Cargo Interactive

I just happened to pass this game the other day. Prince of Persia Classic for the PS3 and Xbox 360 is a remake what is in my opinion one of the best games ever made. Jordan Mechner brought a completely new expirience to puzzle game design, inspiring a new sub-genre of platform games (to name a couple: Abe’s Oddysee, and the cinematic Another World by Eric Chahi).

I had heard that Mechner video taped his brother as a visual aide when designing his character animations. This was the key to creating fluid jumping, falling, and climbing sequences, and brought the game to life. This would be a precursor to motion capture. Here is some of that footage.

Prince of Persia Animation Reference 1985 from jordan mechner on Vimeo

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about convergence. I see it as one of the main ingredients in creativity, and we see it everywhere when we look for it.

By convergence, I mean, whenever you take two concepts and put them together to create one concept. Joseph Campbell, for example, has referred to the dragon as a serpent and an eagle. It’s a very comon property of mythical creatures: a mermaid is both a human and a fish, a centaur is both a man and a horse, pegasus is both a horse and a bird. These creatures are not a patchy mish-mash of concepts. They take the best of each half to produce a meaningful whole. Birds are associated with flying, so a creature that inherits the characteristics of the bird should fly, it shouldn’t inherit a birds legs, for example.

Sometimes meaningless hybrids are produced for the sake of confusion and horror. The Chimera is the classic example, a creature which usually is comprised of snake, lion, and goat parts. What makes the Chimera interesting is how strange the combination is executed - often starting the the prototype of a lion, then swapping out the tail for a serpent, and then having a goat’s head jutting out of the lion’s back. This certainly offends our sensibilities, and it’s meant to. So it’s clear that the choice of, let’s say, ‘ingredients’ changes the taste of a mixture.

I recently watched a number of 80s cartoon intros on youtube, for nostalgia’s sake, and I was struck by how often this method of combining ingredients is employed.