

Development Journal for Price of Persia - jeromewbrock
http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/

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rbarooah
Fantastic read. I love the way he charts the ups and downs in his personal
motivation. It's a great reminder to be persistent.

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mkelly
This inspires me to keep closer logs of my progress on personal projects --
particularly the "soft" stuff (how I'm feeling about it, etc). It's terrific
motivation.

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WesleyJohnson
Just spent the last 2 hours reading through most of the 46 pages and skimming
through the ones that didn't appear to have much "meat" on them regarding
Prince of Persia.

I found the journal to be an incredibly revealing look into what game
programmers, and arguably many other programmers, go through. Really makes me
wish I had documented some of my earlier forays into programming just so that
I could go back, read, and remember.

It's also sparked a bit of intrigue in me that I haven't felt in a while to
revisit game development. I toyed around with Dark Basic and Blitz Basic back
in 2001 and really haven't touched anything since.

As others have said, great find and I would love to read more from other
programmers like this and like ones from Carmack recently posted on HN.

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josephkern
This is a great find. Thanks! BTW, I love the reference videos that were shot
for the animation.

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ericd
Yeah, even just seeing the still frames brought flashbacks of those
animations.

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mcella
October 23, 1986

Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris – a Russian submission
for the IBM PC. It’s a classic, like Breakout. But I don’t think Broderbund is
going to publish it. The knaves.

October 31, 1986

I beat out Ed and Steve for the #1 spot on the Tetris high-score list.

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Thanks for this link, great reading! my best friend had a pc and prince of
persia (and karateka) when we were young, great memories...

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mattmaroon
1985: "And the games business is drying up."

Classic.

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jcl
I was fascinated to learn that Jordan was working in the same office as Robert
Cook, the guy who was making D/Generation, a game I remember fondly. Like
Prince of Persia, it also has an enemy who is a dark version of the player.

(The lineage of the concept is more complicated than one game borrowing from
the other, however: The journal entries show that another coworker, Tomi,
suggested the dark version of the player, while Robert suggested creating the
dark version by jumping through a mirror.)

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joezydeco
It's a great read, but you kind of cringe knowing in hindsight that the Apple
][ market was drying up and there was Mechner, working on screen plays and
taking months at a time away from development of the game.

It _does_ have a happy ending that the PC market started to kick in, but man.

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fnid
it's "prince" of persia.

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jeromewbrock
yep, first fpp, typo, duh

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tfh
you can download the original prince of persia here :

[http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/old-games/prince-of-
persia.p...](http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/old-games/prince-of-persia.php)

use dosbox (<http://dosbox.com>) to run the exe. This brings back childhood
memories. Learning how to use the command line to play prince on a 386.

The journal really motivates me to start writing my own. I would help me to
clarify my thoughts and keeping my goals in mind..

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ZenzerNet
Wow, this is brilliant - always interesting to read about development in the
old days! Thank you!

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ericd
Amazing story of a very exciting and chaotic time in computing and computer
games.

