The Sands of Time: Crafting A Video Game Story, an essay I wrote a couple of years ago for MIT Press, is now available online. If you’re curious about the nuts and bolts of video game writing — and how it’s different from screenwriting — check it out.
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Here’s a page I started on the midnight flight from Casablanca to Ouarzazate and finished the next morning when I arrived on set.
What the drawing doesn’t show is that it reached 125 degrees that day (52 Celsius).
I started keeping a journal my freshman year in college, and kept the habit for years afterward. I’m still not sure whether it was a good habit or a bad one. A few months ago, when I sat down to write an afterword for the Prince of Persia graphic novel, I pulled out those old notebooks and started to browse through them, figuring it might help me wrap my mind around Prince of Persia’s 20-year history.
It’s all there. The story of how Prince of Persia came to be, and almost didn’t. It occurred to me that as a case history, a time-capsule view of the videogame industry as it was in the 1980s, this was a story others might find interesting too.
So even though the last thing I need is another hobby — especially one that involves spending more time at the keyboard — I’ve begun posting those old journal entries, a kind of blog from the past, starting in 1985. Check out the “Old Journals” tab at the top of the page, and let me know what you think. If enough people are interested, I’ll keep posting — ideally, at least through the end of 1989, when… well, you’ll find out.
The entries are selected and abridged — most of what I had on my mind at age 21, you don’t want to hear about — but on principle, I’ve let things stand as I wrote them, and avoided the temptation to revise with hindsight.
The “Projects” section of the nav bar to the right has the scoop on my past and current projects. I’ll update these pages periodically, and add new ones as new projects reach a point where there’s enough to say about them. Your comments are welcome.
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