Not long after returning from Montreal, Mechner struck a deal with Ubisoft for the new Prince of Persia game. (At first Mechner planned to be involved only on the periphery as a creative consultant.) Word quickly filtered back to Montreal that Mechner had given the thumbs-up. The team was understandably thrilled. But at the same time, everyone realized that the hard work was just beginning. "It's one thing to say you are going to have this amazing acrobatic game--you know, the prince will jump over enemies, run on the walls, swing on ropes, and things like that," says Mallat. "But now we had to translate that into a real working game."

Patrice and Yannis discuss the game's direction during the early days of the project.

In September of 2001, real design work on the new Prince of Persia game began. While Mallat acted as a producer, most of the day-to-day work fell into the lap of creative director Patrice Desilets and the rest of the pre-conception team. Unlike the previous design team, Desilets--who moonlights as an improv comedian--wasn't interested in writing a big 300-page design document. "In a way, improv inspires the way I design a game," he says. "In improv you have to say yes a lot to what people give you because if you say no, the improv is over. Game design is like that for me. I try to say yes to everyone's ideas and build off of them. I would never sit here and say, 'Well, that's a good idea, but the design document I wrote back in February says this, so we can't change it.'" All told, the design document for Prince of Persia never grew to more than 10 pages of paper.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater inspired the game's acrobatic feel.

The way Desilets tells it, the core game design for Prince of Persia was largely inspired by sports games. "I love how games like NHL have great context-sensitive control. So I wanted to blend the mechanics of a sports game with a story-driven adventure," he explains. "In the early days, I thought of this as an action adventure game like Tony Hawk, only with a prince. I wanted a character you could throw around the environment, and he would do acrobatic tricks. Our prince was going to be about a set of possibilities rather than specific abilities, so as you played the game, you were going to surprise yourself with what the character could do in certain environments."

Horseback riding was one idea considered but ultimately dropped from the game.

For months, the team brainstormed different gameplay ideas. For a while, ladders were supposed to play a large part in the game, with a design that would allow players to kick and swirl them around like in a Jackie Chan movie. A magic carpet was another concept, as was a sequence where the player would ride on top of a horse and fight enemies in the desert. "We had a lot of great ideas, but we also wanted to focus the game design," says Mallat. "We didn't want a ton of average stuff--we wanted a focused amount of great stuff." After a few months of initial design work, it was decided the game would largely be composed of three core elements: fighting sequences, acrobatic puzzle sequences, and a few adventure-game-like puzzles. Horse riding, magic carpets, and swirling ladders would have to wait for another game.

Still, Mallat wanted to make sure that this Prince of Persia game had something that made it stand out. "We needed our own technological breakthrough or a gameplay keystone," Mallat says. "Much like people talked about Jordan's animation system for the original Prince of Persia, we needed to raise the bar in some way with this game."

It turned out Desilets had the perfect idea--and he owed it all to Donald Duck.