#Prince of percia comic book professional

This strikes me as rather analogous to my own play with Mechner's original game, so encouraging of obsession with activity within segments. Sequences can stretch and squash time, with layouts evoking (or merely depicting) space, thereby affording the artist many ways in which to guide a character (or the reader) through an environment. You see, I think the comics form has long ago proven itself excellent at processing movement across its oft-segmented panels and pages. Heaven knows my experience with Mechner's game put a wholly different brand of anticipation into me. Everything is very literate in this book, which may seem odd in reference to the not terribly elevated standards of video game comics, but this is the same publisher that set its last licensed book apart by having Eddie Campbell convert an unproduced screenplay into something vividly uneven, so maybe expectations ought to be adjusted. Water too, but in the manner of literary metaphor. Time is also a major concern for this new, 208-page official licensed comic from First Second. In the end, I think I got stuck in Mechner's temporal cement, seeing his work not as worldbuilding but a study in activity: narcissism by way of avatar, maybe, but I find it hard to fault a game that gave so many their first peek into a credible, virtual reflecting pond. And while I can watch videos of play whenever I want, when I think back to it I can only see running and heaving, ascent and decent, all of it frantic, a struggle against time. It's a very tactile game, in that your character moves with some real weight through an environment liable to break away (or at least sink into the floor so as to trigger a helpful gate!) at any time. No, I vividly recall movement, in both the scampering and scrambling of the player's character and the visual clatter and jolt of the game's many spiked traps and collapsing floors. It doesn't really pop for me at all as a 'world,' not on recollection.

The new division of 'levels' was glued with time you have an hour (as in an actual, at-your-chair realtime hour) to save the day, effectively replacing the spatial with the temporal as the game's primary means of evoking a wider, fantastical life.įunny then that none of that is what makes Prince of Persia stick in my memory.

You're a young man in a dungeon, and you've got to amble and hustle and leap to make your way up, down and around each level map, all of which are 'levels' in a palace you're invading so as to (again) save a lady love from some fuckwit. I always liked that better than the heroic end, although I guess it begs the question as to why the girl needed to be rescued in the first place.īut it was 1989's Prince of Persia that cemented Mechner's reputation. It was a hard game, even sporting an infamous alternate ending wherein the lady love you're striding to rescue cracks your neck with her foot if you're so rude as to approach the romantic finale in your combat stance. All of its primeval cut scenes are 'in-game,' every location you see can eventually be visited, and every character you glimpse can ultimately kick your ass. Indeed, it was perhaps one of the first games to use non-interactive graphics in the middle of play as a means of substantively suggesting the possibility of life away from the player's viewpoint, and thus foster a greater desire to explore a teeming virtual world (er, however much you can 'explore' a rigid left-to-right map).

#Prince of percia comic book professional

It's possible I first ran into some variation of Mechner's 1984 professional debut, Karateka, which remains striking in its attention to character animation and its holistic, cinematic grasp of the playfield, a left-to-right plane with you on the left, the villains on the right, and the viewpoint occasionally wiping or cutting from one point (your play) to another (programmed enemy activities) in order to create suspense, or maybe just a sense of life.

Games might as well have dropped from the sun, so downplayed was the human element in that new and risen morning.Įventually, I got a clue. I'd never really known what a game designer did back then - all the games I'd liked in the '80s seemed to come from Japan, and half their credits were laid out in the jaunty patois of NES coding, like excerpts from an especially frivolous medieval epic presenting the lineage of cartridge kings in a forgotten tongue: The Opus of Yuki's Papa. I can't recall when I first played a Jordan Mechner computer game it was probably on a video game console, actually, since my old Tandy 1000 was never much good for play.