Bought a camera at Whole Earth. It was more expensive than I’d anticipated — $250 with the lens – but it’s a good camera, and I imagine I’ll find some use for it even after the game’s done.

I shot my first roll of film (David turning around) and had it developed at the local one-hour photo stop. I think this will work. The real problem, obviously, will be going from a sheaf of snapshots to the 280 x 192 Apple screen, and the loss of accuracy entailed therein. It almost makes me want to do it in double hi-res.

Shot four more rolls of film: David running and jumping in the Reader’s Digest parking lot. One year ago tomorrow. Red and orange leaves… God, I’m homesick.

It’s pathetic. When I shot that tape I was going stir crazy under self-imposed house arrest, yearning to come out here and start a new life in sunny Marin County, California. Now here I am with all my wishes come true, and I’m looking at the videotape I shot that day and I’m getting nostalgic over it.

There’s no pleasing some people.

Today I wrote the first lines of code of the game.* It Begins.

*Not counting the hi-res routines.

Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris – a Russian submission for the IBM PC. It’s a classic, like Breakout. But I don’t think Broderbund is going to publish it. The knaves.

Yesterday I implemented the running animation. Next I’ll do the jumping… then the stopping… then the “jumping from a stopped position”… oh boy, this is great!

I restrained myself from taking all my work papers home with me yesterday… and I’m restraining myself from going to work today. There must be Balance.

Ed was pretty thrilled with the rough running and jumping animation, now under joystick control. So was Tomi. Lauren, Doug and Gary didn’t act all excited, but I think they were secretly impressed.

I love the quality of the just-digitized roughs, but I’m having trouble preserving that fluidity and realism when I clean it up and stylize the figures. This is going to be a problem.

I beat out Ed and Steve for the #1 spot on the Tetris high-score list.

The Mets won the World Series.

Prince of Persia Animation Test 1986 from jordan mechner on Vimeo.

God, I miss New York.

Fifth Avenue… Christmas shoppers… rich ladies in furs laden with shopping bags and kids… crisp cold autumn air… the smell of burnt pretzels… St. Peter’s… the steel drum players wearing woolen gloves with cut-off fingers, breath condensing on the air…

I’m looking out the window at the San Francisco skyline across the bay dotted with white sails. It looks unreal. Like some kind of paradise.

Called Kyle Freeman in L.A. (he’s at Electronic Arts now) and asked him what he’d charge to license his Apple music subroutine. He spent half the phone call dumping on Broderbund. I realized after I’d hung up that this was the first thing I’d done independent of Broderbund since I got here. Interestingly, it actually strengthened my confidence that Broderbund is the right place for me. It reminded me that I am independent.

Digitized the running skidding turn-around that was so amusing on videotape. It looks OK. I’ll need to redo the straight running, but I think everything else will work as it stands.

About half the animations are in now. Next step will be getting the character to interact with the environment (climbing a rope ladder, pulling a lever, etc.)

At this juncture I think I’ll redirect my attention to the game design.

Prince of Persia Cleaned-Up Animation Test 1986 from jordan mechner on Vimeo.

Spent most of the day trying to figure out the velocity of a falling human being as a function of time. Enlisted practically everyone at Broderbund at one point or another. They all seemed to find this a more interesting problem than whatever they were working on.