You've combined my two favourite things into one article: animation and video games. The amount of effort to rotoscope characters into digital format before such tools were properly invented is staggering, but it holds up even today in its fluidity. Another great read.
Thank you! Glad you liked the piece. It's really kind of mind-boggling what Mechner did to make this happen. As we were researching, it took us a while even to conceptualize how it all worked! But the results he got definitely speak for themselves.
My first ever computer was an Apple IIE in 1982 & although I was interested in programming my efforts never led to making games apart from copying lines of hexadecimal code for simple games from magazines (tedious!).
But it did lead to commercial applications later on Atari 1040’s & Amiga 2000’s - in fact I used my Apple to create an image for something I later animated traditionally for a “Doritos” commercial directed by Russell Mulcahy, mainly to see what level of quality I could achieve with its limited palette and by using a lightpen to draw directly on a monitor screen.
Fun times at the cutting edge of home computing..:)
Ah, thanks for sharing these stories! That era of early personal computers, and the way they interacted with animation, is fascinating to us. The earliest computer for either of us was a Commodore 64, long after its prime -- a lot of good memories attached to that. Seeing what folks like Mechner achieved on the old hardware is pretty incredible.
Thanks for these links! We hadn't seen the bible for the second game yet. Mechner has done incredible work preserving and documenting that era -- really enjoyed researching this subject!
Games like this helped cement my lifelong interest in game development and design. I would credit "Earthworm Jim" being another important game when it came to animation along with "Dragon's Lair". With "Earthworm Jim", I remember being blown away how they got traditional hand-drawn animation into a video game, and they went with a cool "Animotion" method of hand drawing and scanning cels with a Xerox machine into a computer, where they could optimize them for computers.
That's new to us! Awesome to learn. We love seeing games bring more traditional animation ideas into the mix, beyond purely functional stuff and straightforward mocap. Quite a few of Nintendo's old games still have strong animation because they followed the classic route (possibly related to the company's early ties to Toei).
This is amazing! How have I never heard of this game?? Though I was born in the late 90's so I guess I missed the boat. Only Prince of Persia I knew was the one for the GameCube.
Thank you! And it looks like the original Prince of Persia isn't really available from the online stores, weirdly enough. There are dozens of different ports, but a pretty safe bet is the DOS version that's playable in-browser on the Internet Archive. The emulation isn't perfect (it's slightly too slow), but it gives you the basic idea: https://archive.org/details/PERSIA_VGA
That was so weird seeing the videos of his brother and karate teacher. Brought back memories!
It's funny seeing him say the teachers running came out poorly because I think it was a good job, his karate teacher just has terrible running form. Lol
Omg omg omg I really really love this game's animation! I first played it in a DOS emulation on my dad's laptop when I was like 13 (which was about 8 years ago). Since then, I fell in love with it, I had done my bit of research once, so it was very nice to fall back into this rabbit hole :)
It's a great game! And still some of our favorite animation in any game we've seen. Rotoscoping gets a bad rap (and it can definitely be used poorly) but PoP is an example of how exciting and creative it can be. Glad you enjoyed the piece!
Excellent stuff. I absolutely adore the innovations and limitations video game animation has created and faced in the time it's been around. Great to see coverage here!
Thanks a ton! We don't cover a lot of game animation here and weren't sure whether folks would be interested, but the response to this one has been amazing -- definitely not ruling out more in the future.
Mechner is a really talented guy. His graphic novel Templar took us by surprise some years ago -- not many people can so seamlessly switch between comics and games and do them both so well!
Wonderful memories! Playing on DOS, I used to pause the game during a big action and then press a key to see the action developing frame by frame. Seeing the details of the animation was fascinating... especially during the gory sequences, I must admit. 😅
Haha, that's really cool! The motion in this game is still mesmerizing to watch after all this time. Reading reviews from the era to research this piece, basically all of them raved about the animation, which is very understandable.
Even though I haven't played the game, its legend lives on (in spite of that movie lol).
As I often write here, I love the passion you guys put into every piece, helping me discover new artworks, new artists, and new themes to explore.
It's not always easy to keep up, mostly because I'm not familiar with some of the techniques and tools mentioned, but it also helps me expand my knowledge and improve my English skills.
Sorry it took us so long to respond -- the past week has been crazy. Thank you for this wonderful comment! It made us happy to read. Super glad you're enjoying the newsletter!
Just goes to show how important art is to human existence, that even the most technical of things can be solved with artistic ideas!
And rotoscope has got to be one of my most favorite forms of animation! It’s got both a practical use and an artistic use!
One of my top favorite examples of the latter is Richard Linklater’s Waking Life! It’s very low-key in tone, but the rotoscope gives it such a dreamlike, ethereal experience, which just supplements the philosophical discussions spread throughout it! Such an amazing film!
Once again, thank you for a very interesting read! I always learn something new and exciting from you guys!
Happy you enjoyed it! We always appreciate the kind comments. And rotoscoping is a really effective tool in the right hands. Beyond the classics like Snow White and The Snow Queen, another of our favorite examples is When the Day Breaks from 1999 -- it's super creative with the technique.
Prince of Persia was one of the first games I've ever played and even though it's almost 30 years since then, I can still remember, with complete clarity, each frame of the titular character's movements. Seeing those shots of Mechner's brother line up with those exact frames from your memory is a pretty surreal feeling.
Another cool thing about this game was that it was not intended to have any combat. When Mechner decided to add combat halfway through development, he ran into a problem: the Apple II's puny memory meant that there was barely any memory for enemy characters.
To get around this, he came up with "mirror man", an enemy that would look like the prince and fight him. It was a pretty neat idea and saved up on memory too since it would use the prince's animations. Led to some pretty interesting encounters too. A good example of how limitations can breed creativity.
Eventually however, he found a way to free up some memory and include regular enemies alongside mirror man, but still, I think the point stands.
Thanks so much for the kind words! Glad you liked it (and glad we could share some of the process behind the game).
The creation of the shadow prince from the mirror is really fascinating -- we came across that as well while researching. One of our favorite moments in PoP is when the shadow steals a potion from the player.
That whole character is a pretty brilliant idea, and a great example of Mechner's approach to storytelling in the game. He told Edge that "the story has twists and turns and lots of characters – the guards, the shadow prince, the white mouse – but it’s a story you play, not a story that’s told to you." We love that. And, like you wrote, so much of it came from the limitations of the Apple II!
While reading this, I expected you would bring up Eadweard Muybridge because a lot of these frames of an actor running reminded me Muybridge's films of athletes. It looks like the developers took some inspirations from him.
Muybridge did come up in Mechner's journals, actually! After figuring out PoP's digitization setup, he used Muybridge's shots of a running horse as the original test run for it. Not sure whether the influence went beyond that or not, but it's really cool that Muybridge's work was still helping animators in practical ways so many years later.
Thanks a ton! Really glad you enjoyed the piece. We also like Another World from that same era -- it has some cool rotoscoping of its own, even if it's not PoP-level animation.
You've combined my two favourite things into one article: animation and video games. The amount of effort to rotoscope characters into digital format before such tools were properly invented is staggering, but it holds up even today in its fluidity. Another great read.
Thank you! Glad you liked the piece. It's really kind of mind-boggling what Mechner did to make this happen. As we were researching, it took us a while even to conceptualize how it all worked! But the results he got definitely speak for themselves.
My first ever computer was an Apple IIE in 1982 & although I was interested in programming my efforts never led to making games apart from copying lines of hexadecimal code for simple games from magazines (tedious!).
But it did lead to commercial applications later on Atari 1040’s & Amiga 2000’s - in fact I used my Apple to create an image for something I later animated traditionally for a “Doritos” commercial directed by Russell Mulcahy, mainly to see what level of quality I could achieve with its limited palette and by using a lightpen to draw directly on a monitor screen.
Fun times at the cutting edge of home computing..:)
Ah, thanks for sharing these stories! That era of early personal computers, and the way they interacted with animation, is fascinating to us. The earliest computer for either of us was a Commodore 64, long after its prime -- a lot of good memories attached to that. Seeing what folks like Mechner achieved on the old hardware is pretty incredible.
I think those pre-cleanup Karateka frames would look great side-by-side on a black T-shirt, Muybridge style
EDIT: and the mid-jump shot of the prince feels kinda like the Air Jordan logo, it's just missing a basketball.
It does have a kind of Air Jordan feel! We love it as a cover image for Mechner's book -- super iconic.
There's also this reference footage:
https://youtu.be/0vG403uFdYc?si=Zzt270biAitA9c2r
And a Design Bible:
https://www.popot.org/documentation/documents/1991-08-08_PoP2_Design_Bible.pdf
Thanks for these links! We hadn't seen the bible for the second game yet. Mechner has done incredible work preserving and documenting that era -- really enjoyed researching this subject!
Games like this helped cement my lifelong interest in game development and design. I would credit "Earthworm Jim" being another important game when it came to animation along with "Dragon's Lair". With "Earthworm Jim", I remember being blown away how they got traditional hand-drawn animation into a video game, and they went with a cool "Animotion" method of hand drawing and scanning cels with a Xerox machine into a computer, where they could optimize them for computers.
That's new to us! Awesome to learn. We love seeing games bring more traditional animation ideas into the mix, beyond purely functional stuff and straightforward mocap. Quite a few of Nintendo's old games still have strong animation because they followed the classic route (possibly related to the company's early ties to Toei).
This is amazing! How have I never heard of this game?? Though I was born in the late 90's so I guess I missed the boat. Only Prince of Persia I knew was the one for the GameCube.
What's the easiest way to play this today?
Thank you! And it looks like the original Prince of Persia isn't really available from the online stores, weirdly enough. There are dozens of different ports, but a pretty safe bet is the DOS version that's playable in-browser on the Internet Archive. The emulation isn't perfect (it's slightly too slow), but it gives you the basic idea: https://archive.org/details/PERSIA_VGA
That was so weird seeing the videos of his brother and karate teacher. Brought back memories!
It's funny seeing him say the teachers running came out poorly because I think it was a good job, his karate teacher just has terrible running form. Lol
Omg omg omg I really really love this game's animation! I first played it in a DOS emulation on my dad's laptop when I was like 13 (which was about 8 years ago). Since then, I fell in love with it, I had done my bit of research once, so it was very nice to fall back into this rabbit hole :)
It's a great game! And still some of our favorite animation in any game we've seen. Rotoscoping gets a bad rap (and it can definitely be used poorly) but PoP is an example of how exciting and creative it can be. Glad you enjoyed the piece!
Excellent stuff. I absolutely adore the innovations and limitations video game animation has created and faced in the time it's been around. Great to see coverage here!
Thanks a ton! We don't cover a lot of game animation here and weren't sure whether folks would be interested, but the response to this one has been amazing -- definitely not ruling out more in the future.
I read replay and it's awesome... period :)
Mechner is a really talented guy. His graphic novel Templar took us by surprise some years ago -- not many people can so seamlessly switch between comics and games and do them both so well!
Wonderful memories! Playing on DOS, I used to pause the game during a big action and then press a key to see the action developing frame by frame. Seeing the details of the animation was fascinating... especially during the gory sequences, I must admit. 😅
Haha, that's really cool! The motion in this game is still mesmerizing to watch after all this time. Reading reviews from the era to research this piece, basically all of them raved about the animation, which is very understandable.
This read was such a delight!
Even though I haven't played the game, its legend lives on (in spite of that movie lol).
As I often write here, I love the passion you guys put into every piece, helping me discover new artworks, new artists, and new themes to explore.
It's not always easy to keep up, mostly because I'm not familiar with some of the techniques and tools mentioned, but it also helps me expand my knowledge and improve my English skills.
Long live the Animation Obsessive Newsletter!
Sorry it took us so long to respond -- the past week has been crazy. Thank you for this wonderful comment! It made us happy to read. Super glad you're enjoying the newsletter!
Just goes to show how important art is to human existence, that even the most technical of things can be solved with artistic ideas!
And rotoscope has got to be one of my most favorite forms of animation! It’s got both a practical use and an artistic use!
One of my top favorite examples of the latter is Richard Linklater’s Waking Life! It’s very low-key in tone, but the rotoscope gives it such a dreamlike, ethereal experience, which just supplements the philosophical discussions spread throughout it! Such an amazing film!
Once again, thank you for a very interesting read! I always learn something new and exciting from you guys!
Happy you enjoyed it! We always appreciate the kind comments. And rotoscoping is a really effective tool in the right hands. Beyond the classics like Snow White and The Snow Queen, another of our favorite examples is When the Day Breaks from 1999 -- it's super creative with the technique.
Banger of an article here, guys.
Prince of Persia was one of the first games I've ever played and even though it's almost 30 years since then, I can still remember, with complete clarity, each frame of the titular character's movements. Seeing those shots of Mechner's brother line up with those exact frames from your memory is a pretty surreal feeling.
Another cool thing about this game was that it was not intended to have any combat. When Mechner decided to add combat halfway through development, he ran into a problem: the Apple II's puny memory meant that there was barely any memory for enemy characters.
To get around this, he came up with "mirror man", an enemy that would look like the prince and fight him. It was a pretty neat idea and saved up on memory too since it would use the prince's animations. Led to some pretty interesting encounters too. A good example of how limitations can breed creativity.
Eventually however, he found a way to free up some memory and include regular enemies alongside mirror man, but still, I think the point stands.
Thanks so much for the kind words! Glad you liked it (and glad we could share some of the process behind the game).
The creation of the shadow prince from the mirror is really fascinating -- we came across that as well while researching. One of our favorite moments in PoP is when the shadow steals a potion from the player.
That whole character is a pretty brilliant idea, and a great example of Mechner's approach to storytelling in the game. He told Edge that "the story has twists and turns and lots of characters – the guards, the shadow prince, the white mouse – but it’s a story you play, not a story that’s told to you." We love that. And, like you wrote, so much of it came from the limitations of the Apple II!
While reading this, I expected you would bring up Eadweard Muybridge because a lot of these frames of an actor running reminded me Muybridge's films of athletes. It looks like the developers took some inspirations from him.
Muybridge did come up in Mechner's journals, actually! After figuring out PoP's digitization setup, he used Muybridge's shots of a running horse as the original test run for it. Not sure whether the influence went beyond that or not, but it's really cool that Muybridge's work was still helping animators in practical ways so many years later.
God damn that was a good read.
Still remember being blown away by the movement in prince of Persia. Flashback was another good one that followed.
I love how he thought he was making the best game ever made. The thrill and excitement... Even though Quake ended up being the best game ever made.
Thanks a ton! Really glad you enjoyed the piece. We also like Another World from that same era -- it has some cool rotoscoping of its own, even if it's not PoP-level animation.