Jordan Mechner made Prince of Persia for the Apple II in 1989. Today, it's a movie with a $150 million budget. At a talk in the Game Developers Conference in China, Mechner revealed the video he used to help sell the idea of a movie to Jerry Bruckheimer and the folks at Disney who control the purse strings.

...the game marketing trailers were very specific about certain story points that weren't in the movie (freeze, fast-forward, sand monsters, visions). Co-producer John August and I didn't want to confuse the execs by showing them a different story from the one we were pitching.

It took me a week to cut on Final Cut Express, in late 2003. Assembling a trailer from existing PS2 game footage was an editing challenge, because key scenes, locations and characters from the movie didn't exist. So rather than attempt to explicitly tell the story of the movie in the trailer, I set out to convey the kind of movie it would be.