Postscript
Designating a particular moment as the end of the story is basically arbitrary, because life just keeps going on (I think that’s what David Chase was getting at with the Sopranos finale)… but January 1993 seems like as good a point as any to stop.
From here on, my old journals are increasingly taken up with the saga of Smoking Car Productions and The Last Express. Which is a good story too, but for another time.
My thanks to all the readers who’ve followed the seven-and-a-half-year tale of how Prince of Persia came to be. It’s been fun for me, revisiting those days. I’ll leave all the old journal entries up on the site, and will continue to welcome your comments and questions as always.
– Los Angeles, November 2009
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Dear Jordan,
For a very long period of time I thought of you as of the creator of “Prince of Persia” saga. However, getting acquainted with “Last Express” less than year ago made me change my mind. Now, I consider that “Last Express” is your gratest archivment – as well as the absolute best game I ever played.
I know that it was a huge commercial disaster and it may be that you have many negative recollections related to market fate. However, I would be the gratest pleasure for hundreds of thousands of your fans to learn the true history of “Last Express”. So, if its possible, please, continue publishing of your diary.
Thank you very much for all the games you worked on and sorry for my English.
Please, please, post The Last Express entries when you have time. I will wait for them. To me the game is very precious. Thank you.
Thanks very much for posting your old journals! They’ve been fascinating to read. I would have liked to reach the point where Prince 2 was actually shipped and reviewed, considering what a let-down the Prince 1 launch was. I can see why you stopped here, if your journal entries don’t actually go into that much.
Prince 2 blew me away. I took pride in showing the game to people, and watching them gasp because it had actual speech. The art, story, and levels were all amazing.
Basically, anything you post I will read with great interest. Congrats on all your successes.
Mr. Mechner, thanks for sharing this awesome story with us. You and Mr. Suzuki are my inspiration to continue my game developer career. I hope we can meet each other someday.
Keep up the good work, life just goes on.
Thank you so much for these journals, Jordan!
I found it through the Wikipedia article about the original Prince of Persia and spent much of today reading my way through the whole thing. Aside from being excellent procrastination-fodder, it was also incredibly inspiring to read about your troubles and the ways in which you handled them.
You actually inspired me to start using my own website more effectively for my own use. Hoping that writing about what I do will help me do what I set out to, especially since I’d have to explain to myself and the five people who read my blog why I haven’t done anything some days.
Also, this whole thing got me jazzed up about playing POP again. I actually never finished it way back when.
Thanks for sharing these journal entries Jordan, it was great to read about the journey of this fantastic classic.
I never knew (before this) that you were planning to release a 4th game by ’96. I’ve been want closure on the ending of Prince 2 since ’94..
I hope that some day you will revisit your ideas for Prince 3 and have Gameloft (Ubi) produce a XBLA/PSN version. I guarantee that it will hugely surpass the sales of Prince of Persia Classic.
Best wishes, and thanks again!
I want to say thank you for the hard work in putting these on-line. I have enjoyed visiting here everyday to read some wonderful stuff.
Prince of Persia blew me away when I first played it on the Amiga. It remains one of my all time top 5 games.
Such a fantastic read, Jordan. I spent the last few days reading this in-between working and found it inspiring and a great record of the time. Do you think it’s time to write your memoirs for real now?
What a riveting tale! I was both dismayed and gratified when your server went down earlier today; I could actually get some work done. Very inspirational, I’m looking forward to more. Reminds me that I should be keeping a journal.
Thank you so much! I went through the whole journal… it’s 6:12am right now. Truly, truly inspiring. Thank you.
Thanks so much for putting up your journals! I had no idea that the core of one of the few games that started my love affair with computer games (mac Prince) was created mostly by a single programmer. I believe it was on the mac demo disk that came with my Mac Performa 600 (a 68030).
Besides that, the journals were a long read, but they were great. It had parallels with what I’m trying to do in web software, and the way I do my work. It echoed my wanderlust and my restlessness. And, it gave me a lot of things to think about. They made me realize simultaneously that success requires the help of other people, and also that I may be stuck in a rut. Again, thank you!
It’s 5:02 am; I just spent a good 3-4 hours reading through this. Though I did skim a few entries (maybe more than a few) this was as gripping a read as any I’ve had in a good while. It scares me to think how much time it took you to type all this up, though.
I’ve stolen an hour here or there every day for the past week to finish reading your journals. I feel like you could take a small cut of them and publish them as a wired article on “the insides of game publishing”. Its a wonderful thing to follow through with a project that you love, though it seems it rarely feels that way when you’re nearing the 99% completion mark.
I hope life has found you well, I’m sure I could check up on your current happenings, but for now I’m going to think of you as a 25 year old game developer figuring out life, business and passions. (And of course consider your journal a reflection of myself.)
Thank you for sharing.
What an amazing ride… This was a joy to read! Thank you for sharing. This really could be a movie some day. It would be really cool if our paths crossed in the future and I got to shake your hand. I am a huge fan of your games starting with Karateka. Cheers.
Brilliant. I love reading about the infancy of the gaming industry and the pioneers behind it.
Thanks for sharing these great journal entries, it was a pleasure reading it, even back then you were already a great human being!
This was a fantastic read, and very inspiring even though I’m not a game designer, film director or anything analogous to what you are doing.
I’m off to do some things I’ve been procrastinating on for far too long. Maybe this time around the sense of carpe diem that’s been built up through experiencing these slices of your life will stay embedded in this dilapidated cathedral of potential.
Best of luck to you with your new movie and game,
Lars
Just wanted to add to the chorus of approval. Inspiring, enlightening stuff.
Hola señor Jordan.
Espero que aun practique su español, quiero comentarle que soy de Mexico, tengo 25 años y me encuentro creando una empresa de desarrollo de video juegos junto con cuatro amigos, y me encuentro muy deprimido por el poco apoyo que encuentro en mi pais, sin embargo al estar leyendo su diario, me he llenado de animo para continuar.
Espero algun dia pueda estar frente a frente con usted y no solo saludarlo sino mostrarle mis videojuegos.
¡Hasta luego!
PS:It Will be a pleasure to follow your steps, and above all I hope that my games are worthy challengers of yours.
I devoured this journal a month ago, cutting and pasting snippets of text that really struck a chord with me. I printed them out and taped them up; I’m so suprised how much they’ve kept me focused and “up” for life, surviving this Hell that’s been 2009. As I make an inventory of ’09 I wanted to thank those words for being so positively affecting and for coming so unexpectedly:
“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.”
It’s true: People like you better if you stand up for yourself. There’s no percentage in being self-effacing and making them think they can walk all over you.
Everyone has their own particular form of self-destruction. Mine, I’m starting to think, is standing outside myself, watching myself live my life, turning my face so as to give the cameras a better angle, and thus missing the whole thing.
The more experiences I have, the more I realize that working with people you like and respect is more important than anything else.
“You know, there’s a lot of poverty and injustice here… only a few people are really living, the others are just struggling for survival.”
I know myself well enough to know that whatever happens, it won’t be my excesses I’ll regret, it’ll be the things I held myself back from doing. In all my life I’ve never yet given a present so lavish, or made a gesture so expansive, or indulged a pleasure so recklessly that I regretted it later. Whereas there are so many things I look back on now and think: That was one of the high points, that moment will never come again, why did I hold back?
I know it’s possible to err in the other direction too, to screw up your life by not thinking of the future. I just don’t think I’m nearly there yet…
thanks again! between Book of Eli and the PoP movie, here’s to oh-10 ushering in the DECADE OF THE NERDS!
Yes! So many great snippets that inspire me to invigorate my own life!
(And yet great procrastination fodder too, as someone else wrote! Took me hours, glorious hours to get through the whole thing!)
What can I say? Thank you for sharing. Thank you for the opportunity of reading a fascinating piece history. Thank you for making me see that I’m not the only one asking the questions I ask, facing the decisions I face. Tank you for the proof that one can succeed.
And thank you for a great game. Even if it’s older than me and I didn’t get to play it.
You’re great! Hope you’ll read this comment (and all the others), and maybe you’ll smile for a second. I sure know I did when I finished reading your journal
and sorry for the crappy English in my previous comment
Thank you, sir. I’ll continue to enjoy your POP games for years to come, I hope and pray! The work that you’ve done to ensure that this story is alive and available for the fans is much appreciated! I enjoyed it all so much and look forward to viewing more of your site as I can. Thanks!
Wow I just spent 3 days reading these when I should have been doing other stuff.
Great stuff.
Dear Mr. Mechner,
This journal may be the best screenplay you ever wrote !
I found myself picturing various scenes and characters….
( read the whole thing in 4 hours)
Truly amazing story !
Regards
T
Oh I forgot to add that i spend countless hours and days playing PoP back in 92′
Well that’s several hours of my life spent reading these. I loved reading your exploits, trials and tribulations of getting Prince out there. I didn’t actually play PoP till quite late in the grand sceme of things but I do remember advising a girl at school what to try. Appraently I gave great advice, didn’t help me with flirting with her though.
Thanks for sharing, that was an inspiring read.
Definitely a good read. Not a “reach out for your dreams” piece that is meant to inspire you to do what you always wanted, but a “look at what you already have”. So many times, early in the story (later parts just drove it home), I was thinking “Why, WHY, Jordan, do you pursue the screen writing like some golden fleece? Everything screen writing could bring you, you’ve gotten from game design! Why do you not see this yet??”
When you were puzzled over what possible use you could have for a pair of Apple IIs, I was too, a bit. Until I remembered multitasking was a crazy future-man thing. It felt like archaeology reading the early stuff. As a child, Prince of Persia (among others) made me want to design games for a living – never mind that my parents and teachers all drubbed that out of me, and my IT teacher crushed my passion to program, the point is PoP, and games like it (not in style but in quality and execution) were some of the first things I appreciated. Not long after, I started reading, too (three or four years old), and books joined them, but games are the first love of my life
I’d just like to say, and I’m sure I speak for all of your fans when I say this, thankyou for the entertainment you’ve brought us all. For some of us, it’s childhood memories, for some, it’s their adolescence, or they discovered games as adults, but the sentiment is all he same. Thankyou, also, for taking the time to transcribe all these journal entries. I never even had the patience to KEEP a journal, let alone one like this.
Wow. I started reading this journal last night and and throughout today and now I’m finished tonight. A very interesting read, which keep me wanting more.
Reminded me of the great Diary of a Game magazine articles back in the day but the insights to a computer company in the 80′s really added to it. I’m glad it all worked out for you.
WOW! Read all 67 pages, how not to love this history of winning and good code? I’ve played your games and always though you to be such a gifted man. Almost cried when I saw your name in the prince of persia movie. But I couldn’t imagine an history like that. May God bless you and I hope someday I can make something as big as you, to be remembered as someone who gave so much happiness to the world
Greetings from Brazil!
Twenty years ago your game blew my mind and that was fine, but tonight, reading your story has given me a whole new outlook on my own life, you have no idea. Thank you!
Thanks for putting up your diaries. It was all a fascinating story. I read it because I loved the Prince of Persia 1 (pirated, sorry, we were to far away and too poor to pay; I’ll donate $5 to the local ASPCA to make up for it) and still have a fond spot for it in my heart. And this is coming from a girl geek.
The most inspiring, thank you very much.
The best thing I’ve read in ages.
Thanks so much for KEEPING a journal, and once again for SHARING it with us all.
I’m just starting my own game development business, all on my own, a dream I’ve had since I was about 6, in 1984, playing King’s Quest, Digger, Alley Cat, and later Prince of Persia which really blew me away.
This is a real inspiration, and a great time for me to reflect on where I’m at, and have a good look at what I have planned for the coming year as I release my first game, and onwards!
As a musician, filmmaker and game designer (who’s doing the art, code, sound and design all by himself), this journal resonated so deeply with me. It’s a very special thing!
THANK YOU JORDAN, and all the very best!
Murray
www . muzboz . com
You bastard.
I was about to go to sleep, when I found a link on wired.com about the source code for PoP beeing ‘rescued’.
A bit of reading and clicking I found this.
The hope of 8 hours of sleep before work is now, at best, 4 hours.
This has been the best read on the Internets in a long, long time. I applaud you, sir!
Thank you!
/M