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.

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.

For those of you who missed GDC — or, inexplicably, went to GDC but missed my talk about the making of Prince of Persia on the Apple II in 1985 — that talk has now been posted online along with the other “Classic Game Post-Mortem” talks in the GDC Vault.

You can see higher-quality versions of the original “making of” videos I showed at GDC, including my brother running and jumping and lots more, here at jordanmechner.com.

I loved the “Classic Game Post-Mortems,” a series of one-hour talks in which game designers spoke about the making of their early games: Eric Chahi on Another World (aka Out of This World), Peter Molyneux on Populous, John Romero and Tom Hall on Doom, Mark Cerny on Marble Madness, Toru Iwatani on Pac-Man were fascinating, inspiring, and touching to hear. (I gave a talk about making Prince of Persia, and really appreciated the generous response.)

But what really grabbed me was the energy and excitement surrounding indie games, especially on new platforms like mobile phones, iOS, Facebook, XBLA and PSN. More than in any previous year, I was reminded of the Apple II zeitgeist of the early eighties. It feels like we’ve come full circle, as an industry, to that time when a tiny team with few resources but talent, creativity and elbow grease has the potential to produce the next hugely influential mega-hit.

And I’m pretty sure I just met some of them in San Francisco.

I’m especially excited to hear from the other speakers — an awesome lineup including, among others, Eric Chahi, Will Wright, Ron Gilbert, Peter Molyneux, John Romero, and Toru “Pac-Man” Iwatani — about how their games, which sucked up so many hours of my youth, came to be.

(A non-game-industry friend asked me, in some confusion: “Why call it a post-mortem?” These are retrospectives of games that shipped, not ones that got killed. But even though we game designers and programmers are supposed to be a logical bunch, I don’t think the term “post-partum” is going to catch on any time soon.)

See you at GDC!

Or rather, partial script. For writers interested in the differences between writing for movies and games, it’s worth noting that there is no game design document equivalent to a film screenplay (i.e. an established format for the writer to communicate the story to producers, director, cast and crew).

Typically, the larger part of my writing work on Sands of Time was conveyed through non-screenplay documents (dialog recording and tracking spreadsheets and the like) to the team of designers, artists and engineers. I’ve described that process in more detail in this article for MIT Press.

The “readable screenplay” posted here reads like a film screenplay, but that’s because it contains only the cinematic cutscenes – not the in-game scripted events, dialog, and voice-over narration that are just as essential to the player’s experience of the story. Those exist in no easily readable form.

The best way to experience a videogame story is to play the game. But for a quick read, this script offers at least a glimpse into Sands of Time’s beginnings.

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.

It was a whirlwind, too-short 36 hours including

• Ubisoft’s Toronto studio launch party Sunday night
• giving the keynote Monday morning for Interactive Ontario (talking about one of my favorite subjects, Prince of Persia)
• doing a TIFF “Film and Games” panel later that afternoon with Jade Raymond and Jon Landau (a really nice, down to earth guy who produced two small yet profitable indie films, Titanic and Avatar)
• standing ovation for Catherine Deneuve after the premiere of “Potiche” (her 109th movie according to IMDB)

The Toronto International Film Festival felt welcoming, spiffy and well organized, like Toronto itself. I left the city by an airport on an island in the middle of downtown that you take a ferry to get to. Now that’s cool.