Page 2: One Bitten, Twice Shy

Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia.

Sitting in the backyard of his Spanish-style home high up in the hills above Los Angeles, Jordan Mechner is wearing shorts and a pale green T-shirt as he gently tosses a worn tennis ball to his dog. As the sun begins to set in the distance, Mechner fondly recalls the early days of Prince of Persia, a game he built all by himself in the late 1980s. "Back then, the biggest cost for developing the game was the rent for my apartment," Mechner says with a chuckle, speaking slowly and methodically as he always does.

When Mechner was younger, he never dreamed of becoming a great game designer. Growing up in New York, he was a smart but shy kid who liked comic books and animation. So when his parents bought him an Apple II computer at age 15, Mechner was eager to create animations on the computer. "At first, I was just doing simple things like creating a little red block that would be chased by a green block," he says.

The original Prince of Persia sold more than 2 million copies.

Over time, Mechner's fascination with computers grew stronger. While at Yale for college, Mechner programmed a karate action game called Karateka. Despite the fact that he was still in school, Mechner sold the game to Broderbund, and it went on to sell an impressive 500,000 units. After graduating, Mechner started to work on Prince of Persia, an action game set in the Arabian Nights universe. The game took four years to create and became a bit of a family effort: Mechner's dad wrote the music, and his brother performed acrobatic moves in front of Mechner's camcorder. (Mechner then digitized the movies into a computer to create amazingly fluid animation for the prince.) Mechner was just 25 when the game came out in 1989, but Prince of Persia went on to sell more than 2 million copies. Across the industry, game designers took note of Mechner and Prince of Persia. "Jordan's early games were cinematic in this very undefined way," explains Will Wright, creator of The Sims. "They felt something like an interactive movie, whereas at the time most other games were simple puzzle toys like Space Invaders."

After Prince of Persia and its sequel, Mechner went from the world of interactive movies to real ones. He attended film school at NYU and subsequently shot Waiting for Dark, a short documentary about the harsh living conditions in Havana, Cuba. The irony of an action video game designer making documentary films is not lost on Mechner. "When I meet other documentary filmmakers," he says with a chuckle, "they ask me what I do. And when I tell them I also design video games set in fantasy worlds with a guy who wields a big sword and kills people, they give me this look like 'How does this guy sleep at night?'"

The ill-fated Prince of Persia 3D game.

Even though he enjoyed making documentary films, Mechner still stayed somewhat active in the game industry. But unfortunately, Mechner found it hard to repeat the success of Prince of Persia. The Last Express, a $5 million adventure game that took Mechner and his team four years to build, was a critical smash but a commercial flop in 1997. And in 1999, Mechner worked as a creative consultant on Prince of Persia 3D, a disappointing attempt to blend Prince of Persia with a Tomb Raider style of gameplay. Today, Mechner sounds almost embarrassed to discuss that game, even though he still proudly lists it on his resume. "Can we skip ahead to the good part?" he asks somewhat hesitantly before trying to change the subject.

After the disappointment of Prince 3D, Mechner distanced himself from the game industry. He began working on Chavez Ravine, a documentary film that tells the story of a Mexican-American village that was destroyed to build the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. To his friends and admirers, it seemed unclear when--if ever--Mechner would return to making games. "I was in one of my several-year-long 'in-between-game' phases," surmises Mechner. "I needed to charge up my batteries by doing something completely different."

But then, in the midst of working on his new documentary, Mechner received a call. The president of Ubisoft, the company that owned the Prince of Persia name, wanted to discuss the idea of doing a new game in the franchise. With wounds still healing from Prince of Persia 3D, Mechner wasn't sure he wanted to do another video game, much less attend a meeting in France. "The first thing on my mind was, 'Well, it would be great to do another good Prince of Persia game,'" remembers Mechner. "But I was also thinking, 'It wouldn't be great to do another mediocre one.'"

Nevertheless, in March of 2001 Mechner flew to Paris to meet Ubisoft and hear what it had to say. The fate of Prince of Persia, one of video gaming's most classic franchises, hung in the balance.