May 25, 1990
Lunch with Lance today, and a meeting with Ann Kronen about Prince 2. She’s not willing to commit to a sequel until Prince proves itself in the IBM marketplace – i.e., until its trajectory makes it clear that it will sell at least 100,000 units.
I reminded her that I’m going to NYU in the fall, so if I don’t do it this summer, I won’t be free to start until next June at the earliest. This left her unmoved.
Lance, meanwhile, assured me that he’ll do it… in his spare time if necessary.
Everyone is unhappy. Product managers are leaving in droves. Broderbund is going down the sink. Doug is travelling.
Prince just got a rave review from the largest entertainment magazine in France, Tilt (“the great Jordan Mechner, author of the unforgettable Karateka“… gotta love the French), which nobody at Broderbund will even bother to have translated to find out what it says. Tomi had to translate it for me.
It also got a good response at a “focus group” test Don Panek and Alan Weiss ran at the Northgate mall yesterday afternoon. I dropped in and watched the kids play it through a one-way mirror. All the kids said that if it were available on Nintendo, it would be one of the top two or three cartridges on their shopping lists.
But I’m more worried than ever that despite the incredibly enthusiastic reactions from the few people who’ve seen it, this game will sink without a splash. People at Broderbund don’t know what they’ve got. And I don’t see what more I can do that I haven’t already done.
I sure hope NYU lets me in. I don’t want to spend another minute here.
May 31, 1990
Dinner at Royal Thai with Tomi and the French interviewers from Tilt who interviewed me the other day – Dany Boolauck (the most famous computer journalist in Europe, according to Dominique) and Jean-Michel Blottiere. It was a lot of fun. We stayed late drinking beer and talking about the software industry, Europe and America. It’s been a long time since I met two such enthusiastic and interesting new people. It was a pleasure.
June 2, 1990
Those bastards! They turned me down! NYU said No!
Ann Norton thinks what probably happened is that since my application wasn’t complete till several months after the deadline (because Adaire lost Doug’s first letter of recommendation instead of mailing it), they’d already filled all their slots. This might actually be true.
Shit. Now what do I do?
June 7, 1990
I moved out of the attic at 47 Paul. There was a full moon in a bright blue sky with clouds drifting past it. I felt like I was saying goodbye to Broderbund.
It was melancholy, being there at night with an empty desk and all those ghosts. Tomi was there too, sifting through the wreckage of Sensei. I called Robert in L.A. to ask him what I should do with his stuff, and we fell to reminiscing. It wasn’t such a bad year-and-a-half. Actually, I remember it quite warmly. But thank God it’s over.
Driving away, I felt strangely light, as if throwing away all those papers had set me free. I felt ready for the next thing, and oddly happy. I told Tomi this and she said: “I guess you’re more optimistic because you’re younger. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s your basic personality.”
I’m never going to have an office at Broderbund again. It was fun but now it’s done.
June 11, 1990
I sent Prof. Charles Milne at NYU a Fed Ex box containing a sheaf of game reviews, copies of POP and Karateka, and a letter begging him to let me in.
Spent Friday at Broderbund. The conversions are moving ahead (Danny is at beta, Scott is at alpha). Francesca and Jessica reported from CES that all kinds of reviewers and journalists came up to them, unsolicited, and praised Prince to the skies. But IBM Prince still isn’t selling. The reasons most often cited are: (1) it’s a conversion (the Apple original having done virtually nothing, the IBM version is left to twist in the wind), and (2) the box stinks (it’s an old-fashioned flip-top, and stores don’t like those).
Maybe word of mouth and favorable reviews will rescue it in time for Christmas. But I’m worried.
Prince’s chances of becoming a hit and my chances of getting into NYU both seem a lot slimmer than they did a month ago.
June 18, 1990
Meeting with Don and Alan to renegotiate the royalty terms for Nintendo and GameBoy Prince. Ed Bernstein was absent, even though he’d asked for the meeting, so all Don and Alan could say was that they’d talk to Ed and get back to me.
In a nutshell: My contract (negotiated in 1986 with then-director-of-product-development Ed Bernstein) gives me 10%. Now they want to add a clause allowing them to deduct the cost of goods, which would effectively bring the royalty rate down to 5%. If I don’t agree, Broderbund probably won’t do Nintendo versions. So I’ll probably end up having to swallow it.
