'Everything should move you closer or further away from your goal, otherwise it's just window dressing,' he said. Mechner concluded that Prince of Persia, as it was, lacked clear goals, a visual indicator of progress, setbacks and triumphs, and human opponents blocking players from the the final goal. The response was ambivalent at first, but he was jolted toward the end of the year when he played a near-complete version of the game and found that it simply wasn't that fun. Prince of Persia's entanglement with Hollywood continued in 1988 when one of Mechner's colleagues insisted that he add combat to the game. It was at this point that Mechner got an unexpected puzzle idea and questioned what would happen if one of the game's fall-away floors fell on a trap tile below. 'I felt like I was looking at code that had been written by someone else,' he said. In May 1987, right after shooting more footage of his brother in then-publisher Broderbund's parking lot, Mechner embarked on his first 'Hollywood adventure.' He wrote a screenplay and devoted eight months to a project that had too much difficulty gaining traction, before returning to the Prince of Persia code. 'My job title was programmer, all those other things were extra.' Initially dubbed 'Thief of Baghdad' (and inspired by the film of the same name), the game continued to come together in a modular fashion, at one time incorporating a full level editor that Mechner had to persistently test, making sure users couldn't introduce game-breaking bugs. 'I felt a little guilty about it, but I was trying to keep costs down,' he said.

According to Mechner, he purchased it, recorded the necessary footage, and then returned it within a 30-day guarantee. You've heard that part, but you might not know about the fate of the camera that captured such iconic scurrying.

He filmed his brother David running about in a Reader's Digest parking lot with a VHS camera, and layered drawings on top of those movements (in a process called rotoscoping) to capture the protagonist's movements in Prince of Persia. Mechner's interests and techniques have always been embedded in cinema. While delivering his Prince of Persia postmortem during GDC earlier this month, Mechner delved into his memories, his journals (which you can read online) and his temporary departure from the game midway through development to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood. In 1985, Jordan Mechner was thinking about baggy pants, arches and columns - images that could be clearly conveyed in a low-resolution, pixelated computer game.

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