The market dropped a hundred points yesterday, and more today. Looks like my timing was pretty good.

My Apple II hard drive arrived today – about a year after I got Ed to agree to order me one – and with some help from Robert I got my entire development system converted over. It’ll save me endless hassles. It’s the most exciting hardware event in years.

Janice Kim gave me some advice: “You should just let go. Take a trip where you don’t have your return ticket booked ahead of time.”

I agreed, but explained that I needed to conquer the world first.

She said: “You’ll still be saying that when you’re 60.”

Janice was fascinated by the way things seem to work out for me. “I mean, if I thought of writing a computer game, I’d just assume it would be terrible and nobody would want to buy it, so I wouldn’t do it.”

I pointed out that at 18, she’s the first woman go professional in the U.S.; but she didn’t seem to feel that was much to write home about. 

David is going to Japan for the next two or three years or however long it takes him to turn pro.

SHADOW MAN. Credit Tomi with this one.

I was explaining to her why there are no enemies in Prince of Persia. The animations for the player’s character are so elaborate, there’s not enough memory left to add another character.

“Why not use the same animations for your enemies, the way you did in Karateka?”

“Wouldn’t work so well this time. This character is designed to look cute. He has a very specific personality in the way he runs and moves. The enemies would have to be cute too.”

“Can’t you just change the face, or the costume?”

“Not possible. If I change anything, it’s a whole new set of shapes. There’s just no memory.”

She wouldn’t give up. “Couldn’t you make him a different color – say, black?”

I started to explain: “This is the Apple II…” and then it hit me: What if I exclusive-OR each frame with itself, bit-shifted one pixel over? I visualized a ghostly, shimmering outline-figure, black, with white face and arms, running and leaping, pursuing you. I described it to Tomi.

“Shadow Man!” she exclaimed.

**

Tomi, Robert, and Eric all huddled around my screen while I paged through my source code.

Me: “Uh, you don’t actually have to watch me do this. It might take a while.”

Eric: “No, we want to. It’s a test.”

In about two minutes I had Shadow Man up and running. He looked great. It was as if he’d always existed. Everybody was wowed. How could I have ever contemplated the game without him?

Robert suggested that Shadow Man could come into being when you run through a mirror. You leap through the mirror; simultaneously your evil shadow self leaps out the way you came, and slinks off into the darkness. For the rest of the game he’s lurking in the shadows, dogging your steps… until the end, when you don the magic amulet and become powerful enough to reabsorb him into yourself, thus gaining the strength you need to defeat the Grand Vizier.

 “You’ll sell a billion copies,” Tomi predicted. “All I want is a Honda Legend. Coupe. Silver.”

Doug told Tomi that the Apple IIe market has started its long downward spiral. If I expect to make any money off POP, I’d better get cracking.

My Karateka royalty stream has dwindled to a trickle. At this point, I’m living on savings. I made an Excel spreadsheet to track the number of months I have left.

Larry told me he’s feeling disheartened. We’ve been turned down by several of the smaller studios, who failed to evince even the level of interest shown by MGM and United Artists. 

Virginia’s lost her job because of the strike.

Been putting in full days on Prince of Persia: 40 hours last week. It’s starting to show visible progress.

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.

[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.

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.

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.