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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Still more camels
This was day 30 of the Prince of Persia movie shoot. A spectacular setup with about 350 extras, horses, camels and goats lined up on a ridge. That afternoon a sandstorm rose up suddenly, prompting the decision to wrap early.
A huge exodus of cars, trucks, animals and extras ensued. I had the bright idea of walking the five minutes back to base camp along with the extras, instead of getting a ride, so I could take pictures of the exodus. This was how I found out that (a) a five-minute walk in a full-on sandstorm takes a lot longer than five minutes, and (b) it only takes about thirty seconds for a camera to get so full of sand that its moving parts won’t move any more.
When I got to the air-conditioned sanctuary of Mike Stenson’s trailer, he remarked: “You’re a different color than when I saw you last.”
Then it rained.
