This is how 90s kids’ favourite Prince of Persia game was made
In 1914 Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, of Brooklyn made a major breakthrough in the field of art with the invention of rotoscope, a device that allowed animators capture live action frame by frame. The invention was of paramount importance for animators and its impact could be seen in the Fleischers’ groundbreaking animation series Out of the Inkwell produced four years later.
Almost after 70 years another American Jordan Mechner produced another wonder when he used the same technique to capture his human movements and replicated them to add life to video games.
Thus video game characters became human, inching closer to human movements.
John-Paul C. Dyson in a blog entry on the website of The Strong, The National Museum of Play, New York, tells us about Mechner who at the stage of development of his first game was still an undergraduate at the Yale University. “In 1983 he began experimenting by filming his karate instructor, Dennis, doing a variety of martial arts moves. Then he traced images from the film and used a Versawriter graphics digitizer tablet to copy the images onto the computer. On March 19, 1983, Jordan finished a test of this to see if it would work in a game he was developing, and in his diary he recorded his excitement: ‘When I saw that sketch little figure walk across the screen, looking just like Dennis, all I could say was “ALL RIGHT!”’ Jordan’s game Karateka (1985), a Japanese-themed karate game, became the best-selling title in the country and Jordan had established himself as a video game designer even before he had graduated!”
For those who remember the 8-bit game Karateka. (A new version with advanced graphics is now available for Android and iOS.)
After graduating from college Mechner bettered the rotoscoping technique he had used in his previous game and created our beloved video game, the 2-dimensional Prince of Persia.
This time it was his brother who became the medium, wearing Prince’s white attire and jumping and climbing and falling to our delight.
Making of Prince of Persia
Mechner went on to reach higher heights, continuing to work on the Prince of Persia franchise till The Sands of Time and then writing the first drafts of screenplay for the Disney movie adaption of the game. Gifted that he is, he also has graphic novels and documentary directions to his name, but to kids growing up in India even in the late 1990s there were few things “cooler” than Prince of Persia and Dave, okay, maybe Tekken and Mortal Kombat. Having carried our hero in a floppy disk from home to computer classes and back again, Prince perhaps remains so relevant a childhood memory to the writer of this post because of a torn shirt pocket — the result of pressing spacebar while a dear friend clung on to the edge of a building.