Please somebody, anyone, tell me you also keep reading it as “Rogue Princess of Persia” ! I can’t figure out why, but it keeps happening every single time I see the name in articles!
The process he eventually settled on started with Mechner using a video camera to record his brother running and jumping in a parking lot across from their high school. Once he found a take that worked, the video was played back on a TV in a dark room and the screen was photographed with a 35-millimeter film camera, frame by frame, creating roughly 35 photos of his brother in action. Mechner then traced over each photograph with a black marker and white correction fluid to create a high-contrast black and white silhouette of each pose, and then used a photocopier to assemble all of them onto a single sheet of paper that was scanned into an Apple II using a special capture card. With the poses all digitized, Mechner then painstakingly cut them all out, pixel by pixel, and used a special graphics tool to assemble them into frame animations.
Not really. It used a series of photos of the lead programmer’s brother(???) Walking, running, jumping etc, which were used to create the character sprites. Very rudimentary. But it worked.
I guess Mechner was the lead programmer in that he probably woke up and told himself "Jordan, you're gonna code some Prince of Persia today" and then he did it.
By the time someone else was involved it'd have been for porting to other platforms, at which point I think his input wasn't super frequent or close. The 80s games industry was a very weird place.
This actually looks and moves super smoothly, it's clearly the result of some really good animators deploying a ton of experience and working really closely with gameplay designers.
I love the original PoP games, but a) they're on a different genre altogether, and b) both tools and technology have come a long way.
Now, if you want to be a grumpy old man about something here, make it the fact that you can only use the stick for movement. Because THAT is worth being mad about.
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