
The Making of Prince of Persia (2011) [pdf] - tosh
http://www.jordanmechner.com/downloads/makpopsample.pdf
======
shahar2k
I actually met Jordan Mechner a couple of times, around 2011. I had a
coworker/common friend who would throw big parties I recognized him oddly
enough based on his drawing style, as a fan of his blog. he was sitting in one
of the bedrooms at the party drawing in his sketchbook. We talked a bit about
the last express, (another one of my all time favorites) and the various
iterations of PoP. He was very shy and quiet but really wonderful to chat
with. Funny enough, at this same party I met another hero of my youth, Dave
Taylor, one of the original members of ID. most likely because they were both
working on the Karateka remake together at the time. (these were fancy
hollywood party with a few film celebrity type people... but me being a game
nerd only recognized the game folks that showed up)

~~~
hx2a
I've never met Jordan but I used to work with his brother, David, whom the
motion capture is based on. He was always proud of his contribution to his
brother's game. What a great experience for both of them to be involved with
this in their youth.

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sircastor
We had this game on a Mac in 7th grade. We'd play through the first part, then
get to the copy protection scheme which was a room where you'd have to select
the letter of the first sentence on page 7 or something. We'd guess constantly
and occasionally get it right so we could play, but otherwise didn't have the
manual.

~~~
xtracto
I loved Prince of Persia for MSDOS because it made me learn to "hack" /
"crack" at computers.

I remember also being stuck on the first level and then on the copy-
protection. Until one day while pressing random keyboard combinations I noted
that a game was saved. At the same point, my father had this XTree Gold
program in the computer (like DOSSHell but better), and it had a HEX view...
when you opened the .SAV file in this view, you had only like 8 or 9 bytes. I
remember my excitement when I changed that 01 to 02 and boom! after loading
the game I started in level 2 .

Back in school (I was in 6th grade at that time) my friends had no clue what
had I done to get past that copy protection level.

It was downhill for me and cracking at that point... I was not interested in
playing but more on doing reverse engineering on different games and programs.

~~~
kaustyap
There was a famous pool game with different formats (8-ball, 9-ball, snooker
etc) in early 2000. The game-play was pretty realistic but it was demo version
and it asked for 6 digit password to unlock all features. I just loaded the
executable in editor and voila the only readable digits among the binary data
was the password. It was pretty stupid of developers not to encrypt the
password!

~~~
ASalazarMX
> It was pretty stupid of developers not to encrypt the password!

You are being very unfair to that era. Even cutting edge software like Norton
Utilities did the same, although they XORed the passwords. That passed as
encryption then.

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hello_asdf
That's really interesting, here's the link to the full book:

[https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Jordan-
Mechner-e...](https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Jordan-Mechner-
ebook/dp/B005WUE6Q2)

I bought it immediately upon finishing the PDF, and my Kindle's battery is
dead..

~~~
freyr
Making Prince of Persia is terrific. I'd also recommend Masters of Doom, a
book about the heyday of id Software.

[https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-
Cult...](https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-
Culture/dp/0812972155)

------
wenc
Prince of Persia (1990) has found its way into the Internet archive. You can
play it here on your browser (DOSbox emulator):

[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Prince_of_Persia_1990](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Prince_of_Persia_1990)

~~~
PunchTornado
it doesn't work well on my mac with chrome unfortunately...

*It is actually working fine after a refresh. shift + L for next level, shift + T for more lives (you have to ctrl quit and then start with Prince.exe megahit)

Thanks!

~~~
wenc
Yes, and Shift-W to float when falling.

------
hal9000xp
For someone who is into old games, I would also recommend book "It's behind
you" which covers a story of porting R-Type to ZX-Spectrum:

[http://www.bizzley.com/](http://www.bizzley.com/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-Type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-Type)

~~~
Slump
Thanks for mentioning this. R-Type is one of my all time favorites, can't wait
to give it a read.

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u801e
On a somewhat related note, there's a blog[1] that details how the Commodore
64 port of that game was made:

[1] [http://popc64.blogspot.com/](http://popc64.blogspot.com/)

~~~
pvg
That's a modern recreation based (in part) on reversing the original rather
than a contemporary commercial port - a much crazier story than 'C64 port'
might make it sound. Readers should also stick around for the post-credits
scene where the original Apple ][ source is found well after the project is
completed!

------
microdrum
"On the one hand, if I live at home for much longer I’ll go stir-crazy. What I
need is a place to go. Friends. Work. Moving to Marin and doing another game
for Broderbund would give me that...the games business is drying up.

Karateka may make me as little as $75,000 all told, and it’s at the top of the
charts. Tere’s no guarantee the new game will be as successful."

What. $75,000 for a 21 year old in 1985? ($180,000 today.)

Why did he seem so upset about that?

~~~
amiraliakbari
Probably not, but expectations change through time - especially if you make
such a successful game. Quoting from The Making of Karateka Journals:

"February 13, 1982 Scott Barnes from Hayden called. Will they ever publish
Asteroids? It’s been over a year — fifteen months — since I submitted it and
they accepted it. (Sigh.) If they only sell 1,000 copies, I’ll make $4,500 —
if they sell 5,000, I’ll make $22,500 — ridiculously high sums of money. Right
now I only have $500, counting everything. So why am I not on the phone with
them every morning, pushing, pushing? Oh well. When I finish Deathbounce and
sell it, I’ll be rich and then I can stop worrying about money for the next
few years."

------
wbhart
The DOS version had a CGA port, which runs extremely slow. Seems to be about
5-8 fps on a 4.77MHz machine, probably 8-12 fps on an 8MHz machine. The
technical document doesn't seem to say how the sprites were done on the Apple
II (I could be wrong, but I don't think the Apple II had sprite hardware
either). It looks to be about 12 fps on the Apple II and a whole lot more
colourful. It's amazing how smooth that looks. But I wonder if they used a
sprite compiler or not. There's not a huge number of sprites on the screen, so
it could potentially have been very, very smooth.

~~~
wbhart
Looking at the description of the C64 port, it looks like each frame of the
character in the DOS and Apple II versions were just drawn over the scene and
the pixels affected just redrawn when he moves (including blocks that obscure
his view). So, no sprite compiler.

~~~
rzzzt
With the cheat mode enabled, you can see this in-game by pressing Shift + B.
Static parts of the level go dark, only the animated characters and their
surroundings are rendered.

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tosh
I'd love to read more development diaries of games and software in general. Is
there a list/collection of some?

~~~
chongli
While not something to read, I really enjoy GDC classic game postmortems. One
of my favourites is Populous. [1] I find it fascinating how such a successful
game came out of experimentation without a real plan ahead of time.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIaK6y5kdro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIaK6y5kdro)

~~~
Cognitron
I like these too. Here's Jordan Mechner on Prince of Persia:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjE4JyfMVLc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjE4JyfMVLc)

Also for Fallout fans (the first game): (EDIT: unrelated to Prince of Persia,
I just like Fallout)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2OxO-4YLRk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2OxO-4YLRk)

------
ceautery
We're all bad negotiators when we're young. Poor kid got taken to town by the
jerks at Brøderbund.

~~~
ak39
Is this intimated in the linked PDF? (I haven’t read it yet).

I agree about being poor negotiators when we’re young - and young is only a
function of how long you have spent in the field you’re negotiating.

~~~
kayoone
> and young is only a function of how long you have spent in the field you’re
> negotiating

Not only in the field, i think it's also about general life experience and
dealing with people.

------
m3mpp
To me it's a mystery how one can sustain an effort for so long and not losing
faith along the way and throw everything through the window... I know it's
tenacity that wins the race in the end, but still, it's always impressive to
read those stories.

~~~
movedx
You might like this talk by Jonathan Blow on "Deep Work":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uUl_aTbOzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uUl_aTbOzQ)

------
osrec
This was pretty much the only game on my computer in the 1990s when I was a
little boy. I must have played and replayed it a thousand times!

~~~
PunchTornado
Same here, it was the game of my childhood.

~~~
bookofjoe
Same here starting in 1990, me and my then-6-year old daughter spending many
happy hours playing PoP on her Macintosh. "Oregon Trail" was our #2.

------
mirekrusin
I remember it very well on my Amiga 500, together with Another World the
movements felt wonderfully fluid and natural. Used it as reference when
paining sprites in Deluxe Paint, my brother coding in Amos etc. good times.

------
grawprog
I've never played the original, but I had the Genesis version as a kid. That
game was hard, so ridiculously hard and when I did finally manage to make it
to the end, i didn't have enough time left to kill the boss and finish the
game. You had 60 minutes or something like that to beat it. I spent a lot of
time playing it though, I think I did beat it eventually but if I did it was
overshadowed by that first time making it to the end with just not quite
enough time. I tried from that last password over and over again and just
couldn't do it.

------
PunchTornado
> 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.

One of those things that you look back at and can't believe it.

------
lostgame
'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.'

\- JULY 5, 1985

I love reading stuff like this.

------
fastbeef
”I restrained myself from taking all my work papers home with me yesterday...
and I’m restraining myself from going to work today. There must be Balance”

I can’t help but feel that the generation before mine was a lot more well
rounded as individuals.

------
pnutjam
Just here to say I loved this game. Afew years back I stuck it in a virtual
machine so I could pause it and actually finished the game!

~~~
hartator
How pause it will give you an edge?

~~~
roghummal
I take it to mean they paused the VM, allowing them to complete the game in
sections when they had the time.

~~~
skocznymroczny
Actually there is a trick with ingame pause that can be used to bypass the
blade traps. If you walk as close to the blade trap as possible, pause the
game constantly until the blades are completely shut, then press the movement
arrow, the game will unpause and you will perfectly go past the blades trap.

------
bluedino
>> I’m getting to the point where I want to rush out and buy a video camera, a
VCR and a digitizer and get to work.

What was that back in 1984 dollars? I remember my dad buying just a VCR from
Fretter electronics when I was a kid and it was like $700.

------
tartoran
I remember the game was hard, I used to know some cheat codes

~~~
ceocoder
Does prince.exe /megahits ring a bell? Prince of Persia was the very first PC
game I ever played. Fun days of booting my 486 with a dos floppy disk and
running the game off of a different set of floppy disks.

~~~
tartoran
It rings some bells, yes it does. Back when I was playing PP I it was out of
reach to play the original and I came by a hack/crack to pass the potions part
of the game got which you had to have the originals game booklet to look up
certain words on pages, remember that excitement. Games were superior in
estetics IMO and now they got complicated and lost the magic, I look at my
nephew playing some horrible games and wonder..

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jgalt212
How did Mechner get access to a rotoscope?

~~~
detaro
Fairly sure he just painted on transparent paper over a film projection and
then manually digitized or something like that, no fancy equipment.

~~~
bazzargh
He talks about the process here (for Karateka)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnutf4XObWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnutf4XObWk)
Not mentioned in the video, but the process for getting from the tracing paper
to digital was a Versawriter tablet, which looks like a pantograph - you can
see one here [http://blog.lonaday.com/2007/02/graphics-
tablets.html](http://blog.lonaday.com/2007/02/graphics-tablets.html)

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agret
I mistook the title to refer to the Prince of Persia (2008) reboot of the
franchise haha. Cool read though.

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darepublic
Disclaimer: This is a 41 page sample.

