PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
It resulted in, for perhaps the first time in videogames, what Mechner rightfully calls “the illusion of life”
Four years before the very first issue of this magazine (happy 20-squared birthday, Edge!), a game was released that arguably represented the original seed of videogames’ turn to the ‘cinematic’. The remarkably fluid and lifelike animation of Jordan Mechner’s Prince Of Persia (1989) promised a humanist future of videogames that in some ways has still not arrived.
In a brilliant and complex new graphic novel-slash-memoir, Replay: Memoir Of An Uprooted Family (St Martin’s Press), Mechner draws and explains in detail how he brought the prince to life: filming his brother jumping and climbing, and then photographing every third frame of that VHS tape with a 35mm stills camera, hand-tracing over those photographs with a pen and Tipp-Ex, and then digitising every image one by one. This process resulted in, for perhaps the first time in videogames, what Mechner rightfully calls “the illusion of life”.