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BEYOND THE LEGENDARY GAME – THE
LEGEND ITSELF
 Long ago in Persia, there lived a Prince -- a man of honor,
of valor, and full of strength -- a man for his people, who lived
with them and took on their trials and hardships. And he was
loved.
His name is no longer remembered. When people speak of him,
they call him merely, 'The Prince of Persia,' as if there have
been no others, and his descendants are enjoined to live like
him, to be like him, to the ends of their days.
Long ago in Persia, there were many princes, one following another,
sometimes quick, sometimes slow, sometimes fat, clever, joyous,
and all more or less honorable. And in some of those princes
there shone the spirit of The Prince of Persia, for in Persia
time spins like a wheel, and what is to come has already happened,
and then happens again, year in and year out.
This is the story of two of those princes, and of the destiny
that threads their lives together.
Who is the Prince?
When I was twelve, I spent most of my free time drawing comics.
I dreamed of a future with Bainbridge boards, T squares, and
ink pen nibs.
Then the Apple II was invented.
A great thing about drawing comics is the intimacy of it.
Hours vanish as you sit at your drawing board, absorbed in
the characters and worlds you’re creating. Comics were
a perfect occupation for a kid inclined to daydreaming and
solitude. So were computer games in the 1980s.
I found out quickly that I liked programming games and I
liked animation—but what I loved was creating an imaginary
universe that others could lose themselves in. The communion
between game designer and player can be as personal as that
between a novelist and reader. I wanted to create games that
would not only challenge players but stir their emotions.
The Bainbridge boards went into the closet. I’d found
a new obsession.
 It
was 1985. I’d just graduated from college. I was in my
old bedroom in the town where I’d grown up: eating my
parents’ food, playing video games, and thinking about
a game I wanted to make and that I hoped Broderbund Software
would publish. I knew the kind of running, jumping, puzzle-solving
acrobatic game play I wanted. What I needed was a story.
It was Broderbund’s Gene Portwood (a former Disney animator)
who spoke the magic words: “What about Ali Baba; Sinbad?”
On that muggy, rainy August afternoon, in a single burst of
creative energy, I wrote a two-page story about a boy who sets
out to win a princess’s love by stealing an amulet from
the dungeons of an evil sultan. I didn’t stop to think,
much less do research. Ideas and vivid images poured out faster
than I could write them down. It was as if the characters had
been there all along, lying dormant, stored in a dream, and
now sprang to life—animating themselves in my head, running,
jumping, and even speaking.
I must have met them somewhere before, but where? Maybe in
some illustrated storybook I’d read as a child. Or on
late-night TV, in those days when movies were fascinating,
elusive things you couldn’t own, couldn’t freeze
in time, could only glimpse as they flitted past, having no
idea when or if the opportunity to see them might come again.
Where do stories come from? All I know is that when they do
come, it’s smart to get out of their way.
I moved to California and spent the next three years programming
the game that would be Prince of Persia. The story
line evolved, got tighter, streamlining and recombining elements.
An evil sultan became a scheming vizier, a royal amulet was
quietly dropped, a magic mirror was added.
One day I sat down at last and read The Arabian Nights.
In those pages, I met my prince and princess, sultan and vizier,
over and over in different guises. Shape-shifting, they peered
out at me from behind different personas, like the broken fragments
of a magic mirror.
Maybe the reason the land and characters of The Arabian
Nights are so perfect for a video game is because they
are themselves dreams. Peel away the layers of Western imaginings,
the Hollywood harem girls and palm trees and, yes, video
games that had fascinated my Israeli professor, and you find
. . . more layers. Reading Husain Haddawy’s excellent
1990 translation, I learned that what I’d believed
were the original unexpurgated Nights, brought to
the West by Galland, Lane, and Burton in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, are actually a hodgepodge of translation,
invention, and outright forgery that medieval Arabic scholars
are still trying to unravel. Even Haddawy’s version,
probably the truest available, is based on copies of copies
of tales that, by the time they were first written down in
the ninth or tenth century, were already older than anyone
could remember.
I hadn’t created the prince. I’d had the luck
to tap into a deep, centuries-old well of other people’s
dreams.
In 1992 a Russian writer named Victor Pelevin wrote a short
story about a Soviet government functionary who plays Prince
of Persia so much that the game starts to merge with his
reality. Set in the late 1980s, at a time when the American
computers needed to play games such as Prince of Persia were
still in short supply, the story made the game famous in Russia.
The prince assumes a thousand shapes
Given his slippery nature, it was inevitable that the prince
would escape from my control. By 1992 Prince of Persia had
become a worldwide best seller. Versions of the game were being
sold on every computer and console platform I’d heard
of and some I hadn’t. Each new publisher and development
team, in every country, put their own stamp on the graphics.
The Super Nintendo prince didn’t look quite like the
Sega Genesis prince or the Sharp X68000 prince, the prince
on the front of the box didn’t look like the prince in
the screen shots on the back, and some of them made me cringe.
I had no one to blame but myself. I’d chosen to present
my story stripped down to its bare essentials, with characters
that conveyed their personalities through gesture and action,
not words. This left plenty of space for others to fill the
void with their own imaginings.
Who is the prince? Does he have a name? How old is he? Is
he a prince to start with, or does he become one by marrying
the princess? What land is he from, who are his parents, what
is the sultan a sultan of, and what century is it anyway?
“Long ago in a certain city there lived a king . . .” The
Arabian Nights tales rarely got more specific than that
about time and place, and neither did 1980s video games.
Baghdad or Samarkand, the ninth century or the twelfth—what
did it matter so long as there was a scheming vizier, a beautiful
princess, and a palace on a moonlit night? On the 280 x 192
screen of the Apple II, where the characters’ faces
were four pixels square, such details hardly seemed to matter.
But as the 1980s became the 1990s, as video-game technology
improved, and teams of artists and engineers I would never
meet began translating Prince of Persia to platforms
with more memory and higher-resolution graphics, those questions
I’d left unanswered started to chafe.
In 1993 Broderbund published the prince’s second adventure, The
Shadow and the Flame. Hoping to preempt the proliferation
of princes and inconsistent backstories that my first game
had spawned, I’d written up what I intended to be a
definitive “bible” establishing the prince’s
past once and for all—as George Lucas had done for Star
Wars, planting the seeds that would flower in future
episodes.
Even while I was writing it, I’d had a vague sense that
it didn’t feel quite right. In hindsight, I think my
real problem was that in trying to force Prince of Persia into
the Western, Nordic epic-trilogy-struggle-between-good-and-evil
format that had worked for Lucas—and Tolkien and Wagner
before him—I’d failed to take into account the
prince’s origins as an Arabian Nights character.
Those were tales of wisps and dreams, whose nature was to spin
and embroider themselves out of nothing, only to vanish again
in the shimmering mist. In Wagner, everything is destiny. In
the Nights, anything can happen.
As it turned out, I never got the chance to complete my epic
trilogy. The big video-game sensation of 1993 was Doom,
the first 3-D shooter. The public no longer wanted 2-D platformers;
plans for a third Prince of Persia game were quietly
shelved. Six years later, Broderbund tried to catch up by releasing Prince
of Persia 3D, but the project was plagued by difficulties,
and landed not with a bang but a whimper.
It seemed that the prince’s adventures had run their
course. And, I told myself, maybe that wasn’t entirely
a bad thing. He’d traveled so far from his origins, I
hardly recognized him anymore.
In 2003, the prince got that rarest of things: a second chance.
When I joined Ubisoft Montreal as writer and game designer
of the title we hoped would revive the all-but-dead Prince
of Persia franchise, the team faced a daunting challenge.
The best-remembered title in the series, the first one, was
almost fourteen years old. In video-game years, that’s
an eternity.
Fittingly, the tale we chose to tell was about second chances. Prince
of Persia: The Sands of Time is the story of a young
warrior who is tricked by the villain into making a terrible
mistake that threatens to destroy not only his kingdom, but
the fabric of reality itself. Only through heroic effort,
helped by a princess he loves but is never quite sure whether
to trust, can he set things right.
From the original game we took an hourglass; the basic triangle
of prince, princess, and vizier; and a certain style of game
play. The rest was new. The tremendous advance in graphics
and sound technology meant that a team of talented artists
could realize the prince’s world with greater beauty
and detail than ever before.
A decade and a half after he’d first run and jumped
across an Apple II screen, the pixelly prince found his footing:
ninth-century Persia—a time of warfare and intrigue,
perfect for a tale of romance and adventure.
Doing research for Sands of Time, I picked up the Shahnameh,
the Persian Book of Kings, set in verse a thousand years ago
by the great poet Ferdosi. Reading the complete work for the
first time, in an edition beautifully illustrated with sixteenth-century
Persian miniatures, was a revelation to me.
The Shahnameh represents a different tradition from The
Arabian Nights. Its epic tales of kings and heroes are
to the East what Norse mythology is to northern Europe. A
Persian prince like the one in Sands of Time would have grown
up steeped in the oral tradition of the Shahnameh;
he would have spoken about the strength of Rustam the way
a 20-year-old soldier today might casually refer to Superman
or the Hulk. (And, in Sands of Time, he does.) But
as much as the prince aspires to resemble the noble warriors
of the Shahnameh, doomed to fulfill their heroic
destinies, he can’t quite shed the basically happy-go-lucky
nature of an Arabian Nights prince, stumbling from
one adventure into the next. It’s his inability to
resolve this conflict that gives him his particular charm.
Ubisoft followed up Sands of Time with two sequels, Warrior
Within and The Two Thrones, which gave the
prince a more ruthless, violent edge. They’re hard
at work now in Montreal crafting his next adventure, which
promises to feel closer in spirit to the romantic fantasy
of Sands of Time and of the original game.
Jerry Bruckheimer and Walt Disney Pictures are making a Prince
of Persia movie. I wrote the screenplay, but I won’t
be surprised if in his journey to the screen, the prince
once again transforms into a somewhat different shape than
I’d initially envisioned. This prince is a survivor.
In the past two decades, he’s shown himself more adaptable
and resilient than I ever expected.
Will the actor who plays the prince in the movie become the
real, definitive Prince of Persia? Will he supplant the prince
in the video games? Can so many princes coexist peacefully?
Or are they all somehow the same person?
Games to comics
In 2004 I got an e-mail from Mark Siegel, the editor of a
new publishing imprint called First Second Books. He told me
that Prince of Persia had had a special place in his
heart since the early 1990s, when he’d first played it
on a black-and-white Macintosh Classic. Would I be interested
in developing it as a graphic novel?
He didn’t know he was offering to fulfill one of my
childhood dreams.
As Mark and I got to know each other, we found out that we
had a lot in common—including a passion for the French
hardcover graphic novels called bandes dessinées.
I’d fallen in love with the work of Hugo Pratt, Enki
Bilal, and François Schuiten in my twenties, when I
spent a year in France. Their books had been a huge influence
on my video-game writing, especially The Last Express and Sands
of Time. When Mark told me that one of his missions for
First Second is to foster European-quality graphic novels in
the United States, I got even more excited.
And when artists LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland came on board,
with their rich backgrounds in children’s illustration
and Dreamworks feature animation, we were more certain than
ever that a graphic novel about the prince’s adventures
could be something special.
The question was, which prince?
The plucky Aladdin-like street urchin of the first game? The
orphan-with-a-mythic-destiny of The Shadow and the Flame? The
guilt-ridden young warrior of Sands of Time? The battle-hardened
fugitive he became in Warrior Within and The Two
Thrones? Or the prince of the Sands of Time movie—or
rather of the screenplay, which will have been rewritten many
times over by the time cameras roll?
Which one is the true Prince of Persia? All of them. And
none of them.
Our search for a writer who could encompass this paradox led
us to the mysterious and reclusive A. B. Sina.
When A. B. asked us what we expected him to write, we said
we weren’t sure, exactly, but the connection to the video
games should be deep below the surface, not evident at first
glance. We didn’t want an adaptation of any of the games
or of the movie, but a new story that would tap into the deep
wellspring of Persian myth, legend, and history from whence
the prince had arisen.
A. B. thought about it for a bit, then remarked that in the
tales of the East—from The Arabian Nights to
Sufi stories—the characters’ conflicts and relationships
tend to be with the structure of reality itself, the structure
of consciousness, rather than with individual psychological
issues as we tend to focus on in the West. He pointed out that
the struggle against destiny is the most universal of all struggles,
that it fuels the American myths and the American dream, as
well as Eastern ones.
We were off and running.
Playing video games is all about timing, so it’s not
too surprising that in every Prince of Persia story
so far, time itself has been a central motif.
What is interesting is that with each iteration, the time
frame seems to expand. The first game was confined to the hour
it took for the sands in Jaffar’s hourglass to run out. Sands
of Time took place over several days, with the menace
embodied by a different kind of hourglass. The Sands of
Time movie screenplay paints a broader canvas and takes
place over weeks. And the graphic novel spans centuries—specifically,
two parallel stories unfolding four centuries apart.
A. B. has woven a delightfully subversive tale offering us
not just one, but many Persian princes. All in their different
ways fighting wild beasts and magical creatures, falling in
love with princesses, and falling afoul of scheming viziers,
as my prince had done for at least a thousand years before
he ran and jumped through a late-summer rainstorm onto the
Apple II computer screen.
One of the possible princes in A. B. Sina’s story wonders
if he is prophesying the future, or if the future is remembering
him.
A sentiment the original Prince of Persia, wherever he is,
must surely sympathize with.
Los Angeles
October 2007
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