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Obama’s speech in Cairo

Okay, this speech has been heard by probably a billion people worldwide; he doesn’t need me to plug it… but I’m just so happy to have a President who says things like this:

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path.

Can we?

Posted Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 10:39 pm in Blog | 2 Comments »

House of Game

Had fun checking out some of this year’s E3 titles (without actually going to E3) at House of Game, a “vernissage” organized by the Hollywood gamers who started Nerd Poker.

Among the cool-looking upcoming titles: Tim Schafer’s Brutal Legend, Pandemic’s The Saboteur, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, and, of course, Uncharted 2.

I especially enjoyed seeing some of the indie games: A USC student project called The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. And Shadow Physics, a very cool mechanic in search of a game. Maybe because they’re works in progress, or just because they’re underdogs; but three hours later, I find myself thinking about them more than about the big studio fare.

Posted Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 9:59 pm in Blog, Games | 1 Comment »

Old Journals update

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!

Posted Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 4:53 pm in Blog, Prince of Persia | 5 Comments »

The tyranny of the epic

I found this Gamasutra editorial by Chris Remo interesting (and not just because he mentions POP). He dares to ask: Why do today’s video games (and the movies based on them) tend so relentlessly toward the epic, at the expense of other kinds of stories?

Is it because games are often played as power fantasies? Is it because, when the default progression mechanic in most games is combat, grand conflict and badassery just make the most sense?

It’s a good question. I saw Star Trek last week at the Arclight Hollywood with friends whose movie tastes run more towards art-house fare. (I loved it, they didn’t.) After the first three trailers (Transformers, Terminator, and GI Joe), my friend leaned over to me in some perplexity and said: “I feel like I’ve just seen the same trailer three times in a row.”

Coincidentally, Terry Gilliam made much the same remark in today’s LA Times:

Terry Gilliam went to the movies the other night, and this is what he saw. “Trailers from ‘Transformers,’ ‘ G.I. Joe,’ ‘ Harry Potter’; they all had the same explosions, the same sound mix, the same rhythms, it was all the same film,” the director says, still not quite believing it. ” Hollywood’s been doing this for 20 years. When’s it going to end?”

[Small world: Gilliam's new film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, was edited by Mick Audsley, who is also one of the editors of the POP movie.]

Kurosawa once said that he made movies for people in their twenties. For me, that’s the key. Epics are the kind of movies I loved most when I was in my teens and early twenties. I liked other kinds of movies too, but I lived for epics. Movies (and video games) mattered more to me at that time in my life than they ever have since. This being a business, it’s fair to note that I spent a far greater proportion of my time and disposable income consuming them than I do now. So in a way, I’m still making movies and games for my 20-year-old self.

These days, when I go to the movies (or the Xbox), be it Star Trek, Bioshock or whatever, what holds my interest most are the small, quirky, human moments that somehow transcend the familiar epic framework, make it come alive one more time. They’re getting harder to find.

Posted Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 3:12 pm in Blog, Film, Games | 7 Comments »

Prince of Persia sketchbooks

Did these on set in Ouarzazate, added the sepia ink wash later when I got back to the hotel.

Posted Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 9:05 am in Blog, Film, Prince of Persia, Sketchbook | 7 Comments »

A visit to Aspen

Went down to the Aspen MLT offices to catch up on all things Fathom and see the work the artists are doing for the upcoming season.

Frank Mastromauro and Peter Steigerwald showed me a stack of Mike Turner’s original Fathom pencil art, including the very first appearance of Aspen Matthews.

There’s something uncanny about a physical drawing, pencil on paper. It’s as close as we can come to touching one of those fleeting moments when you imagine something new for the first time. Something that might change your life, and other people’s.

It was sobering to realize that the stack is finite.

Posted Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 12:05 pm in Blog, Comics, Fathom, Film | No Comments »

Sketching in the desert, continued

Of all the things there are to draw in the world, for me the most fascinating, compelling, and damnably difficult is sketching people I know.

It’s way more pressure than clandestinely sketching complete strangers in a café or an airport. When you draw someone you know, you’ve got nowhere to hide.

This little scribble (lower left) of 2nd AD Rich Goodwin standing between takes on the POP set in Ouarzazate was one of the few times I felt I got a recognizable likeness, even though you can’t see his face. (Whereas the one of John Seale looks nothing like him.)

Posted Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 10:38 pm in Blog, Film, Prince of Persia, Sketchbook | No Comments »

Getting Adults to Draw

This NPR interview with Mo Willems really struck a chord with me. He points out that while all kids draw, almost no adults do, and questions why:

“People stop when they decide they’re not good at it. Nobody stops playing basketball when they realize they’re not going to become a professional. The same thing should apply to cartooning.”

About a year and a half ago I started carrying around a notebook and sketching what I saw. Aside from the pure fun of it, my new hobby has enriched my life in more ways than I ever expected. Willems has some great things to say in favor of picking up the pen, and I can’t endorse his message enough.

Posted Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 2:11 pm in Blog, Sketchbook | 1 Comment »

Prince of Persia released

Many thanks to the readers who’ve been following and commenting on my old journals. Originally, I’d planned to end the feature here — in October 1989, with the release of Apple II Prince of Persia, four years in the making.

Now that we’ve reached that milestone, though, I realize that no self-respecting storyteller would end at such a critical moment, with my worst fears about the game’s commercial prospects soon to be horribly confirmed. So I’ll let my 20-years-younger self keep on blogging from the past a while longer.

Meanwhile, here are answers to some nostalgia-oriented readers’ questions — this one from Ugur Mengilli:

In which programming language was PoP written?

From Nabil Nawaz:

What language did you program Karateka in? How long did it take to code the game?

I coded both Karateka and POP in 6502 assembly language. Looks like this:

CLRMEM  LDA #$00        ;Set up zero value
        TAY             ;Initialize index pointer
CLRM1   STA (TOPNT),Y   ;Clear memory location
        INY             ;Advance index pointer
        DEX             ;Decrement counter
        BNE CLRM1       ;Not zero, continue checking
        RTS             ;Return

Karateka took me about two years and POP four. Both were significantly slowed down by other things I was attempting at the same time (like finishing college, and writing my first screenplay), as the old journals show.

For true die-hards (thanks, Maurice Kaltofen, for tipping me off to the existence of this site), and anyone who’s interested, I’ve posted the POP source code documentation here.

From Sam Assenberg:

I am Sam and I still play the original Prince of Persia almost every day. I’m a big fan of you and Prince of Persia!

Soon, Prince of Persia exists 20 year and we, my uncle and I, are planning a Prince of Persia anniversary! He played it during a few years after it had been released and I started to play when I was about seven years old, almost nine years ago. We love it very much.

We’ve searched all over the web for the exact release date of PoP (we need that for the anniversary), but we couldn’t find it. And that’s our question for you: when has PoP been released exactly?

I had to check the old journals myself to find the answer. The first Apple II version was published in the U.S. on October 3, 1989. So, still six months away. Thanks, Sam and your uncle, for reminding me!

If you’d like to read the old journals from the beginning, they start here.

Posted Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 11:37 am in Blog, Games, Prince of Persia | 19 Comments »

Paris in springtime

I’ve been experimenting with those watercolor pencils. You pencil in the color and then go over it with a wet brush and it turns to watercolors. Still not fully sold on it.

Posted Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 11:27 pm in Blog, Sketchbook | 1 Comment »