SAN FRANCISCO — As the windows continue to decrease between when audiences will accept their nostalgia (a "Melrose Place" remake? More "Scream" movies?), some odd coincidences are beginning to occur around Hollywood. Next month, Jake Gyllenhaal will give us one of these senses of déjà vu when he takes to the silver screen as the living incarnation of a video game character who debuted in 1989 and gained fame in the early '90s.

"I played their original side-scrolling version of the game when I was a kid," laughed 29-year-old Gyllenhaal recently, remembering his first encounter with "The Prince of Persia." "And then I took a little hiatus."

On May 28, Gyllenhaal will portray Prince Dastan in "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," the first video game movie ever to be written by the father of the game — in this case, Jordan Mechner, who introduced "Prince of Persia" on the Apple II computer in 1989. "I was actually kind of tripping out on that with Jordan the other day," Gyllenhaal said of portraying a character he once could only play with a controller in his hand. "I was saying to him, Who knew when I was playing it — after I closed out 'Oregon Trail' and went over to my 'Prince of Persia' game when I was I don't know how old, maybe 8 or something — who knew I would be playing the Prince of Persia? It's kind of awesome."

Although many actors have played characters based on games they've claimed to enjoy (the Rock in "Doom," Mark Wahlberg in "Max Payne"), few actually grew up playing them. To Gyllenhaal, it might be yet another reason why most video game movies don't live up to their namesakes.

"The reason why most video games movies haven't been successful up until now is the fact that most of the action that takes place is stuff that we've seen before [in the game], but hasn't had a reason in the story line that makes sense," Gyllenhaal explained. "So, in this movie we decided that everything the prince did in the movie had to have a reason. If he were going to jump on a wall and run over to get away from somebody, or he's going to jump from building to building, there had to be an obstacle. It had to be based on something that he had learned, or based in the story line.

"Most of the time you just see really cool stunts and people doing really cool things, but you don't know why," explained Gyllenhaal, who has flat-out said that there's never been a good video game movie made. "[Our action] all ties back into the ultimate story."

Check out everything we've got on "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time."

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