The Making of Prince of Persia

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 that he wanted to be a movie director.) Fortunately, the writing was still quick and easy and I managed to finish this in only a few evenings. I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t really recommend it outside of a very narrow swath of game developers, and even then, with plenty of hedges and caveats about the era when this was written, and the obvious sense of privilege and entitlement that the writing exudes.

§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 point that there never comes a time when Making, giving birth to a technological or cultural artifact, is anything but a mountain of angst, uncertainty, confusion, self-doubt. Personal projects in software, and I imagine in writing, painting, woodworking, etc., are something you do because you cannot help it---you're not surprised when you return to the craft again and again. There's no point at which it becomes easy, only harder.

§5. Some excerpts that moved me:

1985, between Karateka (Mechner's previous hit) and Prince of Persia: "I’ve been having serious doubts about doing another computer game ... the games business is drying up ... There’s no guarantee that there will even be a computer games market a couple of years from now."

'My night thoughts lately have been along the lines of: “Do I have it in me to do another computer game? Is this what I want to do? Can I do it? What if the code-writing part of my brain has atrophied? Will I fail ignominiously? Should I just turn to screenwriting full-time? ... Today made me feel better. ... I’m unutterably happy that I’m getting psyched up for this new game. It fills me with joy and confidence in the future. Then again, maybe feeling good doesn’t necessarily mean that what I write is good. Maybe the best stuff is produced out of blackest despair. Or maybe not.'

'Last night I was kept awake by anxiety about the new game. All the detail I’m gonna have to put in… it just seems so daunting. How did I do it for Karateka? I can’t remember. I’m not sure I can do it again ... You’re taking a step backward. You want to be a filmmaker. It’s time to move on! You brought the Apple-computer-game thread of your life to its climax a year ago ... You caught the industry just before it started to die, before you started to lose interest in games yourself.'