The book he references (https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Jordan-Mechner-e...) is a collection of journal entries he wrote while making the game. It's been about ten year since I read it, so the details are fuzzy, but it's a very raw retelling of the process of making a game basically entirely alone and before the internet. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who writes software.
Imagine being a lone nerd before the Internet and not only being filled with self-doubt, there was no social network to assure you that "your people" were even actually out there.
My graduating class was 180 people (very cliquey, I had very few friends). Myself (and notably, a woman who is now a doctor) were the ONLY TWO people to take programming classes at my high school (late 80's) (it was Turbo Pascal on the earliest PS/2, for anyone who remembers). My exuberant cries of "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!" when I first used modems and BBS's, fell on deaf ears. It was a very lonely time to be a tech nerd... and yet... witnessing everything that has happened firsthand has been absolutely amazing.
I gotta be honest, though... looking back, it was quite terrifying to be in that position. If ANY powers-that-be had dropped ANY hint of "Just. You. WAIT!" into my life at the time, it would have assuaged my insecurities tremendously.
Here I am on a Commodore 64 circa 1985 (?) during a summer program: https://i.imgur.com/dTCqbYe.jpg I believe I was coding sprites to make a very basic game at the time. Karateka had recently come out and it was inspiring!
I actually feel like it was easier in many ways back then. There were fewer resources, yes, but also fewer distractions, fewer decisions to get stuck paralyzed on, and fewer giants to compare myself against.
I wanted to make games that looked and played like the best games I'd played. Well, that was SimCity, which had 16x16 pixel 16 color sprites. I could draw those — not as well, but at least I had the technology available. I didn't need to be able to model, texture, rig, light, and render a 3D model.
I needed a language to program in. Well, my local Waldenbooks only had a couple of books on QuickBASIC and C. I did the former at first and then switched to the latter once I realized the former was too slow. I didn't get stuck trying to decide between C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Rust, and Python. Unity, Unreal, Löve2D, Godot, GameMaker, etc.
I needed time to focus. I didn't have Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, HN, and an endless parade of free-to-play games only a couple of clicks away. I was bored and coding filled the time.
It was lonely and limited, yes, but I believe solitude and constraints are often the most important ingredients in creative work.
I am a bit younger, graduated HS in 1995. But I'm essentially of the same generation and learned on the same stuff. QBasic -> Turbo Pascal -> C in high school. I made a simple video game in my senior year of high school that cemented my decision to study computer science.
My father had internet access well before the web as an engineer so I was sometimes able to get stuff. I remember buying some programming books to get started and sometimes getting access to text file tutorials that must have originated from BBSes.
But yah.. that was back when our abilities to concentrate were greater, there were almost no distractions, and most of us were working alone.. no product managers, no co-workers to disagree with or have them sow doubt, almost nothing to hold back someone who was talented and motivated.
I almost feel like I got cheated as what I thought work was going to be like basically doesn't exist unless you found your own company.
My father was a physics professor who worked at CERN in the early nineties. He had a MIPS workstation on his desk running one of the early web browsers. (I think it was Mosaic, so it must have been around 1993?)
During the weekend, I'd borrow the car keys, go to his office on campus, and browse the early web sometimes until 3am, printing out the pages that I found interesting for in depth reading at home.
I was blown away that you could get information from all over the world for free. My biggest concern at the time was: "what will happen when he retires 15 years from now, and I'll lose access to all of this."
> Imagine being a lone nerd before the Internet and not only being filled with self-doubt, there was no social network to assure you that "your people" were even actually out there.
Alternatively, imagine being a wizard when nobody around you has any idea how someone would go about understanding how the magical box functions let alone being able to make it dance with brilliant images and dynamics responses to input using “only 1s and 0s”
> Imagine being a lone nerd before the Internet and not only being filled with self-doubt, there was no social network to assure you that "your people" were even actually out there.
I'm not sure how much that came into play. A lot of programmers were writing games they enjoyed - for themselves, really. If others enjoyed them as well, that was gravy.
I think the previous commenter might be talking more about their own isolation rather than the global effect on the rate of software production. It's something many of us who come from communities that are later on the tech adoption curve can relate to.
It's been almost ten years since I read it also. Was originally published as a fake blog, with all the posts backdated according the journal entry dates from the late 1980s.
I remember discovering the "blog" after a night of insomnia, lying on the couch at dawn. I couldn't stop reading. After a few minutes I called in sick to work and spent the rest of the morning consuming the journal and literally tingling with excitement and nostalgia and pure inspiration.
"Jordan's journals are remarkable. I so wish I had kept a similar record.
Reading them transports me back to that place and time. We all knew this was an exciting new industry, but I don't think we had any clue what it was going to turn into during our careers. There were no schools, no books, no theories covering what we were doing. Everyone was just figuring it out on their own.
Following Jordan's creative path is a great example of how to go with your own gut instinct. It's also a great inspiration, showing how persistence and determination can lead to unexpected and wonderful results."
The reviewer is not wrong, though it certainly clouded his judgment of the book. The book needed more editing.
Between the two journals, I really recommend The Making of Kareteka instead. It's more concise, and it shows Mechner at more of a formative age. Many of the things he did are easily related to, like not knowing what path to choose in life, cutting classes, taking transit because he didn't have a driver's license, or moving out for the first time. And even though it's a diary, it ends like a good story.
Making of PoP is a hundred pages longer. Though interesting, Mechner's attempt to enter the movie industry, international travel, and the development of PoP 2 made the book unfocused. At the end it peters out and abruptly stops.
I wonder if, of the two, it gets more attention because Prince of Persia is familiar to more people?
If the book is anything like the freely available blog entries (at least, they used to be free) I read years ago, I vigorously disagree with that reviewer. They were fascinating. And mixing the coding, producing and business side of things only added to the interest.
One thing I found hilarious was when Jordan comments how they got a young actress to motion capture the Princess. They were the prototypical geeks of the time, and he says they were shy and very embarrassed around her. We've come a long way... :P
Also fun that Jordan got his brother to do some of the Prince's signature moves. In some parking lot or similar space, if I remember correctly.
Yes, it would be nice if HN stopped just having a link to another site as the article, and instead had a little abstract of what you're going to see there. In the case of links to (un)popular sites (is there a version of 'infamous' for stuff that's popular but sucks?) enough text so that it's possible to search for alternative/original sources would be just swell.
That would piss off the content creators no doubt. Let people have the traffic for the content they create.
dang et al do an amazing job of fixing links when needed and getting rid of blog spam.
Banning FB outright isn't necessary because it's not always reposted elsewhere and is far too popular. Despite still having an awful long-form reading UI/UX despite years of designs and a focus on 'groups'...
Oh man. Where did the time go? I still have the opening music stuck in my head. I recall making a map on paper with my cousins of all levels so we could memorize them to finish the game. Hours of playing late way past bed time. Such a beautiful game with a romantic love story.. Man, where did the time go?
What's funny to me is how much I remember on first exposure to this now - little tricks about how to get through that gate by jumping over the closing trigger I just saw and took in stride. And it's been since the nineties! But I can't remember my Dad's birthday still (it's one of two days, but I still screw it up).
I was a kid, but I remember disassembling the game with my dad to see if there was a way to kill that fat swordman mid-game, that killed us every time.
We succeeded by getting the 'megahit' keyword. That was my very first session of reverse engineering.
The sprite sheets (jumping, running, landing) on the first one were so rad compared to anything else around that time, so fluid. That photo from his office wall really shows how much effort went into them
Wow. That's awesome. I could recognize most of the movements from the video... Guess I played a lot of Prince of Persia back in the day. It's funny how the brain can recognize specific movements like that, or like when you can recognize a friend from far away just based on how they walk.
I remember well the movement that impressed me the most. The elaborate changing of direction when running and then turning. It looked so natural, and it was the first time I'd seen that in a game.
Most platformers still violate conservation of momentum and let you change direction in mid air.
Fun fact: the original Assassin's Creed game was originally a sequel to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time called Prince of Persia: Assassin. In the original concept, you protected the prince instead of playing the prince himself, playing in an open-world environment.
Ubisoft didn't like the idea of not playing the prince himself, so they spun it out into a separate property and came up with all the other plot points (genetic memory and Assassins vs. Knights Templar).
This provides a pretty good overview of what happened.
What was originally an idea for a next-gen, open-world Prince of Persia game became what is now the Assassins.
> ... I’m asking, “OK, so what’s next?” And I was told, “Let’s do a Prince of Persia, but for the next generation of consoles.”
> At first we thought that we could do a Prince of Persia open world. We did not [yet] have the concept of an assassin fighting in an open world
> since I’d just finished a game with a prince, I wanted a different character. I wanted the prince to have a different job than just being there waiting for mom and dad to die and take their place. So I wanted to have an action character — something that in his title, it was a job where you could actually see action right away.
Recently I was playing through the PC version of the original Prince of Persia again. Last time I played was as a kid and the game was very hard for me, level 5 was about as far as I could get. I trained for two days until I got so good at the game and memorized everything, that I was able to complete the entire game in one go with zero deaths. Took about 25 minutes of ingame timer to complete all stages.
If the original poster had managed to somehow record their original childhood playthrough and get the recording through to the present day with sufficient quality to convince the speedrun.com moderators to accept it, they'd actually only be able to claim spot 12 on the leaderboard out of 14. You need to look at the in-game time column, not real time.
25 minutes is a decently skillful playthrough, don't get me wrong, but it's not surprising that someone on here would have completed it in that time when you think about how many people would've played it back in the day and how few are speedrunning it now.
If the 11th fastest is 25 minutes, and the fastest is 15 minutes, then probably either there aren't many players, or not many players who post speedrun times...
Note that that is a _glitched_ record. To get 15 minutes you need to not only be very good at the game, you also need to know ways in which the game isn't what it seems to be, e.g. IIRC Prince of Persia has glitches that let you avoid doing some puzzles through careful timing, and skip most fights if you know exactly how to do it.
This is a runner doing a glitched run, right at the start they don't even collect the sword!
There's only one glitchless run on the leaderboard, in 21m 32s of in-game time by the person with the 8th fastest glitched run. It really doesn't seem like a very actively run game and glitchless is even less so. (Also, note that the glitched record is 14m 29s in-game time and this is what runs are ranked on. Completing it in 25 minutes on the in-game timer would make you 12th fastest out of 14.)
11th fastest player in modern times... without backing up or denouncing op I believe there must have been, back in the day, several top players going completely unrecognised. Most players would only have their immediate circle of friends to compare to.
I may have been incorrect then. Perhaps my pace was 25 minutes remaining, that'd be 35 minutes of ingame time. While I didn't waste too much time and didn't die (dying is the biggest timewaster), I wasn't skipping any fights either along the way so definitely wasn't going anywhere near a world record pace.
I loved that game but when you're 8 years old you often crawl through games that are too old for you. The time limit made it unbeatable for me for years. Well... That and my being petrified of the guillotine traps.
Lots of gaming things scared me as a kid but are also some of my fondest memories of overcoming my fears. Some included:
- The guillotines in PoP.
- The death animation for victims of the TOZT Napalm Unit in Marathon.
- The "red alert" warning combined with Kestrel fighter escort launching sound in Escape Velocity.
- The wolf 4 screens left in King's Quest 1 (I played this at about age 4 and did not comprehend the idea of going somewhere else. I just kept trying to outrun it)
The original Forbidden forest I think was the first game I ever found creepy/scary. It did a lot better job at creating an atmosphere fitting the subject matter than most other games of that era that were very arms-length in presenting peril to the character on screen without making it translate.
Aztec Challenge came close in creating tension, but not enough to feel scary.
Thanks for that, they were awful. The alien chatter from Marathon is up there too and hearing that close by was terrifying. The rocket launcher noise offset it a bit.
More recently, the Half-Life face suckers were pretty bad.
To go slightly further back in time... the whole C64 Forbidden Forest game... the dragon, the reaper/ghost, the demogorgon all made 4 year old me crap my pants.
i remember feeling the adrenaline going through my body while playing it, to the point where when i was on the further levels, my hands would shake so much i couldn't play properly.
I remember, back in my university days, being somewhat loosely involved with the "POPsource" (Prince of Persia source code recovery). The team drove down to Jordan Mechner's place with a DiscFerret and a bunch of other magnetic media reading gear.
Given that DiscFerret was "new on the scene" at that point, that was pretty fun to watch (from my seat on the other side of the pond). Shame Wired didn't bother to get the facts right and their editor wasn't concerned (in the slightest) with fixing the mistakes!
Still, it was mindblowing to be even a minor part of that.
(Only saying "the team" because I can't remember the names of all involved, and I'd rather not risk missing someone out)
So I’m reading this article and going to myself “Stripe Press” - wow sounds like a cool little indie book press wish I had free time to pursue something like that, maybe when I retire from my busy, important life . . .
And then reading down Jordan mentions “the founder of Stripe Press Patrick Collision reached out to me”.
What? Really? THAT Stripe?
More evidence that there are either even more Collison brothers than meets the eye covering for eachother or Stripe has a hell of a sleep deprevation skunk works program going on . . .
Thirty years ago today, I was at my Apple II, crunching on a six-week deadline to finish Prince of Persia by mid-July to ship in September.
I know this because I wrote it in my journal. If I hadn't, those details would have long since faded from my memory, along with the 6502 hex op codes I once knew by heart.
In 1989, I could never have imagined that Prince of Persia would last this long -- much less have foreseen it being ported to a future generation of game consoles from the makers of the Walkman. (Or to the big screen by the producer of Beverly Hills Cop.)
To all of you who've played, watched, and supported PoP over the years -- thank you! I've been especially moved by the things you've shared about the ways PoP has touched your lives. Your kind and encouraging words have been an inspiration to me.
Many of you have asked when there will be a new PoP game (or movie, or TV series). If you feel that it's been a long time since the last one, you're not alone. I wish I had a magic dagger to accelerate the process -- it would have been poetic to time a major game announcement with this 30th-anniversary year. But I'm only a small part of a bigger picture.
There is one PoP announcement I can make, and am happy to share with you. Stripe Press, an imprint specializing in books about innovation and technological advancement, will publish a hardcover collector's edition of "The Making of Prince of Persia" -- my 1980s original game development journals, newly illustrated with notes, sketches, work-in-progress screen shots, and as many visual features as we have the bandwidth to add by our target "gold master" date of September 2019 (30 years after Apple II PoP signed out of Broderbund QA). Oh, and there'll be an audiobook.
What I cherish about books:
For me as a kid who dreamed of creating mass entertainment, in the pre-internet days, when you still needed a printing press to make a book and a film lab to make a movie, the Apple II was a game-changer: a technological innovation that empowered every user to innovate. Suddenly, I didn't need adult permission (or funding) to tell a story of adventure that might reach thousands -- and ultimately millions -- of people.
That direct connection between author and public is still possible today for small indie games -- and for books. By contrast, making a major movie or AAA game requires millions of dollars and hundreds of people. It's a thrilling ride, and the rewards can be great, but by nature it's beyond the scope of what one person or even a tight-knit creative team can accomplish alone.
So it felt very much in the magical 8-bit spirit when Stripe's co-founder Patrick Collison emailed me to propose this book, and less than two months later, we're doing it. For me personally, in the midst of longer-term projects whose announcement is still a ways off, it's refreshing to add one whose timeline is reckoned in months rather than years.
In 2012, when the PoP source code disks I thought I'd lost turned up in my dad's closet, I discovered that an incredible retro-gaming fan and archivist community has been keeping the flame of early game development knowledge alive. The Internet Archive and Strong Museum of Play (which houses work materials and artifacts from my past projects) are already on board to help us make the collector's edition of "The Making of Prince of Persia" as feature-rich as possible.
As we move toward beta, we'll document and share our progress online via facebook, Instagram and Twitter. With luck, we'll be able to bring boxes of printed hardcover books to PAX East in spring 2020 -- 30 years after the PC release of Prince of Persia (which is the one most people remember). I hope to see many of you there in person.
Until then, here's a fateful time-capsule post (and photo) from the week PoP went alpha, thirty years ago. Reading it now, the drollest part is that I still thought (as usual) I was about two weeks from the finish line.
And then there's the mullet.
-----
July 26, 1989
Left a stack of disks three inches high on my desk for Brian. Eleven for sales, three for QA, plus seven more. Hope they work.
I played the whole game straight through for the first time ever, start to finish, cheat keys turned off. Made it with seconds to spare (my hour ran out while I was fighting the Grand Vizier).
You know what? It was fun!
There’s a level of tension generated when you know you can’t cheat, which is completely absent from the normal playtesting I do. By the time that final battle rolled around, I had a solid hour invested, and damned if I was going to lose!
Still a few bugs -- two weeks of work, like I said -- but it’s a game, and a damn good one. I’m content. I’m ready to go river rafting.
I love that book as well as Making of Karateka (his previous game), I read both books for 5 times and each time when I started to have doubts about my decision to be indie developer (not doing games anymore) and when I started to think about finding a job after almost two decades without any success it did renew my energy to continue.
The book for me is about spirit of working on your own projects, about curiosity and passion on whatever you choose to pursuit.
The PC version of Prince of Persia will always have a special place in my heart.
The first time I saw it was when me and my brother were in a store with my mom and saw this game running on a PC in the computer section. It must've been the first game I ever saw with 256 colour VGA graphics.
That evening we told my dad about this amazing game we saw in the store with graphics that looked like real people.
I think it was also the first time I saw a 3 1/2" disk. We still had a 286 at home with 5 1/4" floppy drives.
It also later became the first game I ever heard with Sound Blaster music and sound effects at a friend's house. That evening I told my dad how the music sounded like real music.
I also remember us giving our old computer to my grandma for word processing and she telling us that she tried to play PoP but got chopped up by the blades every time because she had to close her eyes when she tried to go through because she was too afraid.
Way different. I like it much less than The Sands of Time, since you don't really die, you just restart the last brief obstacle/battle you failed. Battles are one-on-one, and negotiating obstacles is more like QTEs where you have to push the right button at the right time based on the appearance of the section of wall, etc.
On the upside, it's based on pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian Persian mythology rather than the more typical "Arabian Nights" style setting of previous PoP games, which was really interesting and different at the time.
I think I would enjoy a Sands of Time style game set in a PoP2008 world.
I'd say the combat (except the bosses fight) is better, since it's a series of duel, compared to the confused brawls against respawning enemies. Boss fight aren't as good and mostly too repetitive. It's easier, with no penalty for successive failures, unlike SoT where, once the sand is depleted, it's back to a checkpoint. But the difficulty of platform sequences isn't lower (I'd say even harder for some). The visual style is good, but not as good as SoT (but YMMV, of course).
Edit: Also, unlike the linearity of SoT, PoP 2008 has areas that can be tackled in any order and you can go back to any area you've previously cleared: it's kinda open-world.
As a Persian and a pop player, it sucks. Too easy, bad story for 2008 (considering Persian material available), and bad dubbing(no persian talks like that). Great graphics and potential in gameplay tho.
Funny thing you mention this. I also remember prince makinit. Which I (in my non English tone) used to speak as mo (as in mother) -kee (as in keep) nit (as in to knit)
