What Does Prince Of Persia And Shadow Of The Colossus Have In Common?

Added 01/05/2009 by Se

If you have never played last-gen's Shadow of The Colosuss (PS2) do yourself a favor, run as fast as you can to the nearest videogame retailer and see if you can still purchase a copy.  New or used it doesn't matter.  Well, if you have played the game and Ubisoft's recently released Prince of Persia, you may have noticed some similiarities between the two games as MTVmultiplayer's Steve Totilo did.  Totilo talks about how both games use climbing, scarce instances of violence, a guiding light for navigation, death, love, and resurrection to immerse gamers into their respective worlds.  His blog then poses the question is PoP paying high homage to SoTC, or just stealing its ideas?

Word must have made the rounds to the Prince of Persia team, as producer Ben Mattes responded to Totilo saying, "Many of the similarities you pointed out are coincidental, but I certainly don't mind the comparison. We've always been very open about the huge influences that Ico, SoTC and Okami had on us during our development."

But Mattes doesn't write-off any inspiration that they may have lifted received from SoTC as he states, "SoTC was a big inspiration for us, but mostly with the intention of making the boss battles epic and emotional - something they succeeded in masterfully and that we only touched the surface of (in terms of emotional connection on the part of the player)." 

There you have it, no fire just smoke.  I have played both games (which I encourage you all to do if you haven't done so) and not once at any time during Prince of Persia was I reminded of Shadow of The Colossus.  While I can see the similarities drawn by Totilo, it's not exactly something Captain Obvious would've been able to point out with his super observation powers.  I mean to draw some of the simple similarities between both games, and pose the question that the fresher game may have ripped-off the older game; is like saying all games that have spaceships and shooting aliens in space, copied Space Invaders.