The book he references (https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Jordan-Mechner-e...) is a collection of journal entries he wrote while making the game. It's been about ten year since I read it, so the details are fuzzy, but it's a very raw retelling of the process of making a game basically entirely alone and before the internet. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who writes software.
Imagine being a lone nerd before the Internet and not only being filled with self-doubt, there was no social network to assure you that "your people" were even actually out there.
My graduating class was 180 people (very cliquey, I had very few friends). Myself (and notably, a woman who is now a doctor) were the ONLY TWO people to take programming classes at my high school (late 80's) (it was Turbo Pascal on the earliest PS/2, for anyone who remembers). My exuberant cries of "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!" when I first used modems and BBS's, fell on deaf ears. It was a very lonely time to be a tech nerd... and yet... witnessing everything that has happened firsthand has been absolutely amazing.
I gotta be honest, though... looking back, it was quite terrifying to be in that position. If ANY powers-that-be had dropped ANY hint of "Just. You. WAIT!" into my life at the time, it would have assuaged my insecurities tremendously.
Here I am on a Commodore 64 circa 1985 (?) during a summer program: https://i.imgur.com/dTCqbYe.jpg I believe I was coding sprites to make a very basic game at the time. Karateka had recently come out and it was inspiring!
I actually feel like it was easier in many ways back then. There were fewer resources, yes, but also fewer distractions, fewer decisions to get stuck paralyzed on, and fewer giants to compare myself against.
I wanted to make games that looked and played like the best games I'd played. Well, that was SimCity, which had 16x16 pixel 16 color sprites. I could draw those — not as well, but at least I had the technology available. I didn't need to be able to model, texture, rig, light, and render a 3D model.
I needed a language to program in. Well, my local Waldenbooks only had a couple of books on QuickBASIC and C. I did the former at first and then switched to the latter once I realized the former was too slow. I didn't get stuck trying to decide between C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Rust, and Python. Unity, Unreal, Löve2D, Godot, GameMaker, etc.
I needed time to focus. I didn't have Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, HN, and an endless parade of free-to-play games only a couple of clicks away. I was bored and coding filled the time.
It was lonely and limited, yes, but I believe solitude and constraints are often the most important ingredients in creative work.
I am a bit younger, graduated HS in 1995. But I'm essentially of the same generation and learned on the same stuff. QBasic -> Turbo Pascal -> C in high school. I made a simple video game in my senior year of high school that cemented my decision to study computer science.
My father had internet access well before the web as an engineer so I was sometimes able to get stuff. I remember buying some programming books to get started and sometimes getting access to text file tutorials that must have originated from BBSes.
But yah.. that was back when our abilities to concentrate were greater, there were almost no distractions, and most of us were working alone.. no product managers, no co-workers to disagree with or have them sow doubt, almost nothing to hold back someone who was talented and motivated.
I almost feel like I got cheated as what I thought work was going to be like basically doesn't exist unless you found your own company.
My father was a physics professor who worked at CERN in the early nineties. He had a MIPS workstation on his desk running one of the early web browsers. (I think it was Mosaic, so it must have been around 1993?)
During the weekend, I'd borrow the car keys, go to his office on campus, and browse the early web sometimes until 3am, printing out the pages that I found interesting for in depth reading at home.
I was blown away that you could get information from all over the world for free. My biggest concern at the time was: "what will happen when he retires 15 years from now, and I'll lose access to all of this."
> Imagine being a lone nerd before the Internet and not only being filled with self-doubt, there was no social network to assure you that "your people" were even actually out there.
Alternatively, imagine being a wizard when nobody around you has any idea how someone would go about understanding how the magical box functions let alone being able to make it dance with brilliant images and dynamics responses to input using “only 1s and 0s”
> Imagine being a lone nerd before the Internet and not only being filled with self-doubt, there was no social network to assure you that "your people" were even actually out there.
I'm not sure how much that came into play. A lot of programmers were writing games they enjoyed - for themselves, really. If others enjoyed them as well, that was gravy.
I think the previous commenter might be talking more about their own isolation rather than the global effect on the rate of software production. It's something many of us who come from communities that are later on the tech adoption curve can relate to.
It's been almost ten years since I read it also. Was originally published as a fake blog, with all the posts backdated according the journal entry dates from the late 1980s.
I remember discovering the "blog" after a night of insomnia, lying on the couch at dawn. I couldn't stop reading. After a few minutes I called in sick to work and spent the rest of the morning consuming the journal and literally tingling with excitement and nostalgia and pure inspiration.
"Jordan's journals are remarkable. I so wish I had kept a similar record.
Reading them transports me back to that place and time. We all knew this was an exciting new industry, but I don't think we had any clue what it was going to turn into during our careers. There were no schools, no books, no theories covering what we were doing. Everyone was just figuring it out on their own.
Following Jordan's creative path is a great example of how to go with your own gut instinct. It's also a great inspiration, showing how persistence and determination can lead to unexpected and wonderful results."
The reviewer is not wrong, though it certainly clouded his judgment of the book. The book needed more editing.
Between the two journals, I really recommend The Making of Kareteka instead. It's more concise, and it shows Mechner at more of a formative age. Many of the things he did are easily related to, like not knowing what path to choose in life, cutting classes, taking transit because he didn't have a driver's license, or moving out for the first time. And even though it's a diary, it ends like a good story.
Making of PoP is a hundred pages longer. Though interesting, Mechner's attempt to enter the movie industry, international travel, and the development of PoP 2 made the book unfocused. At the end it peters out and abruptly stops.
I wonder if, of the two, it gets more attention because Prince of Persia is familiar to more people?
If the book is anything like the freely available blog entries (at least, they used to be free) I read years ago, I vigorously disagree with that reviewer. They were fascinating. And mixing the coding, producing and business side of things only added to the interest.
One thing I found hilarious was when Jordan comments how they got a young actress to motion capture the Princess. They were the prototypical geeks of the time, and he says they were shy and very embarrassed around her. We've come a long way... :P
Also fun that Jordan got his brother to do some of the Prince's signature moves. In some parking lot or similar space, if I remember correctly.
