As soon as Mechner arrived in France, he headed to the Ubisoft offices in Paris and met with Yves Guillemot, the president and CEO of the company. Through a series of complicated business transactions, Ubisoft had acquired the Prince of Persia name from Broderbund, a company that imploded in the late 1990s. The catch was that while Ubisoft owned the name, Mechner held the intellectual property rights to the franchise. In other words, the only way Ubisoft could make another Prince of Persia game was by convincing Mechner to cooperate.

During the meeting in Paris, Mechner says he was impressed by how seriously everyone treated the Prince of Persia franchise. "They had this big PowerPoint presentation about the future of the franchise," he recalls. But fancy slide shows aside, Mechner was still skittish about approving a new Prince game. In order to even consider the possibility, Mechner told the Ubisoft executives that he wanted to personally meet the team that would produce the product. "I needed to judge if the team was going to be able to do a good game," Mechner recalls. The suits at Ubisoft agreed: The goal was to assemble a team in Montreal and have the producer meet Mechner at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

Yannis Mallat, the producer of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

In Montreal, the task of pulling together a team for the Prince of Persia game fell on the shoulders of Yannis Mallat, a producer who had games like Rayman Advance and Dinosaur (based on the Disney movie) under his belt. Mallat, like Mechner, had a streak of public-interest work in his past: After going to college in France, he worked in West African countries to help rural citizens increase the productivity of their crops. Eventually, however, Mallat realized he wanted to do something different with his life. After obtaining an MBA in Quebec, he took a job at Ubisoft.

Mallat says he was certainly excited by the possibility of working on a new Prince of Persia game. But in early 2001 that's all the game was: a possibility. Mallat knew that in order to get the game green-lit by Mechner, he'd need to come up with a great concept and assemble a fantastic team. So he set to work on building a team and coming up with a game design. Leading up to E3 in May, Mallat brought three designers on to the project who began working on a design (or "pre-conception") for the game.

Members of the POP Team meet to discuss the game's design.

A few weeks later, Mallat flew to E3 to meet Mechner. The meeting lasted two and a half hours, and by all accounts the two men hit it off. By the end of the meeting, it seemed like Mechner was beginning to warm up to the idea of a new Prince of Persia game. "But I also kept reminding myself, 'Hey, Prince of Persia 3D sounded really good at first too,'" recalls Mechner. In other words, Mechner still needed more convincing. So at the end of the meeting, it was decided that Mechner would fly to Montreal to meet the team and see the initial design work.

There was, however, one big problem. Back in Montreal after E3, Mallat started to realize that the pre-conception work on the project was not going as expected. "The designers on the project were coming up with a very basic game--you know, you run around in 3D, there are traps, and it was all very obvious," Mallat says. With Mechner arriving in Montreal in only a few short weeks to approve or kill the project, Mallat knew that time was running out. Before long, he realized that drastic measures were needed to save the fate of the game. In short, the entire Prince of Persia team would have to be fired.