POP

So last night I finally sat down and read "The Making of Prince of Persia", a compendium of Jordan Mechner's journals from his time developing said game. I really enjoyed it. There were many parts that resonated with me personally. I tried to make note of parts that stuck out to me either with some comedic value or just plain inspirational so I could share them here.

Videotaped David running and jumping in the Reader's Digest parking lot. It'll do for a start.

Microsoft Word 4 arrived via Fed Express. I booted it up and it crashed immediately.

Roland spent the whole morning helping me switch over to Merlin and ProDOS. It was kind of a thrill to watch. Roland is a hacker of the old school. He's polite and unprepossessing in his dress and demeanor, careful about money and contracts. He drives a Saab with license plate SNAB-BIL. But under that conservative surface is a demon -- a guy who will put his day job on hold for 72 hours and sit down and reverse-engineer an Apple II conversion of Tetris, just for the pleasure of it. Watching him do what he did for me today, I felt a little of the old joy come flooding back. I'd almost forgotten the most basic thing: programming is fun.

The more experiences I have, the more I realize that working with people you like and respect is more important than anything else.

Roland came over for breakfast and we installed an extra 1 MB in my Mac. Roland tested it out by creating an 8,000 page document in MS Word.

There's no guarantee the new game (Talking about PoP) will be as successful. Or that there will even be a computer games market a couple of years from now.

Apple II is a piece of shit. Kyle's sound routines are a piece of shit. His user interface is a piece of shit. The music we play on the CD player for inspiration sounds fucking awesome. Maurice Jarre's rousing overture to Lawrence of Arabia -- amazing. Then when we try to recapture some of that drive and ferocity on the Apple II, it sounds like a bunch of frogs' croaking being drowned out by the crinkly of cellophane wrappers. It's depressing.

SHADOW MAN. Credit Tomi with this one. I was explaining to her why there are no enemies in Prince of Persia. The animations for the player's character are so elaborate, there's not enough memory left to add another character. "Why not use the same animations for your enemies, the way you did in Karateka?" "Wouldn't work so well this time. The character is designed to look cute. He has a very specific personality in the way he runs and moves. The enemies would have to be cute too." "Can't you just change the face, or the costume?" "Not possible. If I change anything , it's a whole new set of shapes. There's just no memory." She wouldn't give up. "Couldn't you make him a different color -- say black?" I started to explain: "This is the Apple II..." and then it hit me: What if I exclusive-OR each frame with itself, bit-shifted one pixel over? I visualized a ghostly, shimmering outline-figure, black, with white face and arms, running and leaping, pursuing you. I described it to Tomi. "Shadow Man!" she exclaimed.

Eleven hours at the office on a Sunday, making this my first recorded 72-hour week.

I gotta finish this damn computer game. I have no excuse for slacking off. As Adam Derman once told me in a letter (about Karateka): "You dumb shit. You've dug your way deep into an active gold mine and are holding off from digging the last two feet because you're too dumb to appreciate what you've got and too lazy to finish what you've started."

I know I missed a lot of gems, however this should give you a taste of how it reads. It's definitely not the next adventure thriller, but rather an intimate look into the personal life of an independent programmer.