Animating for Interactivity: The Walk Cycles of Prince of Persia (1989) and Ninja Gaiden (1988)

This article uses the walk cycle to simultaneously place movement in video games within the history of animation, and to show how the walk cycle has been adapted for the video game medium. Dating back to the pre-cinematic toys of the 19th century, the walk cycle is an animation technique that depicts a character’s walking animation as a self-contained, reusable loop. Video games import this technique into a new context with different affordances. A comparative analysis of the video games Prince of Persia (1989) and Ninja Gaiden (1988) explores different methods of implementing the walk cycle and reveals a trade-off between verisimilitude of movement and responsiveness to user input. Prince of Persia’s walk cycle, inspired by full cel animation, foregrounds fluid movement, while Ninja Gaiden utilizes limited animation techniques to prioritize responsiveness. Thus, this article argues that interactivity becomes a site of tension between movement and responsiveness, with video games drawing on older forms of animation to negotiate this tension.