Jordan:
One of the pleasures of being a video game designer is getting to work with talented teams of artists, and to create something together that none of us could have envisioned on our own. You, as a writer, are used to working in solitude and sometimes in secrecy. What made you decide to take on this collaborative project? Did it turn out differently than you thought?

AB:
I have no idea what happened, but boy, am I glad I took it on.

I am generally suspicious of the depictions of the Middle East in much of Western popular culture and of the kinds of simplifications they tend to generate. These have cultural and political consequences. So I resisted this project at first. I also didn't want to be controlled by the marketing needs of mainstream publishing, the two-dimensionality of Hollywood, the utilitarian approach of corporate America, etc., etc., etc., etc. In other words, when I first heard of this whole project, I stereotyped it. But clearly you and Mark, First Second’s Editorial Director, had other things in mind. You just said go ahead, do what you want. I think that is really rare and quite phenomenal and a big break for me.

So I guess the question has to be reversed. What the hell made you go with me as a writer? I mean, I think it was a major risk, you really had no idea what you were getting into, what I was going to produce. The time pressure by then was intense, so you couldn't backtrack and shelve the project. You just had to go with it. The more I think about it, the crazier you guys appear.

Jordan:
I wasn’t worried about it. I never meant for the graphic novel to be faithful to the video games, or even for it to be a new, original Prince of Persia story that might be suitable for adapting into a future video game or movie sequel. If anything, my fear was that you would lean too heavily on the games and take the obvious route. I was hoping you would do something original and unexpected, write a story that could only have been conceived as a graphic novel--and you did.

One question that's always intrigued me is, are the different versions of the prince in the video games and the movie really all the same character? Over the years hundreds of artists, writers, actors, programmers, and other creative people have put their own stamp on the prince--in a sense, so has every gamer who’s picked up the controller to play a Prince of Persia game. As an archetype, the prince predates me and my Apple II by over a thousand years; his roots go back to the 1001 Nights and Shahnameh. This is the kind of philosophical question that a graphic novel can tackle, whereas movies and video games aren’t well suited for that.

AB:
I think you have a great approach to this and one that is oddly congruous with the notion of the prince, because “prince” is a role, a position that has to be filled by various people who have to live up to that image and its responsibilities. So it's one thing filled by many characters. And it's fun to think of “prince” evolving from a central role in society to a role people can now take on individually on a computer screen. After all, it is hundreds of thousands of players who are taking on and contributing their own quirks and characteristics to the role of prince, to the way it is executed or performed--everyone playing the game is a prince. So the fluidity you bring to the idea is fun and appropriate and timely--it wouldn't be half the fun if his characteristics and appearance etc. were strictly and corporately controlled and branded. It’s an open source approach to the character. Obviously one that’s worked very well, since POP is huge, globally huge.
Actually, a little while ago, I remember seeing a poster for one of the POP games in the window of a store in a small village in Ecuador. I thought Wow, this is big. It’s funny how that reach into the small village is what makes us think that something is really big, really global. Still, I thought of the mix of things: medieval Iran and princes, an American kid in New York (you), a gaming company in Canada, a small village in Ecuador... All these levels of translation and probably mistranslation, through time and space. I’m sure you've thought about this and have had similar experiences. Can you talk about this a little, maybe?

Jordan:
I guess the first time it really hit me was about 15 years ago in a village in Honduras, when my friend’s teenage cousin showed me a bootleg copy of my first game, Karateka, in a shoebox full of 51⁄4-inch floppy disks. As far as my publisher was concerned, this place wasn’t on the map, it didn’t exist, no copies of any software had been sold there nor ever could be. Yet every kid on that street had played my game.

AB:
I remember when Prince of Persia came out. I was in college and I had just sworn off computer games. I used to spend lots of money and time in arcades and bars playing games like Donkey Kong. And then with the first home computers, we got the text-based adventure games, with typed commands like “Go east,” “open door,” “pick up fluff,” and so on. The one I played incessantly instead of doing my papers was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I shared a house with five others, and one person had a computer, an IBM I think, with those monochromatic monitors, the green pixels, no graphics. We all shared that computer and had assigned times on it, especially at the end of term when everyone had to rush in a paper. The game was on a floppy disk, so we're talking paleolithic here. One night when I was trying to pull an all-nighter to finish a paper, something about Poe, I think, I did the usual. I inserted the evil floppy at around 3:33 a.m., got to the final stage of Hitchhiker’s, which I’d been stuck on for a while, and then, as I went this way and that, typing go-east, go-west commands in a half-conscious state, I fell asleep, slouching over the keyboard. I was woken up in the morning by a housemate. Instead of a three-word command to the Hitchhiker's floppy, the screen contained a long semi-coherent text about coming back from the dead (as in Poe) and going on summer vacation with Arthur Dent and the Vogons--obviously, while I dozed off, my subconscious had me type a perfect summary of my most urgent concerns. Needless to say, my paper was late, and I never cracked the final stage of the game. That's when I swore off games.

Some time later, I saw Prince of Persia--in a store in California, I think. Can you imagine, up to then all the video games I’d seen were about things like outer space, martial arts, strange simians and plumbers, or a yellow omnivore munching pixels. And then here it was, a slick video game with Persia and Prince in the title?!!! All my gaming-chastity vows were about to go out the window. But I decided to hold fast. I ran out of the store and never looked back. I have written a lot of late-night semi-coherent texts since, but I have not played a single video game. And this of course is the worst place to confess that.

So here’s a question about writing and gaming. You’re known mainly as a game developer and especially as the creator of POP, and a lot of that story is both online and in the afterword of the POP graphic novel. But you also write--you wrote the script for the POP movie and a graphic novel of your own (forthcoming from First Second), etc. How do you see yourself as a writer? How is writing for games different from writing a script from writing a graphic novel? What are your influences/preferences in literature (broadly understood)?

Jordan:
I've loved movies and graphic novels since I was a kid. In the 1970s, before the Apple II existed, my dreams were to be a writer, cartoonist, or filmmaker. Over the years, between video game projects, I spent some pretty solid chunks of time writing spec screenplays and making short films. None of those scripts got made, but it was a really good apprenticeship for writing the POP movie for Bruckheimer and Disney.

Writing for games is very different from writing for movies or graphic novels. There are surface similarities, and some of the craft does carry over--but deep down, what makes a game work has very little to do with the story. Games are made to be played, not watched or read. The danger for a game writer is to lose sight of this and to write a story that’s not really part of the game, but just sort of sits on top of it.

I love video games because they’re such a young art form, and there’s so much potential that hasn't even begun to be explored. Trying to make games more cinematic or more literary, aspiring to emulate some other medium, is really missing the point. As a game designer you can do things, achieve emotional effects in a video game that have no equivalent in a movie or in a graphic novel--and vice versa. The best Prince of Persia games are the ones that do something interesting with the video game form itself, push the envelope in a creative way, as the original game did in 1989 and Sands of Time did in 2003.

When I was learning to write screenplays, I took workshops and read a lot of books about writing. That was worthwhile up to a point, but the most essential part of a writer’s education is to absorb a ton of input--play games, see movies, read graphic novels, whatever form you’re working in, until it’s in your blood. And train yourself to become sensitive to your own subtle reactions. A movie, or a graphic novel, or a video game is such a complex thing that any attempt to analyze it rationally, systematically, will be at best incomplete and superficial. The real stuff happens at an unconscious level.

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