Martin reviewed The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner
None
3 stars
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 …
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.