The first two POP games had a massive following, but that was then and this is now. They don't seem to have any trouble with menu bars, but I'm hopeless with them." I'm sort of a check on them, because many on the team are very good core gamers and they play games like Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy all the way through. It's a trick to keep people from getting disoriented. Some of the people on the team can use both hands simultaneously all over the keyboard, but that's personally my limit and that's what we had on Prince 2, so we're trying to stick to that. So the design challenge that we're still wrestling with is: how do you keep it to basically four directional arrow keys and two keys - because that's all I can do personally. And making the leap between them is a tricky business, as Jordan admits: "Well, the hard thing about 3D, of course, is you need at least a couple of extra keys.
So I thought, 'Hey, Jeez, twist my arm.'"Ĭlearly, a side-on platformer and a full 3D extravaganza are two very different prospects. But they really convinced me that they wanted to push it further than it's ever been before and use the Prince Of Persia to do that. There's no sense in doing it if it's just going to be like 'take the Tomb Raider engine and slap a turban on if. "The opportunity was there and it was kind of intriguing because Andy Peterson, the producer, had a really gung-ho bunch of artists and programmers who wanted to give it the full treatment - the best graphics, the best 3D. We tracked down its creator, Jordan Mechner, at the recent E3 show in Atlanta and asked him just that. It's been five years since the last outing though, so why resurrect it now? The latest to earn the 3D tag is Prince Of Persia, which by a stroke of luck is actually the third game in the series. In fact, it always has been, it's just that games are finally catching up.