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.”
September 7, 1988
Ed Badasov is no longer my product manager. He’s been replaced by Brian Eheler. Brian has been lobbying both me and Ed for some time to get Prince of Persia, and finally prevailed. It’s fine with me. Better than fine.
September 24, 1988
Brian Eheler and I had our big meeting yesterday. He took out his notebook and asked me so many questions about Prince of Persia – How many disks? How much memory? What kind of documentation? – that by the end of it, I was all jazzed up and adrenalized.
It made me feel like the project is real, that it’s really going to ship in four or five months, and I’d better get cracking. I promised Brian I’d have a preliminary version ready for QA in eight weeks – the first concrete promise I’ve made to anyone. Usually I just say something like “It should be ready by January… 1999. Ha ha.”
The meeting erased any doubts I might have had about Brian’s effectiveness as a product manager. This is what I needed all along: someone to push me. He blows Ed out of the water. Anyway, I’m revved up to work on POP.
October 5, 1988
Had lunch with Don Daglow, head of Broderbund’s Entertainment Group. Don got his B.A. in playwriting, so he was interested in hearing about the screenwriting stuff. He’s eager to publish Prince of Persia and would like to start on an MS-DOS conversion as soon as possible.
