

'Prince of Persia' creator Jordan Mechner on telling stories in 48k or less - AdamFernandez
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/27/2980806/prince-of-persia-jordan-mechner-narrative-games

======
mmphosis
"It's often in pushing against a constraint that the best ideas arise."

~~~
johansch
As an example: We created Opera Mini targeting the Java ME-capable phones that
were available in 2004.

The flagship device of the Java ME platform at the time was the Sony Ericsson
K700, with its 176x220 screen and relatively speaking amazing Java
performance, enabled by its quite talented developers in Lund, Sweden. (A
bunch of the same people are now working in leading roles on their Android-
based devices, as I understand it.)

But Sony Ericsson never really captured much market share outside of the
nordics (and Russia. And The Arab countries). Everywhere else was sort of
Nokia country.

So we also ran decently on the Nokia 3510i with its 96x65 pixel display. And
with much worse performance (but still with an amazing improvement over the
built-in browser).

...

Anyway, these days Opera Mini has 170M+ monthly active users and we have a
quite nice browsing experience on Android (with opengl es hardware
acceleration) and iOS.

Pretty neat for something that started at like a 60 kB download.

------
AmazingMe
WTF! I thought Mechner is taking $48,000 to tell some story.

