Prince of Persia source code documentation [1989] [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Prince of Persia source code documentation [1989] [pdf]

jordanmechner.com

72 pointslabria15 comments

Mechner has also taken the liberty to share his old journal entries from the Prince of Persia era. A lengthy, inspiring read, and highly relevant to people trying to build something.

Check them out on his website:

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

Can I just second that these are an engrossing read.

See the HN discussion here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952029

Thanks!!! Plowing through it, enjoying the read, sad it will soon be done. It's like reading Coders at Work in autobiographical form. One of the best non-book books I've read in months.

> 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

April 3, 1989

> The other thing is, I liked them. Lately I’d been starting to feel jaded about this whole enterprise – “Oh well, it’s just a computer game” – but watching Chris and Stu, I realized: These guys love games. They love games the way I loved movies in college. Even more, because they’re not interested in girls yet. Computer games are like the air they breathe. If I can make one that they can get excited about, that’s a real accomplishment. That’s something I can be proud of.

So I worked till ten with renewed enthusiasm.

May 6, 1989

This entry is funny: http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1985/07/july-5-1985/

"There’s no guarantee the new game will be as successful. Or that there will even be a computer games market a couple of years from now."

Yeah, I loved that one. Does provide some perspective.

On the other hand, I kept thinking how thrilled he must be that his game is going to be a huge movie, since he really wanted to be a filmmaker all along.

I hope it lives up to the potential. Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame went down that path and has barely been heard from since. OTOH he never got anywhere close to a $200m budget.

and it seems he worked for 4 years to write POP in 6502 assembler (non-fulltime - via http://jordanmechner.com/page/4/).

with all the usual HN talk about release early, release often, that's a pre-release timeframe i have problems even imagining.

wish jordan was a HN reader!

I third this. It's like reading Microserfs, except it's REAL

I am really intrigued what the redacted ##magic marker'd##-out line could be...

  PRINCE OF PERSIA--Cheat Key Version
  August 27, 1989

  ???         Enable cheat keys

  With cheat keys enabled:
  [Return]    Disable cheat keys
  SKIP        Skip to next level (up to Level 12)
 ################################## (Redacted!)
  TINA        Go the end of level 12
  R           Restore full strength
  BOOST       Boost max strength (origstrength) by 1
  Z           Reduce guard to 1 unit of strength
  ZAP         Zap guard (he drops dead)

When I saw the same page in the development journal he posted, I assumed that code got removed from the game after he printed out that page -- not something that was redacted, per se. :)

[edit: attempting to use something resembling English grammar this time]

Lovely

Total RAM: 127.75K

Total Diskspace: 252.5k

ha awesome, compare that with how much space a "hello world" executable takes when compiled on a modern OS with standard libraries

4.6k, for 2 lines of code and 66 characters (in C). Wow.

Another way to think about it is that the game used almost all of the available RAM and drive space. That would be like a game today needing 3.5 GB of RAM and 0.90 TB of disk space. :)

You've played Crysis then ;-)

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