July 21, 1990
Pink Floyd is tearing down the wall in Berlin. I want to be there.
Basically, I want to be young and European. Or even young and Central American.
July 27, 1990
Since its release in Sept. 1989, Prince has sold 9,741 units. In the same period, Karateka – a five-year-old game – sold 9,645 units. That’s pretty sad.
More irritating facts:
- I walked into Wherehouse Records the other day and they’d never heard of Prince of Persia. Wings of Fury they had, Wolf Pack they had, but not Prince.
- Ten months after its release, Prince has yet to be licensed to Nintendo, Game Boy, or any other game machine. In short, we’ve missed a year. If it gets licensed now, it’ll be as a Christmas 1991 title. This delay is solely attributable to Broderbund’s waffling.
- The other day at the PD25 Xerox machine, I happened to see the tossed-out first page of a letter to U.S. News and World Report, presumably from someone in marketing or PR, saying “Enclosed is some information about Broderbund’s new games…” and listing four or five, including Wolf Pack, but not mentioning Prince. I learned this out of turn, so I can’t very well complain, but this says a lot.
- Prince gets only half a page in the new entertainment catalog, sandwiched between acknowledged duds.
Encouraging facts:
- Reviews are uniformly raves.
- Tandy has ordered 12,500 units.
- SoundBlaster is interested in bundling Prince with its sound cards.
- Tomi and Florence reported that Egghead Software was sold out of Prince, and that the salesman said: “It’s moving.”
- NEC pre-orders of 8,000 units in Japan.
I’ve decided to move to NY anyway. I don’t need NYU. I can spend all my money and go into debt making a couple of crappy short films all by myself without their help.
Matthew Patrick’s Graffiti was awesome. It sustains my faith in the short film as a worthwhile medium. It was better than most of the features that came out of Hollywood this summer.
July 28, 1990
Robert called yesterday. He’s being courted by two publishers and has just sent D-Gen off to a third. (Broderbund turned it down, in the person of Ann Kronen, who proclaimed sweetly: “We don’t do action games any more.” Ha ha.) Good for Robert.
I can’t help wishing I’d had the good luck to have Prince rejected by Broderbund so I could have taken it to a publisher who might have actually marketed it… No, I’m not that cynical. Yet.
Broderbund has done two conversions, IBM and NEC, better than I had a right to expect. And EA probably would not have offered me an 8% royalty on the IBM version. If Prince takes off now, I’ll have no cause for complaint.
But these last four months have made me bitter.
July 31, 1990
NEC POP sales are up to 9,000.
Latricia is pursuing the SoundBlaster bundling opportunity. She’s hoping to get $8/unit.
Sophie has put in a request for advertising funds.
IBM POP sold 1,350 units in July – four digits!
Henry says there’s a lot of interest in Japan in doing a sequel.
Tom Marcus says the Japan sales have raised interest in licensing. He’s already gotten a call from Dianne Drosnes (who’s now at Sega).
Maybe there’s hope.
August 3, 1990
Brian showed me a LAN message from a sales rep saying “Prince is the hottest thing in Phoenix! Prince of Persia fever is spreading! Do we have any more games coming up by Jordan Mechner?”
Also got a fan letter from Malaysia.
Please God, maybe it’ll be a hit after all.
August 6, 1990
Scott came in with the new version of Mac Prince. We’re not going to make Christmas, but at least it showed some tangible improvement. We decided to use the NEC graphics.
Lunch with Doug. He was sorry about the letter of recommendation, and that Prince isn’t doing better. I told him it wasn’t his fault. He’s excited for me that I’m going off to make films in New York.
