The Prince of Persia ebook
For readers who’ve gamely clicked their way through all seven years of my “Making of Prince of Persia” journals online — and those who haven’t — I’m happy to announce that the complete saga is now available as a PDF and Amazon Kindle ebook.
The book isn’t free — we’ve priced it at US$7.99 — but at 300-plus pages, I hope it’s good value. We’re publishing it without any copy protection or DRM, so pirates shouldn’t have much of a challenge. Book sales will help defray the costs of this project and of maintaining the website.
The ebook contains the original Old Journals, plus never-before-published entries leading up to the beginning of The Last Express. You can download a free sample PDF of the first 40 pages, or the full ebook, here.
Thanks to Danica Novgorodoff for designing the book (Danica is the multitalented author of the excellent graphic novel Refresh, Refresh, and designer of many First Second books, including Solomon’s Thieves), and to David Anaxagoras, Ryan Nelson, and Aaron Simonoff for their hard work putting it together. It’s safe to say it turned out to be a lot more work than any of us expected.
How Prince of Persia got made — and almost didn’t
In the ebook, you’ll read what I wrote in my journal on the day I videotaped my kid brother running and jumping to model the prince’s moves; the day I gave up on the project; and the day I decided to finish it after all.
In the seven years from May 1985 to January 1993, Prince of Persia went from a few scribbles on yellow-lined paper to a published, best-selling video game franchise, and I changed from a callow kid into (I thought) a seasoned software entrepreneur. If you’ve read the journals, you know that it was a bumpy ride, and that the game’s eventual success was anything but a foregone conclusion.
Whether you’re a game designer or in another creative field, whether you had an Apple II in the 1980s or weren’t born yet, I hope you’ll find inspiration (or something else of use to you) in this story of how one game got made.
Check out the ebook here.
A request
This ebook is an experiment in many ways. I have no idea how many people will be interested, or how well the non-DRM “honor system” will work. Either way, I’ll post once the dust has settled, and let you know how it went.
If you’ve enjoyed the Old Journals on the site, but don’t feel the urge to own the ebook, you can still support this project by helping us spread the word. Readers like you who take the time to post or tweet about the Old Journals ebook, review it on Amazon, or just tell a friend, will make a big difference in the experiment.
Many thanks!
Still Life with Apple
I finally read Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s great memoir this week — prompted by the tsunami of media commentary on the resignation of Steve Jobs (you know, the other guy). It got me thinking about what an incredible impact stuff made or sold by those two Steves has had on my life over the past three decades.
1978
I was a sophomore in high school when I bought my first Apple II. It cost $1200 at the Computerland of Fairfield, Connecticut — my life savings, including all my loot from years of drawing caricatures at community fairs, plus a loan from my kid sister.
I remember opening the box, lifting the computer out of those custom-molded foam packing pieces. The tactile thrill of owning an Apple began before I’d even plugged the thing in. I knew it was going to change my life.
I hooked it up to an old TV and a cassette recorder, and I was up and running.
1979
Weekends and after school (and sometimes instead of school), I progressed from typing in BASIC game program listings from the red book that had come with the Apple (Breakout was the best), to inventing my own games — first in BASIC, then in 6502 machine code, using the built-in mini-assembler. I pored through the red book, trying to understand its secrets.
As soon as I could afford it, I increased the Apple’s 16K of RAM by adding another row of chips, and then another. Each enhancement unlocked new capabilities: hi-res graphics, then two-page hi-res. Newer, more sophisticated games like Apple Invader (a pixel-perfect copy of the coin-op Space Invaders, programmed by the mysterious M. Hata) pushed the machine’s limits beyond what I’d imagined possible. I realized the games I’d programmed so far hadn’t scratched the surface of what it could do.
1981
I brought my Apple to college. Tricked out with a dot-matrix printer, 5 1/4″ floppy disk drive, lower-case adapter chip, and new word-processing software that could hold up to four pages in memory, it replaced a portable Smith-Corona typewriter as my go-to device for writing papers. I was the only kid in my dorm who had such an awesome system. I used it to earn extra cash typing other people’s papers for a buck a page.
Between classes (and instead of them), I used it to make a game called Karateka.
1985
The Karateka royalties bought me a brand-new 512K Macintosh computer, through a special student-discount arrangement Apple had with Yale.
Macs started popping up all around campus that year. It was still unusual for a student to actually own one — the only other guy I knew who had one was David Pogue, down the hall — but anyone could use the ones in the computer rooms, and a lot of people did.
The Mac had a tiny, but amazingly high-resolution screen, with a mouse-driven graphical interface that gave it a totally different vibe from other computers. It was a device that even non-techies felt comfortable using. And it could hold 100 pages of text in memory. The Mac changed playing games and typing papers on computers from a fringe activity into part of mainstream college life.
1985
I loved my Mac. It was a shiny new toy — good to write papers on, fun to show off to friends — but I didn’t consider it a machine for serious programming. I wasn’t enough of an engineer to pop the hood and figure out how it worked and what all the chips did, the way I’d done with the Apple II. It was too sophisticated.
Besides, the installed user base of Macs in 1985 was miniscule compared to the Apple II. As a game programmer, it didn’t make business sense for me to switch.
So my new Mac took its place alongside my main working system — which I’d by then upgraded to a newer Apple IIe with 64K of RAM, two disk drives, color monitor and joystick. That was the computer I used to program Prince of Persia.
1989
I hadn’t anticipated that, due to my combination of obsessive perfectionism and occasionally dilatory work habits, Prince of Persia would take me four years to finish. By the time I was done, the Apple II was obsolete.
Ironically, it was the Mac version that saved my new game from oblivion. While the Apple market was dying, the rise of desktop publishing had created a new market of Mac owners hungry for games to play on their high-resolution color screens. They embraced Prince of Persia and made it a hit.
Thanks, Woz. Thanks, Steve. If I’d gone for the Commodore PET or Compucolor II in 1978, my programming career wouldn’t have been nearly so charmed.
2011
Today, like almost everyone I know, my daily life is inextricably bound up with Apple products. I’m typing this in a café on a MacBook Air, with an iPad and iPhone in my shoulder bag, and more Macs and iProducts on view at the tables around me than I can count.
Devices that in ten years will seem as quaint as my 1978 Apple II does now.
But oh, man, it was a thing of beauty.
PoP Original Screenplay
Regarding Prince of Persia’s recent journey from video game to movie, I’m sometimes asked how closely the final film follows my original story.
Now that the movie is out on DVD/Blu-Ray, I figure the easy way to satisfy curiosity is to simply post my screenplay from June 2005.
Quick history: This was the last draft I wrote, starting from the story John August and I pitched to Disney/Bruckheimer in 2004. A series of other writers took it from there: Jeff Nachmanoff, Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard, in that order, resulting in the shooting script that went into production in summer 2008.
The making of the movie is well documented in Michael Singer’s coffee-table-worthy book and the movie DVD/Blu-Ray extras. Now, you can see how it started.
Update: If you’re curious about the game-into-movie adaptation process, I’ve also posted the original game script of Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which I wrote in 2002-03, and an accompanying article about how that game story was developed. As these materials illustrate, writing for games and movies are two very different crafts.
Tips for game designers
Thanks to Jeremie Biron for finding and posting these “Tips for Game Designers” I gave in 2004, on the release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
- Prototype and test key game elements as early as possible.
- Build the game in incremental steps – Don’t make big design documents.
- As you go, continue to strengthen what’s strong, and cut what’s weak.
- Be open to the unexpected – Make the most of emergent properties.
- Be prepared to sell your project at every stage along the way.
- It’s harder to sell an original idea than a sequel.
- Bigger teams and budgets mean bigger pressure to stay on schedule.
- Don’t invest in an overly grandiose development system.
- Make sure the player always has a goal (and knows what it is).
- Give the player clear and constant feedback as to whether he is getting closer to his goal or further away from it.
- The story should support the game play, not overwhelm it.
- The moment when the game first becomes playable is the moment of truth. Don’t be surprised if isn’t as much fun as you expected.
- Sometimes a cheap trick is better than an expensive one.
- Listen to the voice of criticism – It’s always right (you just have to figure out in what way).
- Your original vision is not sacred. It’s just a rough draft.
- Don’t be afraid to consider BIG changes.
- When you discover what the heart of the game is, protect it to the death.
- However much you cut, it still won’t be enough.
- Put your ego aside.
- Nobody knows what will succeed.
The Making of Prince of Persia
Update: The Making of Prince of Persia journals are now available as an ebook. You can buy it here.
For the past year, I’ve been posting daily entries from the old journals I kept while I was programming Prince of Persia on the Apple II, 20 years ago.
This “blog from the past” covers roughly seven and a half years from May 1985 to January 1993 — from Prince of Persia’s conception through the development of its sequel, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame.
In a coincidence I couldn’t have planned, this month marks both the 20th anniversary of the original game’s release, and the release of the first trailer for Disney’s Prince of Persia movie. Time is an ocean in a storm.
If you’re curious to know how the Prince’s journey began, back in those halcyon days when computers looked like this, it’s all in the Old Journals. Some highlights include: the day my kid brother modeled the prince’s moves; the day Prince of Persia got its title; and the first rotoscoped animation test.
You can read the whole story from the beginning starting here.
Writing a video game
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.
