It’s been a couple of weeks since Ubisoft canceled its Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake, and fans, the developers, and actors on the project are all still reeling from the news. One person who is also reacting to it is Jordan Mechner, the creator of the original Prince of Persia, who also acted as a designer on Sands of Time back in 2003.
Mechner hasn’t been with Ubisoft in decades, and has largely left the video game industry in favor of writing books, but he still posted about the cancellation on his personal website, offering his condolences to the team.
I’d hoped my first post of the new year would celebrate The Sands of Time‘s release, but alas, that’s not in the cards. The remake’s cancellation as part of Ubisoft’s restructuring was disappointing news to all fans who’d been eagerly awaiting it, myself included.
My sympathy goes to the development team in Montreal; I can only imagine how they must feel. Having a project killed is a brutal experience. It’s an aspect of the game industry that the public doesn’t often see, but developers are all too familiar with.
A cancellation so close to release can be particularly devastating for younger team members who don’t have decades of past shipped titles on their resumé. It’s tough to suddenly absorb that the past four years of hard work you were proud of, and looking forward to seeing out in the world as your new calling card, will now never see daylight. Words like loss and grieving might seem exaggerated, but artists put their hearts into their work. Memories of nights and weekends spent in studio crunch instead of at home with loved ones, sacrifices that felt worth it at the time, only add to the pain retrospectively once their object ceases to exist.
I love games — playing them, making them — but news like this makes me feel especially grateful that for the past five years, I’ve been focused on making books and art. The production budget of a graphic novel is minuscule; the creative freedom of trusting that what I write and draw will reach readers directly is priceless.
Honestly, good for him for getting out and finding something less soul-crushing than game development right now. He touches on something significant here in that people who are still early on in their game dev career will be especially affected by this, as they likely spent years working on something they can’t include in their portfolio, and Ubisoft seems dead set on making sure no one sees what the team was working on by scrubbing leaked art and screenshots from the internet. Eman Ayaz, an actor who is believed to have played a role in the remake, recently released a video lamenting how her work on the project was one of her best performances, but now it will never see the light of day.
The Sands of Time remake cancellation came as part of a larger restructuring at Ubisoft, which resulted in the shelving of six games and the delaying of seven others.
