The first five years of Old Journals have now been posted, covering the development and first release of Prince of Persia. As of June 1990 — nineteen years ago — POP is struggling for life on two formats, Apple II and IBM.
I really appreciate the interest readers are showing in these journals, both on this site and on Twitter. I’ll continue posting one new old journal entry a day. Thanks for following!
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It’s been absolutely fantastic reading these Jordan. Prince of Persia is my most cherished game, and I’ve always wondered about its development and the man behind it. These are a truly fascinating read and I’m very glad you’ve decided to keep posting them!
Thanks for posting those journals! I was barely walking when you were writing Prince of Persia, but it’s fascinating learning about game development back then.
Thank you so much sharing them… It really makes me appreciate all the hard work even more looking at the game as programmer and a video game fan through out the years.
Fantastic, Jordan! Thanks! We were all so excited about the game back then…I was even able to finish within 20 minutes
I was a kid back then and POP surely encouraged me to do more programming.
I was blown away by the aptness of the following (May 9 1989):
“The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concrete reality of what I programmed today.” Oh how precisely this describes my feelings about the “necessary simplifications” I’m forced to do now and then because of deadlines…
And a bold question – I’ve seen that you made the docs PDF available, any chance of seeing more? The source code, perhaps? There are still people able to read assembler…and perhaps the PC conversion code? That would be coool…But I know copyright issues might still prevent you from doing that.
I’d love to post the source code, the problem is I haven’t been able to locate it! My first round of digging into the boxes in my garage, and hitting up old Broderbund pals on Facebook, turned up some cool stuff, but not that. If I find it, I’ll definitely make it available.