In the late 2000s, parkour emerged from obscurity, and took over mainstream entertainment. Movies, YouTube videos, and video games alike took to the urban jungle so that they could showcase the activity in all of its glory, and entertain audiences with fast-paced thrills. And no other video game managed to thrill quite like Mirror’s Edge. The brainchild of Swedish video game developer DICE, Mirror’s Edge cast players in the shoes of Faith, a raven-haired courier tasked with delivering messages across the rooftops of a gleaming dystopia. While many found the sum of its offerings to be far from perfect, most agreed that running through the metropolis was a delight, and that it’s clean, minimalist art was a welcome breath of fresh air from the browns and grays of its competitors.
After Mirror’s Edge came and went, however, it quickly became apparent that it would be a while longer before fans would be able to return to Faith’s world. While DICE would repeatedly express its desire to continue building out its budding parkour series, rumors and news stories alike perpetually suggested that DICE either was at a crossroads on how to proceed with it, or simply not working on it at all. And the more years that passed, the more the studio seemed to become further entrenched in the Battlefield franchise.
In the end, however, the series would finally receive a second lease on life nearly a decade later, in the form of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst – an open-world re-imagining of DICE’s opus that would be met with equal parts fanfare, and equal parts frustration.
This is the history of Mirror’s Edge.
