Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

For those of you who haven't read them, Jordan Mechner's "The Making of Prince of Persia" is one of the most engaging things I've read online.

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/

Just realized there's an e-book now... I'll probably get it.

View on HN

Reading Jordan's full diary will take you at least eight hours but it is well worth it. It is one of the best stories of making a game, runaway success when success wasn't runaway, determination (not to get screwed legally/financially) out there. About ambition and leaping the artistic gap into film making when being a hit game maker was not enough. Jordan wrote POP in 6502 Assembler and he writes well (with off-hand notes - oh a royalty check for $65k - time to go to class) and inside observations, sometimes about his life.

> We chatted for an hour about peripherally related topics. Broderbund, corporate America, the rat race, capitalism, freedom. I was seducing him.

At the critical psychological moment, I remarked: "You know, all my clipping is done on the byte boundaries."

There was a pause

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/page/33/

April 3, 1989

That's actually on page 27 right now. :-)

Direct link: http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1989/04/april-3-1989/

76 pages in 8 hours? If it were dense as a textbook it wouldn't half that long.

Those are html pages. It's 330 pages as a paperback:

http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/

Fascinating!

He taped his friend jumping and climbing in a parking lot to model the animations after (and posted the video): http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1985/10/october-20-198...

I can definitely see the character performing all those actions from my own childhood memories..

David is his brother, rather than his friend.

crikey, is that mutually exclusive?

I know this comment doesn't add up much to the conversation but that is one of the coolest things I've ever seen, I don't know why I'm so hyped, maybe it's the memories...

Must be memories. Prince of Persia was the first program I ran on my computer.

One day me and my father drove 30 kms to buy the box. We talked with the guys about what we wanted ('16Hz, no, its to fast, 12 will do') and they sad it would be ready in three days. Then, we were very surprised and disappointed. They were surprised that we were surprised and finally said 'no biggie, we will set it up right now for you'. So we were back home with the box this evening.

At home we plugged it in only to discover that it was totally useless thingy blinking at us. This evening I learned why software was so, sooo important.

Only the next day I would get some floppies from friends and feed the beast.

Empty parking lot, 1985... Shoot!

Reminds me of the creation of the rotoscoped graphics for the intro animation to "Out of This World", another classic video game.

If you like "making of" stories this one is pretty good too, it's been posted on HN before but is a great read.

http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm

Similarly Andy Gavin wrote a series of blog posts about the development of Crash Bandicoot. It's more of an overview than the journals, but still interesting.

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...

From the original article on him finding the source code:

Yesterday he found it, and the discovery is all thanks to his father. The three packs of 3.5″ Apple ProDOS disks had been safely stored away in a brown box along with a load of Amstrad copies of his 1984 game Karateka.

And from your link, in the first excerpt from his Journal from 1985:

Dad called. Billboard’s top-ranked program for this week is, indeed, Karateka.

I thought that was a funny coincidence. :)

Karateka was truly awesome. Those were truly the days; good games really amazed with their originality and game play.not course there was nothing to compare to but it was magical as a kid. Wonder if my kids will feel the same about FPS?

Yeah, I never realized he was the same guy that made Karateka. Played the crap out of that back then.

I still remember Time Zone, that multi-floppy time-traveling graphic/text adventure.

And Swashbuckler! And Aztec! (Nerd boner.)

In the early days of anything almost everything is original simply because there was nothing to do compare it to. Karateka and Prince of Persia were innovative.

>...the comfort of having an organization is largely illusory. It still comes down to one programmer in the end.

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1986/09/september-10-1...

"Now that the day’s over and it’s clear that I had nothing to be scared of, I’m not scared any more – I’m terrified. I’m scared shitless.

I have to rent a car. I have to drive it. On these insane twelve-lane racetracks they call freeways. I have to find an apartment and rent it. I have to move in. I have to buy a car. I have to buy insurance. I’ve never done any of this stuff before… and now I have to do it all at once.

And on top of this – or rather, at the bottom of it – I have to make a computer game.

It’s gonna be fun."

For the older generation, there are also Andrew Braybrook's notes while he developed Paradroid:

http://www.zzap64.co.uk/zzap3/para_birth01.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com