The Making of Prince of Persia

Journals 1985-1993--Illustrated Edition

hardcover, 336 pages

Published April 28, 2020 by Stripe Press.

ISBN:
978-0-578-62731-1
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(10 reviews)

Before Prince of Persia was a best-selling video game franchise and a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, it was an Apple II computer game created and programmed by one person, Jordan Mechner. Mechner's candid and revealing journals from the time capture his journey from his parents' basement to the forefront of the fast-growing 1980s video game industry... and the creative, technical and personal struggles that brought the prince into being and ultimately into the homes of millions of people worldwide.

2 editions

None

Goodreads says I marked this book “want to read” Feb. 2, 2012, about 13 years before I finally picked it up.

I've been meaning to read this for longer than there has existed this 30th anniversary edition, which I submit is a beautiful artifact. In fact, I may have read snippets of this from the author's website many years ago, but for a long time it's been on my to-read list. It was only because of laziness that I accidentally waited until this edition existed.

Mechner's journal starts out a page turner. I had a hard time putting it down the first time I started reading. But then about halfway through (sometime between when the first game releases and he begins “working” on the sequel), it really started to slow down for me, and there were long swaths that I just found tedious and relatively boring. (I didn’t much care …

Review of 'The Making of Prince of Persia' on 'Goodreads'

§1. In 1996, I was given a pirated copy of Prince of Persia to play on our Pentium 75 MHz PC running Win 3.1 but couldn't get past the first couple of frames because I couldn't figure out how to get around the guard.

§2. In 2014, I came across Fabien Sanglard's code review of the original Prince of Persia Apple source code, where he mentioned this set of memoirs, originally posted online (and still free for anyone to read!), subtitled Journals: 1985--1993.

§3. Later in 2014, and for these two reasons, and because I was in diapers when the first journal entry was made, I finish reading this book.

§4. I like the book! Any programmer will identify with young Mechner's struggles to give birth to something great. The fact that even my most stupendous software project was peanuts compared to Prince of Persia helped underline the …

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