July 18, 1988
Been putting in full days on Prince of Persia: 40 hours last week. It’s starting to show visible progress.
August 5, 1988
Yesterday was an unusually productive day. Robert put fire extinguishers into his game (D/Generation), I put falling floors into mine.
A Fish Called Wanda: hilarious.
August 14, 1988
[In Paris] Brought Mom, David, Janice and Emily along to a dinner party at Larry Turman’s – actually, the Paris pied-a-terre of his friend Larry Gordon, three blocks from the Eiffel Tower. Mom liked the Turmans a lot; she had a great time. Afterwards, Larry’s sons Peter and Andrew and their friends came to the St. Eustache with us and we stayed out past midnight playing go.
August 24, 1988
Rented a camera, shot some footage of Robert and me swordfighting.
Doug came by and I showed him the game. “Better finish it while there’s still an Apple II market out there,” he said.
Prince of Persia Animation Reference 1988 from jordan mechner on Vimeo.
August 28, 1988
Worked hard on POP all week, even Saturday. It’s scut work, cleaning up and rethinking the graphics and masking routines that were supposedly finished months ago, but it has to be done, and now I’m finally building up a good head of steam.
The videotaping with Robert came to an undignified halt when the battery pack in the rented camera abruptly died. At the time, I was hanging off the edge of a bus shelter at the North San Pedro Road freeway exit, hoping the cops wouldn’t show up, and realizing that hauling oneself up onto a ledge from a dead hang is harder than I’d thought.
We’ll try again next week.
August 29, 1988
I gotta finish this damn computer game.
God, I’m restless; I want everything to start happening now. I want to fast-forward through the next five months of grueling work and just be there.
I have no excuse for slacking off. As Adam Derman once told me in a letter (about Karateka): “You dumb shit. You’ve dug your way deep into an active gold mine and are holding off from digging the last two feet because you’re too dumb to appreciate what you’ve got and too lazy to finish what you’ve started.”
