it easier to adapt.

Game trailer for Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time


Game trailer for the latest Prince of Persia, which looks quite beautiful


Tried out bolding key words. Let me know if it's annoying.