January 25, 1990
A week of Broderbund days. Monday I signed the Amiga contract with Danny Gorlin and had lunch with Ed Bernstein. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I spent sitting at an IBM screen pushing pixels in an attempt to get Jim St. Louis’s EGA versions of my original Apple character animations to look decent.
Jim’s work is dismayingly bad. I’m not sure he’s saved us any time at all. I’ve got no choice but to redo it. What at first seemed like a fun thing to do for a couple of days has turned into a massive project. Three days, and I’m burnt out and not even half finished.
Brian and Lance are thrilled to have me coming in every day, even though it’s for a bad reason. The first day, I worked in Lance’s room, the last two in Brian’s. Brian in particular is happy as a clam. We just got another rave review (Nibble magazine), the customer response cards are uniformly “Excellent,” the IBM version is starting to come together… and now that he’s got me under his wing, he’s confident everything will go smoothly.
Dad delivered his new music, which he and Tom Rettig are both pleased with. (Dad: “This is the first music I’ve written that I’ve really liked.” Tom: “This is the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on.”) Even Lance likes it.
Doug brought Ken and Roberta Williams by today and I showed them IBM Prince. (Ken: “Great animation.”) Doug then explained that he was losing me to the movies, and that in an effort to forestall this he’d written me a bad recommendation for NYU.
Alan Weiss has been removed from the job, putting Prince’s future on NES and Game Boy temporarily in doubt. Dianne Drosnes is taking over licensing. Tomi and I have already talked to her. A Nintendo license might mean an advance of $150,000, and again that much in royalties… enough to pay for three years of film school… so it’s worth politicking for.
Getting Prince onto as many different formats as possible (maximizing my future income stream) is all very well, but what’s really grabbing my attention these days is the potential for something bigger. Dad’s suggestion that I make a franchise out of Prince sequels, Doug’s offer that I captain a new graphic-adventure line for Broderbund, and my own idea of starting a company with Tomi, Roland, or Lance, are all sort of churning around in the back of my mind; I’m just waiting for them to coalesce into some really irresistible form.
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