Update: Karateka Classic is now live in the App Store and on Google Play.

I’ve heard from a lot of people who’ve expressed the desire to replay a certain 1984 side-scrolling, bird-punching game that traumatized them in childhood, exactly the way they remember it — on their mobile devices.

So, by popular demand, I’m happy to announce that Karateka Classic is coming to the App Store and Google Play this Thursday. It’s not a remake, not a port, but a faithful pixel-perfect emulation of the original Apple II game, with Olivier Goguel’s ActiveGS emulator running my 6502 assembly language code, graphics, and my dad’s music.

In engineering the app, Olivier has added a number of nifty touches, including the ability to choose between color CRT, amber, or green screen, as well as a few touchscreen-friendly updates, and a certain peculiarity of the 5.25″ floppy disk version which I won’t spoil here.

I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts. Does Karateka Classic match your memories? How does it compare to the Karateka remake? And is it better to kick, or always punch the hawk?

Download links will be posted here late Wednesday night. Oh, and the price will be 99 cents.

Two events are already on the calendar: If you’re in L.A. on July 9 (the day the book launches), come by Skylight Books in Los Feliz, where I’ll be doing a reading/signing and Q&A. The following week, I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con (event details TBA).

Meanwhile, see you on Tumblr!

To jog my memory, I dug out of my archives the game design “bible” I created for the PoP2 dev team in 1991. It’s a curious artifact of that era; you can download the PDF (19MB) if you’re interested.

Why I hate bibles, and made one anyway

There was no “bible” for the original PoP. That game evolved over four years in an organic process of improvisation, trial and error. The level design — the balance of action, exploration and combat that gave the game its particular flavor — came together only in the final few months. I had the liberty to do it that way because I was game designer, animator, and programmer, working on my own with no fixed timetable or budget.

Writing a detailed 200-page bible, then handing it to a team and saying “Make this” is the complete opposite way to start a project, and it’s almost always a terrible idea. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. But that’s how PoP2 was made. It worked because of a peculiar combination of reasons:

• I’d already made PoP1. The idea for PoP2 was to basically make PoP 1.5: keep the existing PoP1 code, animation, and gameplay, add souped-up graphics, a few new twists, traps and enemies, and build twelve new levels. Designing the entire game on paper was possible because it was just similar enough to the original that everyone could easily imagine how it would look, sound and feel to play.
• I was 3,000 miles away. The team was in California, and I was living in New York, about to move to Paris. In those pre-internet days, communication was by fax and long-distance phone calls, with game builds and data sent on floppy disks in DHL envelopes. I knew I wouldn’t be on site often enough to permit fast iteration and tight feedback loops. So it made sense to spell everything out ahead of time.
• We had a budget. Broderbund was a conservative studio and PoP2 was the biggest internal game project they’d ever done. They were already nervous about doing such a graphics-intensive project, and wouldn’t have signed off on it without a design document that gave them confidence that the cost estimates were solid.
• The team actually followed the bible. If the on-site team had included a creative director, my bible would have been obsolete by month two. Games evolve so quickly that any design that gets put on paper is usually out of date by the time anyone reads it. This is why making a detailed bible is usually a waste of time. PoP2 was the rare situation where the studio and team were united in wanting to faithfully execute the design I gave them — and I was safely off-site where there was less danger I might get inspired to improve it.

For all these reasons, it made sense to have a bible. It’s interesting to read it now and see how it compares to the final game. There were cuts and trims, for the usual budget/schedule reasons (the blow-by-blow story of the game development is in the second volume of my old journals) — but I’m most struck by how much was kept, and how faithfully it was executed.

The Shadow and the Flame burns again

To the many readers who have posted asking for a version of The Shadow and The Flame to play on mobile devices, I’m happy to report that Ubisoft has just announced a modern “remastered” version for smartphones and tablets.

The mobile Prince of Persia: The Shadow and the Flame will feature updated graphics, sound, and touch controls in the spirit of Prince of Persia Classic, rather than a direct port of the original like 2010′s Prince of Persia Retro. Here’s a link to the trailer. For myself, I’m looking forward to trying to beat the game again, twenty years later.

Questions & Answers (Spoiler Alert!)

Having recently visited memory lane, I can now answer the following questions posed by readers about Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame. Thanks to Jose and Rishi for asking!

Q: Who is that old lady that is shown at the end of the game? I’ve always wanted to know that.

A: Ah, the Old Witch. In the final shot, after the prince and princess have defeated Jaffar and are flying off on a magic horse to live happily ever after, we pull back to reveal they’re being watched in a crystal ball by a sinister old hag. Tattooed on her forehead is a serpent-S symbol. Observant players may recognize that symbol from earlier in the game, as graffiti scrawled on the walls of the ruined city, presumably by the marauding army that sacked it.

That’s the peril of cliffhanger endings: I wrote PoP2 thinking there was going to be a PoP3… but then there wasn’t. (PoP3D doesn’t count.) In that never-written third game, the Old Witch would have been the primary antagonist. She’s the arch-villainess who gave Jaffar his powers, the one behind the slaughter of the prince’s parents and sacking of his home city, and whom he is destined to vanquish one day. The serpent-S is the symbol of the evil god she serves. (Apologies to Tolkien, Wagner, Lucas, etc. It was the nineties.)

Q: And what about that fire sword in the red castle, and that little man who comes when you get locked in a level (I don’t remember which) and opens the gate to allow you to escape?

A: The Temple of Fire was built to house the sacred blue flame, a very ancient magic. The traps and bird-headed priests are there to protect it. The flaming sword that fights by itself is one of those traps, placed there to guard a door.

The tiny man in the bottle is a Djinn. The original idea was that when you opened the bottle, he would grow into a fearsome giant and attack you. As I recall, we had to cut the giant Djinn for budget reasons. If you’ve played the game recently enough to remember what the final implementation was, please remind me — but I think in the end, we may have had him just run away and accidentally step on the switch to open the gate as a bit of comic relief. It’s just the stub of what he was originally planned to be.

I’m excited to announce that my original graphic novel Templar will be published in July in its entirety as a 480-page, full-color hardcover from First Second. (Book one of the saga was previously published in 2010 as an individual paperback, Solomon’s Thieves.)

It’s a hefty tome. Artists LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland have outdone themselves, evoking 14th-century Paris with all the action, humor, and depth a writer could hope for. I’m immensely proud of this book, and I can’t wait for you to discover it.

Templar will ship on July 9, 2013. You can pre-order it from Amazon here.

Watch the Templar facebook page for updates about book events and other news.

And if you don’t have an iOS device, the new remake is also out on Sony Playstation, Xbox 360, and PC. Don’t forget to punch the hawk!

Update: Karateka is now available in the App Store and for Sony Playstation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, and Steam.

The modern remake of Karateka (out today on Steam) has given me a great reason to dig into my archives and revisit the long-ago era when I developed the original Karateka on a 48K Apple II.

If you’re interested in making games, you may enjoy this series of short videos about the creative and technical process of making Karateka, then (1982) and now (2012). Each episode focuses on a different aspect of production: Inspiration, Animation, Sound and Music, and Gameplay. They’re posted below.

The game industry has changed a lot in thirty years. And yet the more things change, the more they stay the same. For readers interested in delving deeper into the old days, check out the rest of this post below the videos.

Episode 1: Inspiration

Episode 2: Animation

Episode 3: Sound and Music

Episode 4: Gameplay

From My Old Journals

When I started the first Karateka, in 1982, I was a 17-year-old Yale freshman and avid gamer, trying to balance a college courseload with my aspiration to become a published game author. Karateka made that dream a reality. It launched my career and paved the way for my next game, Prince of Persia.

That same year (1982), I started keeping a private journal — a habit I’d keep up for the next decade, as readers of The Making of Prince of Persia (1985-1993) will know. More surprisingly, I never got around to destroying it. And now it’s in the distant-enough past that, rereading it, I’m able to laugh rather than cringe (OK, so maybe it’s a bit of both).

As a time-capsule record of that early Apple II era, and a window into the maniacal brain of a teenager obsessed with “breaking in” to making games and/or movies, it may be of interest to others. So here it is (as DRM-free pdf, epub, and Amazon Kindle ebook, with print edition to follow): Volume One of my old journals, The Making of Karateka.

And, of course, I hope readers will check out the new Karateka.

Here’s our official launch trailer — written and directed by Adam Lisagor, who infused the trailer with his nostalgic memories of playing Karateka at age six on an Apple II:

I’ll post more in coming weeks about the process of making Karateka, then and now: in 1982-84 as a college student on a 48K Apple II, and in 2011-12, as creative director of a bigger (but still small) team using modern game development tools. It’s a great excuse to dig into my archives and uncover old-school souvenirs like this one.

My goal in remaking Karateka was to recapture the simplicity of the original in a compact, reasonably priced (under US$10) downloadable game, with gameplay so straightforward that players of all ages could immediately grasp it and start having fun right away — while enjoying a dramatic human story.

I hope readers will give the new game a try. I’d love to hear your reactions, whether you played the original Karateka in the 1980s or are encountering it now for the first time. Send me a tweet (@jmechner on twitter), post your comment below, or (if you have a question of general interest that you’d like to see answered on the site) email me.

The Karateka website has up-to-date information on game availability on the various platforms. And don’t forget to punch the hawk!

I tested the final version yesterday on a long transatlantic flight (Frankfurt-LAX, with headphones), and it’s my new favorite way to play it. Next to playing on an actual train, that is.

Here’s the trailer:

Tony and me at the moment of truth

Jamie — who knows the term “source code” primarily as the title of the movie Jake Gyllenhaal did after Prince of Persia — digested my explanation; then, looking as confused as before, asked “Why?!?”

It was such a simple question, it stumped me for a moment. Why would I spend a whole day trying to recover data from some ancient floppy disks?

I said: “Because if we didn’t, it might have disappeared forever.”

Why source code?

POP source code recovered after 22 years

You don’t, if all you want is to listen and enjoy the music. But to a pianist performing the piece, or a composer who wants to study it or arrange it for different instruments, the original score is valuable.

It’s possible, up to a point, to reverse-engineer new source code from a published video game, much as a capable musician can transcribe a musical score from listening to a performance. But in both cases, there’s no substitute for the original document as a direct line to the creator’s intentions and work process. As such, it has both practical and historical value, to the small subset of the game-playing/music-listening community that cares.

This is why I was so sorry to have lost the Prince of Persia source code, and happy to find it again.

Lost and found (Geek quotient = 9)

If you’ve read my 1980s game dev journals, you know that by the time Prince of Persia shipped in 1989, I was burned out on coding and seriously eager for the next chapter of my life to start. So I did what most programmers would do: I backed up my Apple II source code onto 3.5″ floppies, stuck it in a box, and promptly forgot about it.

Thirteen years later, when I looked for that box of source code again, I couldn’t find it. I was in Montreal with an amazing team making Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Lead programmers Dominic Couture and Claude Langlais had volunteered to port the original POP to the PlayStation 2, and slip it into our new game as an easter egg. (This was their idea of a fun respite from crunch time.) All they needed was the source code. But as much as we searched — from my garage to Broderbund’s archives to Doug Carlston’s basement — it was nowhere to be found.

Finally we tracked down Scott Shumway, who’d done the 1992 Mac port of POP. He didn’t have the Apple II source code either, but he did have the Mac source code. Dom and Claude made short work of porting it to the PS2, and Sands of Time got its easter egg. Everyone was happy.

On my return to LA, I dug deeper, and turned up a whole shoebox full of Apple II floppies, some dating back to high school. The source code to all my early games was in there: Deathbounce, Karateka. But no POP.

I didn’t need the source code for anything; and it wasn’t as if POP had been lost to history — vintage Apple II POP copies (and their disk images) were widely available — but still, it bothered me to think that something I’d spent years working on was just gone. I felt dumb for not having kept a copy.

This was eight years ago. I gave up the search and forgot about it.

Until two weeks ago, when my Dad shipped me a carton of my stuff he’d found cleaning out the closets of his New York apartment. Inside was the source code archive I’d mislaid in 1990.

Paper is forever

Here’s the thing about digital backups and magnetic storage media: They don’t last very long.

Try popping your old 1980s VHS and Hi-8 home movies into a player (if you can find one). Odds are at least some of them will be visibly degraded or downwright unplayable. Digital photos I burned onto DVD or backed up onto Zip disks or external hard drives just ten years ago are hit and miss — assuming I still have the hardware to read them.

Whereas my parents’ Super 8 home movies from the 1960s, and my grandparents’ photos from the 1930s, are still completely usable and will probably remain so fifty years from now.

Pretty much anything on paper or film, if you pop it in a cardboard box and forget about for a few decades, the people of the future will still be able to figure out what it is, or was. Not so with digital media. Operating systems and data formats change every few years, along with the size and shape of the thingy and the thing you need to plug it into. Skip a few updates in a row, and you’re quickly in the territory where special equipment and expertise are needed to recover your data. Add to that the fact that magnetic media degrade with time, a single hard knock or scratch can render a hard drive or floppy disk unreadable, and suddenly the analog media of the past start to look remarkably durable.

This is why, when I posted about finding the POP source code, digital archivist Jason Scott, Apple II collector Tony Diaz, Derek Moore, and the technical teams behind the DiscFerret and Kryoflux disk readers volunteered their time and effort to give us the best possible shot at a successful extraction.

Let me begin to count the ways I’ve been lucky with this: The box was found. The disks were intact. Prince of Persia and I happened to have a high enough public profile that people of Jason and Tony’s caliber (and dozens of others who contributed their expertise via IRC, skype and twitter from around the world) cared.

In the bigger picture, our timing was lucky. The 1980s and the Apple II are long enough ago to be of historical interest, yet recent enough that the people who put the data on the disks are still with us, and young enough to kind of remember how we did it. Roland Gustafsson, author of the special 18-sector RWTS routines that had made our disks super-efficient in 1988 (and unreadable to anyone but us), was able to get on IRC in 2012 and explain what he’d done to Discferret kids who weren’t born then.

For all these lucky reasons, our archaeological expedition was crowned with success.

From a preservationist point of view, the POP source code slipped through a window that is rapidly closing. Anyone who turns up a 1980s disk archive 20 or 30 years from now may be out of luck. Even if it’s something valuable that the world really cares about and is willing to invest time and money into extracting, it will probably be too late.

This is why it’s awesome that there are people out there working on digital preservation. Because now is the time.

Back up your backups

Jason suggests the following rule of thumb: If you have data you want to keep for posterity, follow the Russian doll approach. Back up your old 20GB hard drives into a folder on your new 200GB hard drive. Next year, back up your 200GB hard drive into a folder on your new 1TB hard drive. And so on into the future.

As for me, the past 48 hours have been a fun walk down memory lane. And have given me a renewed appreciation for paper, celluloid, and stone tablets.

(Postscript: For 6502 assembly-language aficionados, the Prince of Persia source code is now up on github, along with a README file that answers some frequently asked questions. I’ve been amazed and moved by the outpouring of interest in the #popsource saga — it literally crashed this website for several hours today.)

Now, I really need to get back to my day job of making up new stuff. I can only hope to have the same lucky, glorious headache of trying to recover some of it 20 years from now.

Further reading:

“Making of Prince of Persia” game development journal

25-year capsule history of Prince of Persia

POP source code on github

Código Fuente de Prince of Persia – ¡Posteado! (Spanish translation of this post)

Despite my eagerness to see what’s on those disks, I’ve yet to pop them in a drive. As readers of this site have cautioned me, digital media degrade with age; if the disks are in a fragile state, normal handling could damage them further and even render them unreadable.

In today’s guest post, digital archivist Jason Scott explains why reading 20-year-old floppy disks is trickier than it sounds — and why he’s volunteered to fly from NY to LA on Monday with special equipment to tackle the job himself.

Monday will be an exciting day. Much like opening a long-sealed sarcophagus, I truly have no idea whether we’ll find what we’re hoping for, or just data dust. For anyone who wants to share the suspense, we’ll be live-tweeting our progress. Hashtag: #popsource. (I wanted to use #sourcecode, but it was taken!)

Meanwhile, here’s Jason’s story, offering a glimpse behind the scenes of a profession whose existence I couldn’t have foreseen or imagined when I was making Prince of Persia in the 1980s: Digital archeologist.

I first heard about Prince of Persia in a somewhat strange fashion; a high school friend said that David’s older brother was working on a new game to follow up his big hit Karateka. I asked what it was about, and he said it was something about Persian princes and acrobatics. I left it at that, but I knew it’d be great, if Karateka was any indication.

I went to Horace Greeley High School after Jordan, and knew his brother, David, who graduated the same year as me. David was the motion model for Prince of Persia. Jordan was this talented figure somewhere out in the fog of the real world, who was making actual, sold-everywhere games with a company I really liked and respected (Broderbund), and was basically living the dream I hoped to live one day: game developer.

(My own dream was fulfilled — I did work for a short time at Psygnosis, makers of Wipeout, as a tech support phone monkey, and another year stint at a startup game studio, before moving on to other places in the computer world.)

It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I moved away from jobs like system administration and backup-watcher into the world of computer history and documentary filmmaking, where I am now. As one of the Adjunct archivists of the Internet Archive, I seek out new collections of data and help preserve current ones — anything from digitized books and audio to long-forgotten shareware CD-ROMs and obscure information files uploaded years ago. It’s a great time, and most importantly, it affords me the flexibility to travel when I’m needed somewhere.

So this was why, when Jordan announced he’d gotten back the Prince of Persia disks he had in his own collection, a lot of friends of mine started linking me to the article and saying “Well?” It was a perfect fit. I had seen Jordan for a few moments after his recent appearance at GDC, so it made sense to have us talk about my coming in to oversee the retrieval of data from the disks. What a nice journey — from hearing the game was being worked on in my youth to helping make sure Jordan’s work lasts for future generations!

Pulling data off dead media in the present day is both easier than it ever has been, and as frustrating as ever. (When I say “dead,” I mean the format. You can’t really go down to the local store and buy a box of 5.25″ floppy disks any more, nor would you want to — a USB stick will give you well over a million times the space and cost you almost nothing.) Thanks to a lot of work by a lot of different people, pulling the data off these floppies can now be as simple as putting it into a vintage disk drive, or a modified recent one, and pulling the individual sectors right into a file that can go into the internet in seconds. But just as it’s so trivial to do this, any clever tricks done to the floppy that made sense way back then could make it a puzzle wrapped in a goose chase to extract. Not to mention, these discs are old — in this case, at least twenty years old, and they’re just magnetic flaps of plastic sealed inside a couple of other sheets of plastic. A lot can go wrong, and no extraction is guaranteed.

It’s the Friday before I hop into a plane in NY — ironically, just miles from where Jordan’s disks had rested comfortably in the back of a closet for 20 years — to Los Angeles, where he works and lives these days. Once I arrive there, I’ll be joined at the site by someone I reached out and tapped due to his reputation within and outside the Apple II community: Tony Diaz. He’s one of a tireless group of vintage hardware and software collectors working to ensure an entire swath of computing history isn’t lost to the shadows. With a collection of Apple-related hardware that is likely one of the largest in the world, accompanied by attempts to catalog and document as much of it as possible, I knew Tony would be the best partner in this project. Tony will be bringing over a pile of Apple II hardware, maintained and cleaned, ready to take these vintage floppies in.

However, not all of these disks are off-the-shelf in terms of their formats. Since Jordan did work with a commercial game company, and because there were attempts to prevent wholesale
duplication of these for-sale games at the time, some these floppies have various levels of “copy protection” on them — modifications in how the data is written, in-code checks to analyze the floppy disk’s state and run or not run based on the result, and so on. I’m not here to start a debate on whether this was the right or wrong move at the time — there’s plenty of screen space spent on that discussion elsewhere. But it does translate to a headache for the present day when a straight disk read doesn’t just “work.”

Enter pieces of hardware such as the DiscFerret, CatWeasel, and Kryoflux — all of them modern hardware dedicated to pulling magnetic readings of the floppy disks, eschewing any cares about operating system, structure and copy protection. Think of them as taking a magnetic photograph of the disk. There’s quite a bit of science involved and a lot of debates on what the best approach is for getting the data, but on the whole, the principle is the same: make a floppy drive read the magnetic flux of the floppy, not unlike how a medical scanner approaches the human body, and from that “image,” pull out what the data setup is on the floppy. This resulting magnetic image is huge, size-wise, relative to the original floppies — these 140k (that’s kilobytes) floppies will have a multiple-megabyte magnetic read result from it. But we’re in the space-car future; that mass of data is nothing to us now.

This week, the DiscFerret team has been working overtime, pulling some all-nighters to test and fabricate a hardware setup to do the magnetic readings, and that machinery was packed and FedExed to Jordan yesterday. The in-depth details of what hurdles have to be taken into account with some floppy drive hardware is outside the scope of this already-long post, but rest assured, there are hurdles, and success is not guaranteed.

And let’s make that clear — we have no idea what’s on these floppies! When we bring them in, they could be completely empty (although that is really, really, really unlikely). Factors from quality of manufacture to storage method to phase of the moon could lead to there being lost data. But be assured we’re going in with the respect these artifacts deserve.

See everyone in La-La land!