It’s easy to point to the late 90s and early 2000s as the collective “moment” when videogames truly began harboring cinematic ambitions. That third dimension brought with it a whole new bag of tricks, and no one was shy about dumping them out. We might be tempted to blame that generation for some modern triple-A trends, but of course, this desire is about as old as videogames themselves. Even if we don’t count the evocative text adventures of the 70s and 80s, the parser-based adventure games pioneered by Sierra and the then-titled “LucasFilm Games,” early CRPGs, game adaptations of movie scenes like The Empire Strikes Back on Atari, and ventures like the barely interactive Dragon’s Lair all sought to marry the theatrical qualities of more prestigious media with games’ unique ability to put you in the driver’s seat. Some of these efforts paid off in fulfilling their own respective goals, but what they couldn’t and often still rarely accomplish is a cinematic cadence and consistency. Playing The Secret of Monkey Island, it’s impossible to truly feel that everything happening at all times carries real dramatic weight. Action games are almost always predicated on a fundamental asymmetry between the player character and everything else — goombas can’t interact with fire flowers — or otherwise bespoke elements whose rules don’t apply to the rest of the game world — Ocarina of Time’s eye switches are only affected by arrows, and cannot interfere or be interfered with by any other means. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of design, I’ve singled out a couple of the greats to make that as clear as possible, but it’s this general lack of internal consistency across the medium which makes 1989’s Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia stand out.
Whether or not you feel that developing a “dramatic game system” is a reasonable or misguided goal, or if “verisimilitude” and “internal consistency” are necessary in achieving it, there’s a level of cohesion to the game’s storytelling and mechanics which I can only describe in these terms. Prince of Persia doesn’t have an incredibly substantive plot (escape the dungeon and save the princess), but the confidence with which it (mostly) wordlessly conveys and provokes the player to experience that story still impresses. It’s in the way the game doesn’t waver in its visual perspective, always presenting the world in profile even during cutscenes, never showing anything which doesn’t have direct gameplay implications. The consistency of its visual language in and outside of playable moments gives weight and narrative credibility to the time spent playing, there is no strict divide between “story” and “gameplay” moments. There are only two truly notable caveats to Prince of Persia’s otherwise spotless coherence, but both are purposeful and arguably necessary for the game to function (respawning after death, and switching between the modes of general movement and combat). Its more widely lauded successor, Eric Chahi’s Another World, though great, is stitched out of setpieces whose solutions have no bearing on the rest of the game, but Prince of Persia never introduces any rule that won’t become relevant or useful ever again. Each space is a system of interlocking parts, where the drama emerges directly from the fact that you’re given almost perfect information about the consequences of engaging with those parts.
Sounds like a pretty clear-cut platforming videogame, but there are some important distinctions to keep in mind. In the shoes of our rotoscoped hero, even the simplest geometric level design must be approached as though it were a real space. if you want to descend a platform, you must step carefully to the edge so as to avoid falling off, turn around, lower yourself down using your hands, and let go of the ledge to drop to your feet. If you want to leap further than the width of a single tile, you’re gonna need a running start to do it. Spike traps can be tiptoed across, but running or jumping will create the force needed for them to pierce through. Failing to take into account the weight and durability of your fragile human body will always result in a gruesome death, but you’re not the only one for whom that applies. Guards litter the hallways of the castle, and all of them are susceptible to the same grisly horrors as the player character. The imposing guillotines, pressure plates and falling tiles can all be used against your adversaries, they’re even as vulnerable to fall damage as you are. Prince of Persia’s environments are built out of only a handful of elements, but each one is an unalienable fact of the setting, and must be treated as such. It’s not the layouts of these levels which create that all-important sense of verisimilitude, fun as they can be to explore and find new routes around, but the consistency and believability of their laws.
The sheer amount of danger lurking around every corner and crevice coupled with the level of commitment required of the player’s inputs means it’s tempting to take a very slow and methodical approach to Prince of Persia, but we can’t have that. For it to succeed as a dramatic game, every moment has to carry a degree of real importance. To reference the canon Mechner was drawing from, one of Indiana Jones’ most prominent filmmaking techniques is “the ticking clock.” Rewatch any of those movies, and you’ll find that there’s almost always some manner of time bomb or closing door in the background of an action scene, which applies an underlying layer of tension to every fist-swinging, heart-pounding moment of struggle. It’s no less effective in an interactive setting. The game is filled with both short and long-term ticking clocks, whether it takes the form of a pressure plate which opens a gate just long enough to slip by after a death-defying leap, or the Grand Vizier’s massive hourglass which contextualizes the time limit looming over the whole game. These push the player to be bold in their performance, encouraging them to take risks in places they otherwise wouldn’t. They heighten the threat of obstacles and draw the player even more deeply into every moment of committed action. Win or lose, they’ll only have one hour to reach the end. That in itself also contributes to the game’s “cinematic” sensibility, its length makes it as digestible as a short film, and the level design is as tightly paced as any action movie. The designs of its stages are clearly considered with an eye for that hour-long playtime — their battles and sizes grow longest in the middle before becoming a triumphant string of victories leading to the final confrontation. It helps that there are no menus or extraneous elements involved. Instead, each area transitions directly into the next. Once mastered, the performance of that arc becomes a thing of beauty.
The game comes together to form an experience almost as nail-biting to spectate as it is to play, but that can’t be attributed to its adherence to these design principles alone. Rather, it’s the way it plays with the expectations those rules create which elevates Prince of Persia beyond its successors in the “cinematic platformer” genre. The game’s heart lies in the recurring “Shadow Man” who disrupts and undermines the player’s efforts at every turn, stepping on pressure plates to shut doors and stealing potions which are meant to increase the player’s maximum health. It lies in the surprise skeleton battle, the magic mirror, the levitation potion, and a penultimate encounter that had to have inspired Final Fantasy IV. It takes every opportunity to use its established rules for dramatic purposes, and never deviates from that goal. As Noah Caldwell-Gervais recently said of Sekiro, Prince of Persia is “cinematic in a way that cutscene-driven games have only ever gestured towards,” and it rallied every ounce of the Apple II to do it.
Whether or not you feel that developing a “dramatic game system” is a reasonable or misguided goal, or if “verisimilitude” and “internal consistency” are necessary in achieving it, there’s a level of cohesion to the game’s storytelling and mechanics which I can only describe in these terms. Prince of Persia doesn’t have an incredibly substantive plot (escape the dungeon and save the princess), but the confidence with which it (mostly) wordlessly conveys and provokes the player to experience that story still impresses. It’s in the way the game doesn’t waver in its visual perspective, always presenting the world in profile even during cutscenes, never showing anything which doesn’t have direct gameplay implications. The consistency of its visual language in and outside of playable moments gives weight and narrative credibility to the time spent playing, there is no strict divide between “story” and “gameplay” moments. There are only two truly notable caveats to Prince of Persia’s otherwise spotless coherence, but both are purposeful and arguably necessary for the game to function (respawning after death, and switching between the modes of general movement and combat). Its more widely lauded successor, Eric Chahi’s Another World, though great, is stitched out of setpieces whose solutions have no bearing on the rest of the game, but Prince of Persia never introduces any rule that won’t become relevant or useful ever again. Each space is a system of interlocking parts, where the drama emerges directly from the fact that you’re given almost perfect information about the consequences of engaging with those parts.
Sounds like a pretty clear-cut platforming videogame, but there are some important distinctions to keep in mind. In the shoes of our rotoscoped hero, even the simplest geometric level design must be approached as though it were a real space. if you want to descend a platform, you must step carefully to the edge so as to avoid falling off, turn around, lower yourself down using your hands, and let go of the ledge to drop to your feet. If you want to leap further than the width of a single tile, you’re gonna need a running start to do it. Spike traps can be tiptoed across, but running or jumping will create the force needed for them to pierce through. Failing to take into account the weight and durability of your fragile human body will always result in a gruesome death, but you’re not the only one for whom that applies. Guards litter the hallways of the castle, and all of them are susceptible to the same grisly horrors as the player character. The imposing guillotines, pressure plates and falling tiles can all be used against your adversaries, they’re even as vulnerable to fall damage as you are. Prince of Persia’s environments are built out of only a handful of elements, but each one is an unalienable fact of the setting, and must be treated as such. It’s not the layouts of these levels which create that all-important sense of verisimilitude, fun as they can be to explore and find new routes around, but the consistency and believability of their laws.
The sheer amount of danger lurking around every corner and crevice coupled with the level of commitment required of the player’s inputs means it’s tempting to take a very slow and methodical approach to Prince of Persia, but we can’t have that. For it to succeed as a dramatic game, every moment has to carry a degree of real importance. To reference the canon Mechner was drawing from, one of Indiana Jones’ most prominent filmmaking techniques is “the ticking clock.” Rewatch any of those movies, and you’ll find that there’s almost always some manner of time bomb or closing door in the background of an action scene, which applies an underlying layer of tension to every fist-swinging, heart-pounding moment of struggle. It’s no less effective in an interactive setting. The game is filled with both short and long-term ticking clocks, whether it takes the form of a pressure plate which opens a gate just long enough to slip by after a death-defying leap, or the Grand Vizier’s massive hourglass which contextualizes the time limit looming over the whole game. These push the player to be bold in their performance, encouraging them to take risks in places they otherwise wouldn’t. They heighten the threat of obstacles and draw the player even more deeply into every moment of committed action. Win or lose, they’ll only have one hour to reach the end. That in itself also contributes to the game’s “cinematic” sensibility, its length makes it as digestible as a short film, and the level design is as tightly paced as any action movie. The designs of its stages are clearly considered with an eye for that hour-long playtime — their battles and sizes grow longest in the middle before becoming a triumphant string of victories leading to the final confrontation. It helps that there are no menus or extraneous elements involved. Instead, each area transitions directly into the next. Once mastered, the performance of that arc becomes a thing of beauty.
The game comes together to form an experience almost as nail-biting to spectate as it is to play, but that can’t be attributed to its adherence to these design principles alone. Rather, it’s the way it plays with the expectations those rules create which elevates Prince of Persia beyond its successors in the “cinematic platformer” genre. The game’s heart lies in the recurring “Shadow Man” who disrupts and undermines the player’s efforts at every turn, stepping on pressure plates to shut doors and stealing potions which are meant to increase the player’s maximum health. It lies in the surprise skeleton battle, the magic mirror, the levitation potion, and a penultimate encounter that had to have inspired Final Fantasy IV. It takes every opportunity to use its established rules for dramatic purposes, and never deviates from that goal. As Noah Caldwell-Gervais recently said of Sekiro, Prince of Persia is “cinematic in a way that cutscene-driven games have only ever gestured towards,” and it rallied every ounce of the Apple II to do it.