The paper book comes from CreateSpace, a really cool self-publishing service for authors. Basically, we sent them a print-ready PDF and they did the rest. The book weighs in at 323 pages, and looks and feels like a good-quality trade paperback. We’ve priced it at $16.99 (the difference from the ebook versions reflects the printing cost).

You can purchase the book here.

To anyone who’s previously paid for another version of the ebook and would like to have the .epub version for convenience, let us know and we’ll email it to you. Like the PDF, it’s non-DRMed.

Once the dust has settled, I’ll post (and Aaron, Dave and Danica may guest-post) about the results of our grand ebook/self-publishing experiment, and what we’ve learned. Short answer: It was more work than we anticipated — but now that we know how, the next book should be a lot easier. I think.

Also: For readers curious about who some of the people referred to in the journals are, or what became of them, I’ve posted a “who’s who” of players in the making-of-Prince of Persia saga, here.

Many thanks to everyone who’s read the book and reviewed, posted or tweeted about it. The response has been fantastic, and makes it all worth it.

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!

When Yuri, Joanna Wasick and I came together in a sound studio for the first day of voice recording on POP:SOT, we didn’t have animations, animatics, or even concept art yet. While the POP team was bringing the world and characters of the game to life on screen, two actors first needed to make them real in their imaginations. The Prince and Farah began as voices in darkness.

I cherish voice recording as a special, thrilling, and terrifying moment in game production. Having experienced it from a writer-director’s point of view, I asked Yuri for an actor’s perspective on the process.

Yuri Lowenthal is an actor who lives and works in Los Angeles. You may have heard/seen him in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Afro Samurai, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Ben 10. He is married to actress Tara Platt and easily stalked at @YuriLowenthal. And if you’re nice he’ll tell you the exciting story about the time he met Jake Gyllenhaal.

People often ask me: “What’s harder? Voice acting or real acting?” I’ve heard it so many times that I hardly get offended anymore. Almost hardly. I mean, I get it; the person speaking is really trying to say: “What kind of acting is more difficult, the kind where we just end up hearing your voice, or the kind where we end up seeing your face?”

Well, let’s break it down:

For on-camera acting, I generally get the script in advance, time to talk with the director about the character and what his or her vision is for the project, maybe do a little research, put on a costume, work with some props, walk around the set, rehearse with other actors, and take time to break down the script so that I can bring you, the viewer, the best performance I am capable of.

For voice acting, I generally show up the morning of the recording, am handed a script, and after about 5 minutes (if I’m lucky) of discussion with the director (or sometimes writer) about the project, we get down to business so that I can bring you, the viewer/listener/gamer, the best performance I am capable of. Will my performance be judged less harshly because I didn’t have the niceties that an on-camera or theatrical situation can afford? Absolutely not.

As a voice actor, I have to jump in, scan the script, get as much info as possible in a short amount of time from the people involved and make choices on the spot — but stay flexible in case my choices aren’t in line with what the client needs. I have to pay extra close attention to the director, because they usually have a LOT more information about the story and characters than I do. And I’m alone, empty-handed, in whatever clothes I grabbed out of my closet that morning, in a room about the size of the closet I grabbed my clothes from, standing in front of a sensitive microphone that will pick up every little sound — voluntary or involuntary — that I make. And the only thing I can count on being there for me is my imagination.

Not that I don’t use my imagination when I’m acting on camera; but in the booth, it’s my most powerful weapon. In the dark, by yourself, you have to create everything — which, when you look at it, can be either terrifying or immensely empowering. For fear of otherwise dissolving into a gibbering puddle of panic, I choose “empowering.” You have to. You must bring a certain confidence into the booth with you, because no one else will be there to prop you up, and the client rarely has giant wodges of time for you to “find” your performance.

To be a good voice actor, you have to be a crack actor. A cool voice will only get you so far. Years of theater gave me a huge jump on voice acting. And you know what? All the voice acting I’ve done has made me a better on-camera actor.

Now, I’m not saying one or the other is better. I love both, and I absolutely love showing up to do a voice acting gig and not have to get there at 5am for makeup and wardrobe and then sit in a trailer for a couple of hours while they light and rehearse until they’re ready for me to come out and say three lines of dialogue. Instead, I can roll into the studio at 9am and be out by 1pm, sometimes having finished recording what is, in essence, a whole movie. And I didn’t even really have to put pants on.

On the other hand, sometimes I love getting into a suit of armor and hitting another actor with a sword.

(As I watch my video game work segue from voice acting to sometimes full performance capture, I see the two worlds on a collision course. But that’s a story for another day.)

When I’m voice acting, you don’t get to see my face, so it ceases to be a question of whether or not I “look the part.” If I can sound like it, I can be it. You don’t see a lot of working voice actors getting cast because of their looks. Once again, you have to be a good actor. Not just a pretty face. Or even Persian.

I can identify with Matt’s feeling that he came to the industry too late — that the “golden age of the bedroom coder” had passed him by. That’s exactly how I felt in 1982, when I’d had my Apple II for four years — since age 14 — and still hadn’t managed to get a game published. While other programmers produced hits like Space Eggs and Alien Rain, I could feel the window of opportunity closing, and kicked myself for having taken so long to get my act together.

As Matt and I can both attest, the brass ring comes around more than once.

Matthew Hall established KlickTock in 2009 from a sheep farm in rural Australia. A veteran of the Australian game development industry, Matthew started programming games at the age of seven.

I met Jordan at GDC earlier this year. I’d recently attended his postmortem of Prince of Persia and ran into him in the halls. We talked about developing games at that time and our own game development histories. However, given Jordan is quite famous and you probably have never heard of me before — what went wrong?

I am only a few years younger than Jordan. Just like he received his first computer, an Apple II in 1978, I received my Commodore 64 in 1983. I programmed games throughout my childhood, but by the time I was able to produce a professional quality game — the golden age of the bedroom coder was over. My 8-bit heroes had moved onto 16-bit and found themselves struggling. The industry had passed to the hands of those with big cheques and bigger teams.

Instead of producing a hit title in my bedroom — as I was always hoping to — I developed homebrew titles for the newly released Game Boy Advance. Nintendo would never allow garage developers like myself access to their development kits, so I used one of the many “flash-kit” solutions available on the black market. As an unlicensed developer I had to release all my titles for free; hardly untold riches! Regardless, I am proud of my titles even if only a handful of people were ever able to enjoy them.

My portfolio of titles and expertise in new hardware allowed me to get a professional game development job. But after 8 years of doing thankless work-for-hire, I eventually came to the conclusion that I had to leave my paid jobs and strike out on my own if I ever wanted to make a game I was truly proud of. I left my job just as the App Store was launching, though I had no idea it was going to change my life.

Little Things was released a year later. Though it was initially a failure on PC, it was featured by Apple as the iPad App of the Week and I’ve had similar chart-topping success with my other iOS games.

Finally the games industry had come full circle, once again empowering a lone developer with a stable platform, low cost of entry, excellent engines and tools available on the market, and a direct line to customers hungry for more games.

So I have a few pieces of advice for those with a passion for games and a notebook full of game ideas:

1. Head out to the store and pick yourself up a Macbook and an iPod. You’ve now got the top of the line development system used by every iOS developer in the world! No need to call a console manufacturer and beg them to allow you to drop thousands of dollars on a single dev kit.

2. Now, for the game engine! From popular open-source solutions like Cocos2D to powerful 3D engines like Unity 3D the choice is yours. If learning to code is too much at first, there’s even Stencyl, which allows you to develop games with a visual interface.

3. When I was a kid, if I got stuck on a problem, I got STUCK. I was a 14 year old kid programming games from a farm in rural Australia. Who was I going to call? Jordan Mechner? I may as well just call Steven Spielberg for film-making advice. The Internet has completely changed programming and if you find yourself with a problem you can’t seem to solve, most likely someone has already solved it for you. With Google around, programming is much less scary.

The most amazing part of this new golden age is that you don’t have to be #1 to be successful. Everyone knows that Angry Birds has had over 200,000,000 downloads. You may not have ever heard of my games, but Doodle Find has had over 2,000,000 downloads and Little Things has sold over 125,000 units. I’m ecstatic with the success I’ve had so far and I hope the best is yet to come. Most importantly, I only need to support myself — not a large company renting an expensive office in a central business district.

I’m beyond grateful to have found myself in the right place at the right time… finally.

Here’s advice from someone who crossed that bridge a lot more recently than I did: Adam “Atomic” Saltsman, creator of the phenomenally successful indie game Canabalt.

Today’s aspiring game designers can tap resources we couldn’t have dreamed of in 1980. But as Adam emphasizes, the bottom line is still the same: Don’t wait. Start making games right now.

Adam ‘Atomic’ Saltsman made Gravity Hook, Fathom, Flixel, and Canabalt. Adam also helped make Paper Moon, Cave Story Wii, FEZ, the Game City Idea Bucket, and the Flash Game Dojo. He lives in Austin, TX with his wife Bekah, his son Kingsley, and a couple of pug dogs, where he makes iOS games at Semi Secret Software.

When I graduated from high school in 2000, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life: make video games. There was only one serious video game curriculum at the time, offered by the DigiPen Institute, so competition for admission there was pretty intense. I didn’t even apply. The programs at Carnegie-Mellon and MIT were still in their infancy. GAMBIT didn’t exist yet, but they had some other programs that looked interesting. I couldn’t afford the out-of-state tuition, and the enormous in-state college I decided to attend offered a single, solitary 4-credit course on the subject.

Times have changed; finding a satisfying career in video games isn’t the impossible joke it used to be. However, the chasm between “I want to make video games!” and actually making video games still intimidates a lot of people, regardless of age, gender or background. If you find yourself on the wrong side of this abyss, don’t panic! Crossing this gap is a lot less complicated than you might think.

Before we start figuring out how to make our dreams come true, though, let’s clarify what that dream is. Contrary to the funny comic above, what we’re talking about is making games, not playing games. Hopefully this doesn’t surprise you, but these are wholly different activities! Just because you enjoy playing games does not necessarily mean that you will love making them too. There’s only one way to find out, of course, but now is a good time to seriously consider whether you really love the act of creation. There is no position at any company in the world that involves just playing games for fun. Seriously, ask a video game tester how much “fun” it is to play the same level 6000 times…

But our game-making dream still needs a bit more clarity. After all, a significant portion of the modern video game industry revolves around pumping out rushed, under-budget game versions of cartoon franchises to whatever console happened to be left over during publisher negotiations (this is not a slam on folks that do that work for a living; their dedication and resourcefulness impresses the heck out of me). So our dream is not just to make any old games, but to make satisfying, interesting games that reflect our passions and interests, whatever those may be.

So how do we do that? How do we escape from our IT/retail/food-service gig and start making games for a living?

A Fork In The Road

At the moment, interesting and original video games that satisfy our assumptions about these game-making dreams tend to come in two basic flavors: big, and small. Big games are usually realistically detailed 3D simulations with a focus on a cinematic narrative. Big games can have huge, open worlds or be more like a streamlined, “on rails” roller coaster ride. Big games are usually made by a big game studio with a team of 100 or more creators, and are sold primarily in plastic boxes at game shops. Big games are a pretty long haul; they usually take anywhere from two to four years to create, and sometimes much longer. There are lots of exceptions, but these guidelines apply to most of the coolest, high-budget games made in the last few years: Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted 2, and so on.

Conversely, small games are usually 2D or stylized 3D, with a focus on abstract or artistic presentation and the exploitation of simple game mechanics. Small games are sometimes hand-crafted, but sometimes the game worlds are “procedurally generated”, or randomly created by computer algorithms. Small games are usually made by a core team of four people or less, and are primarily distributed through electronic payments and downloads. Small games vary greatly in the time they take to produce, depending on the platform and the design, and can take anywhere from five days to five years to create. Like big games, there are lots of exceptions, but these guidelines apply to a lot of the most interesting low-budget games made in the last few years: Braid, World of Goo, and so on.

While many people work on both big games and small games (sometimes at the same time!), my advice about how to start making games depends a bit on what sort of game you’re dreaming about making, and what sort of team you’re dreaming about joining.

Don’t forget that taking a true game design role on a big game is almost impossible. The vast majority of the team, while they all have creative input and the ability to affect the outcome of the game, are largely devoted to producing the game content, not making decisions about the game design. Even in a game studio with a thousand employees, only a handful of them will actually work on game design on a daily basis, and they’re probably going to hang on to that job for a while. This is just the reality of it; if game design is the part of making games that you love, making small games is going to be a much better bet, at least for now.

Big Games Need Specialists

By necessity, most big game studios are looking for specialists: experts in a specific discipline. A big studio is looking to hire the absolute best 3D Modelers, Animators, and Programmers they can get their hands on. Robin Hunicke (Flower, Journey) published a nice breakdown of some of the different disciplines and job titles in this Game Developer Magazine Career Guide article. With few exceptions, these responsibilities do not overlap in practice. For example, a 3D Modeler will rarely spend time programming the game engine, and vice versa. There is so much work to do that having each person focusing on their greatest strength just makes the most sense. The level of detail is staggering: one artist might do hundreds of iterations on a single character, while another might spend months modeling hair. Hair.

To find a place on a project like that, you need to zero in and focus on the specific part of making games that you love the most. If 3D sculpting is the part of making games that really engages you, dedicate yourself to making the best 3D models you can. It will take a long time, and you will make a lot of bad 3D models along the way. You may also figure out if you have what it takes to model crates for months at a time. The same goes for Programmers; you will spend a lot more time debugging frustrating hardware problems than you will elegantly solving interesting problems, or designing cool systems. You need to be able to appreciate the details. Plus, in any discipline, I think it’s fair to expect to spend two to three years of nights and weekends honing your craft in order to perform at a level that will attract the attention of a big studio.

Hopefully that’s not a terrifying idea! If 3D modeling, or animating, or graphics programming is something you love to do, spending your free time getting better at it should be a no-brainer and an enjoyable pastime anyways. But in my experience, and the experience of my peers, if you don’t spend that extra time on your craft you won’t cut it. Plus, if you don’t love it enough to pursue it in your free time, then why on earth are you trying to get a job in the game industry? Compared to other tech industries, the hours generally suck, and the pay’s usually not great either! But more importantly, most of us need a couple years of failing and doing things wrong in order to figure out how to do things right.

What about schooling? At a lot of large studios, just having a great portfolio isn’t enough. Even if the studio is pretty liberal, sometimes their investors will require at least a two-year degree. You don’t necessarily need a four-year degree or even a degree in the actual discipline you’re pursuing. One way to think of a college degree, from an employer’s perspective, is a piece of paper certifying “I satisfactorily completed a multi-year commitment”. This can be reassuring to an employer who is taking the risk of bringing on someone new. If you are attending one of the many game art or game design schools that have sprung up over the last decade, be careful that you aren’t just comparing yourself to your classmates, or even the faculty. It’s important to honestly and sincerely compare your portfolio against the art in recently shipped games from major studios. That is your real competition, not just the folks in your afternoon class.

If you want to be at a big studio, and work on big games, the most important thing to do is to start honing your craft now. Right now! Don’t even bother finishing this article! Just launch the appropriate software, open some tutorials, and start failing; you will be awesome by this time next year.

For more specific advice about taking this path into the industry, I highly recommend thoroughly reading professional animator Kiel Figgins’ Industry FAQ, which has all this advice and much more, including tips for prepping your website and portfolio. Figgins also suggests this simple step-by-step approach to gaining some perspective what goes on behind the scenes of big games:

1. Load up your favorite game, the one that inspired you to make games.
2. Skip the game and go straight to the credits!
3. Google each name and see if they have a website, blog or portfolio.
4. Check out their resume. What companies did they used to work for? What software do they use? How much experience do they have?

I also recommend checking out the tail end of the following section for some links to high-end 3D game engines that are free, and might be useful for familiarizing yourself with modern game technology, as well as testing animations, models, level designs or sound effects. If you feel like you have reached a plateau in your discipline, especially if it involves 3D modeling or animation, you could also look into a variety of online mentoring programs with industry veterans.

Small Games Need Generalists

Dividing these approaches into “specialist” versus “generalist” is a bit unfair. Employees at big studios always have ancillary skills and hobbies. I know of Programmers who are sound engineers, architects, and even armorers. And creators at small studios are still pretty highly specialized. Our day-to-day work rarely requires us to create floral arrangements or groom pets. That said, in any given month at my two-person company, my responsibilities might include computer repair, web design, marketing, production, programming, prototyping, concept art, production art, testing & QA, UI design, tool creation, tool maintenance, game design, and sometimes catering. My old boss used to call this the “Swiss Army knife” approach.

How on earth do you prepare for that kind of “job”? The same way we prepare for a job at a big studio: by spending all our free time honing our craft and sharing it with the world. Except in this case, it could do more harm than good if we spend too long working on any one skill. We want to spend our time doing everything; making whole games from scratch all by ourselves. That’s right, non-artists: time to learn how to make art! You too, non-programmers: time to learn how to code! We all fear the unknown, but if we’re afraid to learn new skills, then our chances of getting to work on small games are sadly diminished.

Like honing our skills for a big studio, learning these new skills can take a long time. That means we’re going to do things wrong for a long time. And that’s ok! That’s the learning process. The point, after all, is not to become the best artist, or the best programmer. Repeat after me: “I don’t need to be good, just good enough.” That can sound defeatist, and I don’t mean to discourage anyone from pursuing excellence. The important thing is to not give up just because we aren’t good enough yet. Radio host Ira Glass says:

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this.

The first game I released was a simple game with a spaceship that shot lasers at bad guys. There was only one kind of bad guy, and the game just repeated itself after about 30 seconds. There was no way to even win! But I learned a ton building it, and my next game turned out even better, even if it too was very small and simple. Over the course of the next year I abandoned some prototypes and released a fairly controversial platformer. More than two years after releasing my first “game”, I finally uploaded Canabalt, a game I made in less than a week. You can learn a lot from a few years of failure!

If you want to work on small games, the most important thing to do is start making small games right now. Even five years ago this would have been a harsh catch-22. However, in this glorious day and age there are not only amazing game-making software tools and tutorials freely available all over the web, but there has been a simultaneous resurgence and interest in tabletop games and game design.

Let’s let that sink in for a minute. Game-making tools: free, powerful, and cross-platform. Game-making tutorials: free, and well-written. Tabletop games: easy to make, fun to make, and require no programming or art whatsoever. The only thing stopping you from making a game right now, right this very minute, is you. If you have never designed a game before, video or otherwise, I heartily recommend starting with this fantastic article about a simple and fun tabletop game design exercise.

For making video games, here are some free and popular game-making tools that are pretty easy to use:

• Game Maker Lite (Spelunky, Hero Core)
• Stencyl (Dangerous Dungeons)
• Flixel (Canabalt, Blocks That Matter)
• FlashPunk (Tiny Hawk, Radical Fishing)
• Unity (Raptor Safari, Desktop Dungeons)

Google should yield up some great tutorials for any of those tools. While Game Maker, Stencyl, Flixel and FlashPunk are mainly for 2D games, Unity can also do some pretty high-end and complex 3D games. If you are feeling particularly intrepid, you can check out these other free 3D game engines:

• UDK (Gears of War, AntiChamber)
• CryEngine (Crysis 2)
• PolyCode (still in alpha)

For more resources, I recommend checking out this encyclopedic list of tools, tutorials, overviews and references. I also maintain a list of game making resources on my gamasutra blog which includes some links to communities that revolve around making games and game art. Meeting new people, learning from them, sharing my work and giving back to these communities has completely changed my life. This is not “networking”. This is establishing relationships and friendships with the people who inspire you the most, and, if you’re lucky, even getting to collaborate with them.

Finally, once you start something, you need to finish it. Game maker Derek Yu (Eternal Daughter, Aquaria, Spelunky) has compiled some fantastic advice on the topic in his article Finishing a Game. Read it and take it to heart!

So Make Some Games Already!

Ultimately, whether you are aiming for big games or small ones, or somewhere in between, my advice is the same: start creating something right now, and keep doing it every day. That might sound like simple advice, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Especially if you have a family and/or a mortgage and/or a day job, your free time is probably pretty limited already. Trying to build up these skills on the side can be hard on relationships and your other responsibilities. Like going back to school or getting a second job, this can’t be a unilateral decision if you have people in your life that rely on you!

If your partner decides to support you in this, or you’re young and unfettered by such concerns, then I am happy to report that it is entirely worth it. When I’m not writing articles, I spend most of the year making up games. I get paid to make games. In my underpants. I didn’t have to go to game design school (although a few of them are great) or buy a bunch of books (many of which are good as well). All I had to do was stay up late, make mistakes, and try to learn from them.

Special Thanks

Some shoutouts to the folks who helped out on this article:

• Kiel Figgins for extensive feedback, suggestions & industry FAQ.
• Adam Schuman for helpful industry feedback.
• Robin Hunicke for the career guide & other suggestions.
• Ron Carmel for some helpful suggestions.
• Erin Robinson for helpful feedback.

And thanks to Jordan Mechner for the idea and opportunity!

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.

The LA Convention Center felt much quieter compared to previous years. Restaurants had plenty of tables, and on the show floor you could actually hear yourself talk.

Hope to see some of you there. And Mom, if you’re reading this, Happy Mother’s Day!

The kind of sturm and drang that’s swirled around “Green Lantern” is actually par for the course on most visual effects-heavy tentpoles these days — and the problem’s growing. Such pics now routinely fit the description of a “troubled” project, with “troubled” the new normal.

Traditionally, big studio movies never miss their release dates. This is different from the videogame industry, where high-profile AAA titles, under pressure to raise the bar technologically as well as artistically, can be granted extra months or even years if the publisher feels it’s worth it.

Game makers have long admired Big Filmmaking’s ability to meet schedules no matter what. But with the shift to digital, film post-production is acquiring the atmosphere of a “normal” game studio at crunch time:

[Studio] management practices are still catching up to the reality of tentpole production, where effects have to be built before the picture is tested, then vfx have to be added and/or changed as the picture comes together and in response to audience testing, all while marketing demands shots for the campaign.

All of Hollywood seems to be still figuring this out, and as a result, the tentpole pattern is now well established:

• A movie demands you’ve-never-seen-this-before visual effects both for marketing and story;
• Ambitious plans and a short schedule leave little margin for error;
• Inevitable schedule problems trigger urgent meetings among studio execs, vendors and filmmakers to get the project back on track;
• “911″ emergency calls go out to almost any vfx shop in the world that can take on some last-minute work;
• Everyone runs a harrowing race to deadline despite all the extra help.

Collapse, rest, repeat.

As a videogame maker, I always assumed we were just crazy to begin with. But is the madness in the craftsman, or his tools?

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