PRINCE OF PERSIA

ED MAGNIN CONVERTED JORDAN MECHNER’S CLASSIC TO THE GAME BOY

How did you end up working on the Game Boy and coding Prince Of Persia?

My boss woke up one day and decided to swap me from the NES to the Game Boy. It was the best thing he ever did. The Game Boy represented freedom for me. When I’d go to GDC or E3 I could carry my work in my pocket and walk up to a booth and show it to someone, no appointment necessary. I did Caesars Palace first, then Prince Of Persia.

Were you a fan of Jordan Mechner’s original game?

I quickly became one. I played the PC version but knowing he did the original on the Apple II was even more impressive. I played the PC version constantly to make sure ours worked as well or better on the Game Boy.

Did you have any say in the cart size selected for the game, and was it a struggle to make it fit?

Publishers were cheap. They didn’t want to pay for a larger cartridge or a battery to back-up RAM in the cartridge. It would have cost a dollar or two, but then multiplied by their mark-up that would have added five or six dollars to the price of the game. If you look back, only Nintendo and maybe one or two publishers ever released games on larger cartridges or with memory backup – the rest of us had to make convoluted password save systems. And yes, it was a struggle to make it fit.

You later did a second version of the game for the Game Boy Color. Did the updated hardware make for an easier conversion?

Not really. In addition to adding colour, Nintendo required developers to add additional levels or features, so we added a training level. At the very end of the project the Nintendo colour police (Club Wario) asked us to make every level a different colour. We had worked hard to make the palace and dungeon levels look really good, so we resisted changing colours. On a conference call I asked Nintendo, ‘Do you want it to look good or do you want obvious use of colour?’ They answered, ‘Obvious use of colour.’ That was it. We had to give them what they wanted or they wouldn’t let us publish it.