Jordan Mechner tells you why movies and games are different

Jordan Mechner is one of my favorite game designers. No fewer than three of his games are classics in my life: Karateka, Prince of Persia, and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I think he also did The Last Express which I never played -- ask Bob about that one.

Anyway, I thought this was a great answer in Gamasutra's Q&A with Mechner:

What are the differences between writing for a video game and writing for a film? How closely does the movie storyline correspond to the games?

If you summarize the movie in one sentence, it sounds identical to the first Sands of Time videogame, but scene by scene it's actually completely different. It has to be, because games and film are such different mediums.

On the surface they're deceptively similar -- you can watch five minutes of an action-adventure videogame and think "this could be a movie," or vice-versa -- but structurally the requirements are totally different.

Here's one example: The game kicks off with a cataclysm that basically destroys the world and turns all living creatures except for the three main characters into raging, murderous sand monsters. That was a great setup for the gameplay we had, which was "acrobatic Persian survival horror."

But if you put that setup in a film, it would be a "B" movie, and that's not the kind of movie Prince of Persia should be. Our model is classic epic, swashbuckling action-adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Zorro, and Thief of Baghdad, with humor and romance and full of memorable characters. You can't get there if you turn everybody into sand monsters on page fifteen.

He goes on to dodge a question about future games. I hope that's a sign he's going to be back doing a game soon.

Labels: design, Gamasutra, mechner

--jvm at 11:34

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