Making Games
Answers to your questions about the art, craft and business of game development.
Conversation with Eric Chahi
I’ve met Eric Chahi (creator of Another World) twice: in Paris in 1992, and a couple of years later in San Francisco, where the Smoking Car team and I were toiling away on The Last Express, while Eric and his Amazing Studios were deep in the throes of finishing Heart of Darkness — both passion projects that had gone over schedule and budget, an ocean apart, exacting a psychic and financial toll for which the experiences of making Prince of Persia and Another World had only partly prepared us.
I remember looking at Eric’s tired face and thinking: He looks the way I feel.
Recently, Mark Siegel, my editor at First Second Books, asked me if by chance I had Eric’s contact info. I hadn’t spoken to Eric in a dozen years (though the original Another World poster he signed for me is hanging in my office), so I asked my friend Eric Viennot.
That email sparked Eric to suggest a joint interview, which, after much patience and persistence on his part, he’s now posted on his blog. Here it is, for those who read French.
Update: An English translation (non-Babelfish) has been posted on Gamasutra.
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.
A French video game school
Congratulations to this year’s graduating class at ENJMIN – the graduate school for video games established by France’s CNAM (Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers) in Angouleme, near Bordeaux. I’ve had the honor and the pleasure of being their parrain (mentor) for the last year. At last week’s graduation ceremony, I passed the baton to Ubisoft’s Serge Hascoët, as Eric Viennot passed it to me a year ago. It was a great experience getting to know the students and faculty at ENJMIN, and I have no doubt that the games industry will benefit from their ideas, energy and talent.
Game to movie to graphic novel
This month’s Game Informer magazine has an opinion piece I wrote about the creative process of adapting a property across different media. You can also read it 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.
