Just buy - The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993
(Book #2 in the Mechner Journals Series)
By Jordan Mechner
highly recommended as 90s gamer
runevault•Jun 12, 2026
Stripe did such a good job with this book (and the others I bought that they published). Each one feels like an artifact I can show off on top of having interesting information inside.
47282847•Jun 12, 2026
Agreed! I did actually enjoy his first one even more; the early years.
pjmlp•Jun 12, 2026
Can acknowledge.
noufalibrahim•Jun 12, 2026
Was going to say the same thing. It's a very nice trip down memory lane.
I read this and Masters of Doom back-to-back. Both very enjoyable, and great contrast between the two.
bentcorner•Jun 12, 2026
I will always have a soft spot for the original Prince of Persia. It was one of those games I played constantly as a child, although only when my dad would let me use his Apple ][c.
I only realize it now but it had some very unique game mechanics that even today you don't see very often (ok maybe that's a bit of a stretch but the mechanics were novel to me back then):
- Notably you have 60 minutes to finish the game. Dying doesn't reset the timer, so there is constant pressure to keep moving.
- There is a satisfying parry mechanic. This is still rare to see in 2d platformers.
- Incredibly smooth animation. This could be nostalgia goggles but the rotoscoped animation really stood out compared to other games of the era.
Lethalman•Jun 12, 2026
It was also incredibly difficult. As a kid I couldn’t go beyond the first level. It was also difficult to attack the enemy at the right time.
But still it was an amazing experience whenever I played it. I felt the pressure and the need to start again like no other game nowadays.
But maybe that’s just because I was a kid.
setopt•Jun 12, 2026
I played it relentlessly as a kid (3-6 years old), and never got past the 4th level…
HeavyStorm•Jun 12, 2026
Yeah, it was. It wasn't even my first game - I was like 11 when I first got to it, and by then was a solid gamer having already owned a master system and mega drive game consoles. And still PoP was hard, really hard.
(But I also didn't like it very much...)
qsera•Jun 12, 2026
>It was also incredibly difficult.
And we dumb kids used to play it without the manual. It was a minor victory day for us when we finally figured out how to pick up the sword!
Cthulhu_•Jun 12, 2026
I don't think it was just because you were a kid, if I recall correctly the controls were incredibly unresponsive. Probably a technical reason, that they couldn't or didn't want to interrupt an animation easily, but still.
Years later though, and games like Dark Souls and Monster Hunter have a similar sluggishness / unresponsiveness to them. But it doesn't feel as unfair in those games.
SamBam•Jun 12, 2026
I feel like unresponsive controls must have been a platform or hardware issue. On my (...Dell with Windows 3.1?) the controls were perfectly responsive, and they absolutely had to be. So many things relied on being able to, say, run and switch directions on a dime so that only your toe touched the platform that would then fall and break.
BrtByte•Jun 12, 2026
I don't think it was only because you were a kid. The game really did punish hesitation in a way that feels pretty unusual now
holoduke•Jun 12, 2026
pop.exe -megahit is what I remember to cheat. Then ctrl combinations for powers.
ant6n•Jun 12, 2026
Well thanks to the 60 minute game play and no saves, you only ever see the first four/five levels or so. It’s a great game, but that particular mechanic is …kind of annoying.
CamouflagedKiwi•Jun 12, 2026
I remember it having saves? I'm not sure if that was an addition to the PC version or if I'm getting it mixed up with the sequel (which definitely did have them, but was also quite a bit harder so it _really_ needed them)
eru•Jun 12, 2026
> - There is a satisfying parry mechanic. This is still rare to see in 2d platformers.
You can see if Dead Cells's parrying mechanic works for you.
Daedren•Jun 12, 2026
Also Nine Sols. It's becoming increasingly popular as games are moving the complexity/flashiness of interactions with enemies to the enemy's side.
Rather than learn and perform complex combos like Devil May Cry, the enemies now are the ones with very flashy movesets and now you simply parry/dodge.
bentcorner•Jun 12, 2026
I've played a little bit of Dead Cell's but it hasn't stuck with me yet.
I have to admit the game is a little overwhelming but maybe I need to stick with it a bit more.
Part of PoP's charm is that the game is very simple, yet the parry mechanic has nuance - you can buffer parry/attack/parry/attack/... sequences and the timing is just a bit faster than normal enemies, meaning you can wear them out (these fights have a very Errol Flynn Swashbuckler feel to them). Eventually your attack lands before they can begin their parry animation.
Later in the game you meet enemies that hit faster than you can respond to with a parry, so you need to change up your tactics.
BrtByte•Jun 12, 2026
A lot of games have time limits, but Prince of Persia made it feel less like an arcade score mechanic and more like part of the story
xtracto•Jun 12, 2026
Likewise, but for different reasons: We had a [pirated] copy of the game, and thus didn't have the manual.
Down here in my city in Mexico that's basically how everyone played it, so most of us played only the first level.
At some point, I was tinkering with the "x tree gold" program and saw the "hex view" thing. I remember opening Prince's .sav file, which was a very small file that only appeared after you saved. After tinkering with the numbers I managed to appear in the next level .
It was my 5 minutes of fame at my computer class when I arrived and showed that I had passed the bottles room.
And I became fascinated by cracking at that point.
jhartwig•Jun 12, 2026
That is awesome! I love the origin stories.
Stevvo•Jun 12, 2026
Another notable mechanic was the rewind. Didn't see that again until Braid, which really went to town with it.
somenameforme•Jun 12, 2026
That was about 15 years later. The original released in 1989, and there was no rewind.
somenameforme•Jun 12, 2026
Somehow in my mind the animation of it and Another World/Out of this World felt similar, and way outside everything else that was available at the time. The games even felt very similar, but I never got particularly far in either so that could well be just the perspective of youth.
achairapart•Jun 12, 2026
Just reading "Prince of Persia" and in my head starts playing the oriental background music (by pc speaker! No sound card back then, at least for me).
Also, the steps, the gates and all other sound FXs.
Most people are/were fascinated by the fluid animations, but this game was perfect from every angle.
d3Xt3r•Jun 12, 2026
I actually rewired my internal PC speaker to a big external speaker just so that I could hear the music/sfx of the game in all its glory.
And that awesome intro animation too - never seen anything like it at the time, like simply seeing realistic human faces being drawn in a DOS game was just mind blowing.
achairapart•Jun 12, 2026
Best PC Speaker music ever was Xenon II, by Bomb the Bass[0] (which much later I discovered was a re-rendition of Carpenter' Assault on Precint 13 OST[1]).
May sound silly for some people today, but that was some incredible wizardry at the times, given the limitations (PC speaker was monophonic, square-wave only). As a YouTube comment says: "This is musical equivalent to pixel art."
When I was a kid, my grandparents were involved in a pretty decent intercontinental floppy disk piracy ring. They would buy and clone software sold locally and send it forward and get copies of games in response. My parents ran a small business converting peoples university notes/recordings into well written essays. My grandparents had a PC with Prince of Persia, and as payment for my parents essay writing services one of their friends from Hong Kong used to come around and teach me how to play. See he couldn't speak or understand english very well, but he had memorised the potions you needed to drink to get past each level, and also the fighting technique of most of the bad guys.
These are some of my earliest memories of computing, and the conversations I had with that guy, who was doing computer science, plus the things he opened up for me on the computer really pushed me into the industry.
I ended up visiting the US with my grandparents sometime later, and got to see the original disks most of my games had been cloned from. They even had the original F-15 Strike Eagle box from memory.
e12e•Jun 12, 2026
> When I was a kid, my grandparents were involved in a pretty decent intercontinental floppy disk piracy ring. They would buy and clone software sold locally and send it forward and get copies of games in response. My parents ran a small business converting peoples university notes/recordings into well written essays. My grandparents had a PC with Prince of Persia, and as payment for my parents essay writing services one of their friends from Hong Kong used to come around and teach me how to play. See he couldn't speak or understand english very well, but he had memorised the potions you needed to drink to get past each level, and also the fighting technique of most of the bad guys.
Sounds like the summary of the opening chapter of a Bruce Sterling novel.
Love that your Hong Kong friend memorized the DRM codes.
Of course, DRM was no issue with a cracked copy of the game...
bentcorner•Jun 12, 2026
My dad had a fairly sizable collection of C64/Apple games and I never really learned where he got them from.
"Cracked by The Vulture" was something that I was very used to seeing upon booting up a game.
jhartwig•Jun 12, 2026
My first real paycheck job was a store in Beaverton Oregon that would buy and sell software. Folks would buy the software, copy the disc, bring it back to us to and we would reseal and sell it. I was always more interested in the actual hardware side and spend most of my day helping the pc tech. I think the store got sued eventually for basically pirating Windows.
curtisblaine•Jun 12, 2026
I have a soft spot for Prince of Persia, but I have an even softer spot for Karateka, its (rotoscoped) predecessor on an ancient green phosphor Apple //e, a computer (and an age) where everything seemed possible.
larodi•Jun 12, 2026
The first two games to fall in love with - Karatéka and then Alley Cat.
phodo•Jun 12, 2026
In 7th grade social studies, I did a report for a class project, and printed the Karateka opening screen on my apple image writer as the cover page. I got an A+ because of that cover!
prmoustache•Jun 12, 2026
Desperately trying to jump on that bin to avoid the dog only to be pushed back by another cat peering over...
simple but good times
magpi3•Jun 12, 2026
Yeah, Karateka deserves more than a simple aside here. It's amazing that he made that on his own as a college student. I loved that game.
Oh, Karateka. I had the flawed Atari 7800 version as a kid.
pjmlp•Jun 12, 2026
Yeah, plenty of "wasted" hours playing that game.
bschwindHN•Jun 12, 2026
Such an absolute classic. My brothers and friends and I played this so much when we were kids that we had a notebook written up to overcome the game's "DRM", which required you to find a letter in a particular page/paragraph/sentence in the game's manual. You then drank the potion with the right letter floating over it. If you got the wrong one, you died and had to restart the game, but this was only at the end of level 1 so that wasn't a huge setback. Theoretically you didn't have this manual if you pirated it, but kids have nothing but time so our notebook ended up quite complete.
The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. And my god, the vertical chopping blades you have to carefully jump through...those things are brutal.
lukan•Jun 12, 2026
"The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. "
Skyrim did that also pretty well. The first draugh zombies/skelletons lying km the catacombs
are just objects to loot from.
But then you tried to loot the next one and it moves and gets up ..
Cthulhu_•Jun 12, 2026
But Skyrim ended up overdoing it, to the point where it's in every tomb (and there's a lot of them), so you end up expecting it and stab every corpse first.
lukan•Jun 12, 2026
Until you learn the trick to see that only the ones with the glowing eyes are alive ...
But yes, they overdid that and should probably have made more variations.
Agentlien•Jun 12, 2026
> The Apple II was dying as a platform by the time the game came out [...] it was rereleased on PC in the US and sales picked up. You wouldn’t get that second chance today.
On a much smaller scale, I was actually part of something similar a few years ago. The game Wavetale was originally a Stadia exclusive but launched just before the platform shut down. We were allowed by Google to port it and release it for every other platform, and I ended up being one of four programmers doing that work; I mainly focused on optimizing the switch version.
The Stadia version barely got noticed, but the other versions, especially Switch, did quite well. The game was even featured on AGDQ, which was really cool.
This is serendipitous as I'm just reading the making of Prince of persia from stripe press.
Goes into lots of detail as what was going on through the journal entries of the dev. Honestly it has encouraged me to start journaling again myself as I can see the value in being able to read back to a day in the last.
meerita•Jun 12, 2026
This was the first game I ever played on a PC, and it will always have a place in my heart. I first played it on an 8086 PC-compatible machine with an amber monochrome CRT monitor (the kind usually paired with MDA or Hercules-style graphics, where everything appeared in those beautiful orange shades). Later, my father bought a 386 PC with a VGA graphics card capable of 256-color modes, which on my monochrome display looked like 256 shades of gray. A couple of years after that, we finally upgraded to an Acer VGA color CRT monitor, and seeing the same game in full color felt like entering a completely different world.
As a small note of color, when I was a teenager I helped the local police department clean up one of their PCs, which had been infected with multiple viruses, Michelangelo is the one I still remember, though there were others. After cleaning the machine, I installed Prince of Persia for them. The policemen were absolutely thrilled to have that video game on their computer.
qsera•Jun 12, 2026
The graphics of Prince of persia took me to those dungeons more effectively than any 4k ray traced modern game could...
eru•Jun 12, 2026
That's because you were younger. Nostalgia is a hard drug.
qsera•Jun 12, 2026
It is not nostalgia.
kruffalon•Jun 12, 2026
I think it's because you have to use your imagination.
Just like active recall (essentially guess consciously before checking the answeris) a better way to learn I think the less detail their is in the story (book, game, movie, etc) the more you have to do yourself and so it becomes your own experience rather than someone elses.
qsera•Jun 12, 2026
Yea, that is it.
It is sad that people easily write off memory of nice things as "nostaliga"! Somethings really were nice.
nvader•Jun 12, 2026
My first exposure to Prince.exe was in the computer lab at school, which has a tiny set of DOS games, including digdug, space invaders and some typing game.
I remember when I was around 6 or 7, a boy a couple years older (and therefore, seemingly infinitely wiser) sharing the folk advice: "Play the other games first, don't play Prince of Persia too early or it will ruin all the other games for you"
BrtByte•Jun 12, 2026
That is excellent playground wisdom
BrtByte•Jun 12, 2026
There's something very of-the-era about fixing a virus-ridden PC and then "improving" it by installing Prince of Persia
pelario•Jun 12, 2026
As I see many others like me, full of nostalgia:
You can play it on the internet archive:
Once every couple of years I dive into it, I still cannot complete it without cheat codes, but I love the mouse animation, the "mirror" prince, and many other amazing details!
shevy-java•Jun 12, 2026
At that time it was a really great game. I played it a lot in my
younger days.
Nowadays games are often epic like a mega-long movie. But it no
longer feels like a game to me. Often the prompts and UI has been
dumbed down to appeal to the masses. That may be a good strategy,
but if I then compare it to old games such as Prince of Persia,
they lost playability in the process. I can not want to be bothered
to play such games, even aside from any time constraints I already
have. Those "games" don't interest me into actually playing it.
On top of that there are milking steps such as play-to-win and
other shenanigans. I can't support such evilness. I have also seen
how they exploit younger people into addictive habits that way.
pyb•Jun 12, 2026
Gobsmacked to learn that this was originally developed on the Apple II. I always thought of PoP as a 16-bit type of game.
jdw64•Jun 12, 2026
this game was so difficult that I never managed to clear it all the way to the end. I played it in the school computer lab, and it was one of the popular games... I can't remember the names of the others
glimshe•Jun 12, 2026
I once beat it in 27 minutes. I didn't know it was supposed to be hard at the time! I briefly checked speed run records now and that time would have put me in the top 50 "no glitches" ranking!
I'm not that good at games... For some reason PoP leveraged some brain circuitry I have with questionable evolutionary value.
jdw64•Jun 12, 2026
That's impressive. You clear this game... that puts you in contrast with me, who can't even become a 'prince' in a game
alansaber•Jun 12, 2026
My dad's favourite game. Still held up 30 years later, I played the shit out of this on IPad.
trwhite•Jun 12, 2026
Funny to see this; I read the first ~100 pages of the Stripe Press book last night and am highly enjoying it.
stefanos82•Jun 12, 2026
I have watched the creator explaining to us in great detail how he came up with so many tiny details that made it a perfect game for its time!
That jump through the mirror blew my mind as a kid. And level 6 oh man took us forever to beat that slightly obese guard. I still remember that we once accidentally walked all the way into that guard and switched places but then were killed by a strike to the back. always wanted to replay and see if I can pass the guard that way.
jgalt212•Jun 12, 2026
It's a great and novel game, but how many more retrospectives do we need?
BrtByte•Jun 12, 2026
Prince of Persia is one of those games where the technical limitations are almost inseparable from the magic
And an awful lot more written by Jimmy Maher on that site.
rando1234•Jun 12, 2026
I love the 'How we made the...' series on the guardian. They also do it for songs, movies etc. Really interesting to hear the back stories.
throw4847285•Jun 12, 2026
I really enjoyed Jordan Mechner's graphic memoir Replay. It's a multi-generational family history and personal reflection interwoven together.
the_af•Jun 12, 2026
Like I suspect many here reading the story, I grew up with Prince of Persia and remember it fondly as one of my favorite games from my youth.
It's very interesting to see the filming material used for rotoscoping the characters.
I find it very funny that when they filmed the actress doing the princess (it's cool to see her doing the swirl with her skirt to face the Prince!) they were young nerdy men interacting with an attractive young actress, and they were pretty shy about it! I think Jordan Mechner recounts this somewhere, probably his book about the making of PoP.
(The book is something I really want but never decided to pull the trigger, go figure. Maybe because I already read a lot of it way back when it was a free blog?).
wdaher•Jun 12, 2026
Assuming we’re talking about the Stripe Press book: if you email me and if you have a US address I’d be glad to mail you my totally unread copy which is mostly just gathering dust for me. (Email in profile.)
the_af•Jun 12, 2026
I really appreciate the offer. I live in South America, so this is a no-go.
How come you didn't read it? Did you lose interest?
Thanks! I've no problem buying the Stripe Press book, as I've said I simply haven't pulled the trigger yet. I don't mind the price, it's just that most of it I've already read back when it was freely available in Mechner's blog.
If I do buy it, I prefer the physical book with photos rather than a Kindle version.
I'm not actually asking for help here, just musing.
(Again, thanks for your reply anyway).
catlikesshrimp•Jun 12, 2026
Aren't there low cost courier services in your country which all they do is bring your stuff from the US? In my country, bringing packages from amazon, ebay, etc cost 2.5$ for a pound.
the_af•Jun 12, 2026
Sure, but why buy from someone in HN? Amazon ships to my country.
As I said, I'm not looking for help here. I do know where to buy the book and I can afford it. I just haven't decided to buy it (yet) for the myriad of reasons people sometimes refrain from impulsively buying all the things :)
Also, I'm afraid of buying it and then never reading it, like it happened to the other commenter.
wdaher•Jun 12, 2026
It's just been one of those "I just haven't gotten around to it yet" aspirational acquisitions. It seems very interesting and maybe I'll eventually get around to it.
It's more the satisfaction of (a) doing a small nice thing for a stranger on the Internet while also (b) freeing up a little shelf space is also worth the ~$5 it would cost me to mail it to someone.
ecocentrik•Jun 12, 2026
The developers of Prince of Persia still talking about the game more than 30 years later seems very bizarre to me. I remember a game called Flashback having very a similar graphical sprite animation innovation around the time PoP was released and I remember it being very fun to play, but nobody talks about it the same way. What's the deal with Price of Persia?
pizza234•Jun 12, 2026
Flashback came considerably later (1992) than PoP (1989); a single year back then was a lot more significant than it is today. A classic game in between was Another World (1991).
Just out curiosity, PoP ran on 8088/8086, while Flashback on 286/386.
gbalint•Jun 12, 2026
Prince of Persia came out in 1989, while Flashback arrived in 1992. In the late 80s and early 90s, pc video game tech was evolving at a breakneck pace, a 3-year gap was an eternity. Prince of Persia ran quite well on an 8-bit XT, Flashback needed a 16-bit 286. They are basically from a different era, and Flashback was surely inspired by PoP.
badc0ffee•Jun 12, 2026
The 8088 had an 8-bit data bus, but I don't think I would call it (or the XT) "8-bit" overall. By the same logic, a 386SX or 486SLC is "16-bit".
gbalint•Jun 12, 2026
Fair point
dfxm12•Jun 12, 2026
It's more popular, especially with the subsequent games and media franchise. FWIW, I hear people talk about Flashback's predecessor, Another World, a lot. That is also a popular game.
bluedino•Jun 12, 2026
If you liked Flashback, try an earlier release (also from Delphine software) called Out of this World/Another World
In my elementary school, we used to have something called computer class, where we just played the 2D Prince of Persia game, which was always in an air-conditioned room :) Many of us were obsessed with this game and the act of using a keyboard. Those perfectly timed jumps necessary to move to the next level are etched in my memory :)
28 Comments
highly recommended as 90s gamer
Also, Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8
I only realize it now but it had some very unique game mechanics that even today you don't see very often (ok maybe that's a bit of a stretch but the mechanics were novel to me back then):
- Notably you have 60 minutes to finish the game. Dying doesn't reset the timer, so there is constant pressure to keep moving.
- There is a satisfying parry mechanic. This is still rare to see in 2d platformers.
- Incredibly smooth animation. This could be nostalgia goggles but the rotoscoped animation really stood out compared to other games of the era.
But still it was an amazing experience whenever I played it. I felt the pressure and the need to start again like no other game nowadays.
But maybe that’s just because I was a kid.
(But I also didn't like it very much...)
And we dumb kids used to play it without the manual. It was a minor victory day for us when we finally figured out how to pick up the sword!
Years later though, and games like Dark Souls and Monster Hunter have a similar sluggishness / unresponsiveness to them. But it doesn't feel as unfair in those games.
You can see if Dead Cells's parrying mechanic works for you.
I have to admit the game is a little overwhelming but maybe I need to stick with it a bit more.
Part of PoP's charm is that the game is very simple, yet the parry mechanic has nuance - you can buffer parry/attack/parry/attack/... sequences and the timing is just a bit faster than normal enemies, meaning you can wear them out (these fights have a very Errol Flynn Swashbuckler feel to them). Eventually your attack lands before they can begin their parry animation.
Later in the game you meet enemies that hit faster than you can respond to with a parry, so you need to change up your tactics.
Down here in my city in Mexico that's basically how everyone played it, so most of us played only the first level.
At some point, I was tinkering with the "x tree gold" program and saw the "hex view" thing. I remember opening Prince's .sav file, which was a very small file that only appeared after you saved. After tinkering with the numbers I managed to appear in the next level .
It was my 5 minutes of fame at my computer class when I arrived and showed that I had passed the bottles room.
And I became fascinated by cracking at that point.
Also, the steps, the gates and all other sound FXs.
Most people are/were fascinated by the fluid animations, but this game was perfect from every angle.
And that awesome intro animation too - never seen anything like it at the time, like simply seeing realistic human faces being drawn in a DOS game was just mind blowing.
May sound silly for some people today, but that was some incredible wizardry at the times, given the limitations (PC speaker was monophonic, square-wave only). As a YouTube comment says: "This is musical equivalent to pixel art."
And a great game too!
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izadA3nSPbk
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5UU2TxOcZs
These are some of my earliest memories of computing, and the conversations I had with that guy, who was doing computer science, plus the things he opened up for me on the computer really pushed me into the industry.
I ended up visiting the US with my grandparents sometime later, and got to see the original disks most of my games had been cloned from. They even had the original F-15 Strike Eagle box from memory.
Sounds like the summary of the opening chapter of a Bruce Sterling novel.
Love that your Hong Kong friend memorized the DRM codes.
Of course, DRM was no issue with a cracked copy of the game...
"Cracked by The Vulture" was something that I was very used to seeing upon booting up a game.
simple but good times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFe28MNCG7o&t=17
The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. And my god, the vertical chopping blades you have to carefully jump through...those things are brutal.
Skyrim did that also pretty well. The first draugh zombies/skelletons lying km the catacombs are just objects to loot from. But then you tried to loot the next one and it moves and gets up ..
But yes, they overdid that and should probably have made more variations.
On a much smaller scale, I was actually part of something similar a few years ago. The game Wavetale was originally a Stadia exclusive but launched just before the platform shut down. We were allowed by Google to port it and release it for every other platform, and I ended up being one of four programmers doing that work; I mainly focused on optimizing the switch version.
The Stadia version barely got noticed, but the other versions, especially Switch, did quite well. The game was even featured on AGDQ, which was really cool.
On a related note, I also highly recommend the "War Stories" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
Prince of Persia info at https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/library/#pop
Goes into lots of detail as what was going on through the journal entries of the dev. Honestly it has encouraged me to start journaling again myself as I can see the value in being able to read back to a day in the last.
As a small note of color, when I was a teenager I helped the local police department clean up one of their PCs, which had been infected with multiple viruses, Michelangelo is the one I still remember, though there were others. After cleaning the machine, I installed Prince of Persia for them. The policemen were absolutely thrilled to have that video game on their computer.
Just like active recall (essentially guess consciously before checking the answeris) a better way to learn I think the less detail their is in the story (book, game, movie, etc) the more you have to do yourself and so it becomes your own experience rather than someone elses.
It is sad that people easily write off memory of nice things as "nostaliga"! Somethings really were nice.
I remember when I was around 6 or 7, a boy a couple years older (and therefore, seemingly infinitely wiser) sharing the folk advice: "Play the other games first, don't play Prince of Persia too early or it will ruin all the other games for you"
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Prince_of_Persia_1990
Once every couple of years I dive into it, I still cannot complete it without cheat codes, but I love the mouse animation, the "mirror" prince, and many other amazing details!
Nowadays games are often epic like a mega-long movie. But it no longer feels like a game to me. Often the prompts and UI has been dumbed down to appeal to the masses. That may be a good strategy, but if I then compare it to old games such as Prince of Persia, they lost playability in the process. I can not want to be bothered to play such games, even aside from any time constraints I already have. Those "games" don't interest me into actually playing it.
On top of that there are milking steps such as play-to-win and other shenanigans. I can't support such evilness. I have also seen how they exploit younger people into addictive habits that way.
I'm not that good at games... For some reason PoP leveraged some brain circuitry I have with questionable evolutionary value.
Just watch it yourself, you will be in awe!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54
And an awful lot more written by Jimmy Maher on that site.
It's very interesting to see the filming material used for rotoscoping the characters.
I find it very funny that when they filmed the actress doing the princess (it's cool to see her doing the swirl with her skirt to face the Prince!) they were young nerdy men interacting with an attractive young actress, and they were pretty shy about it! I think Jordan Mechner recounts this somewhere, probably his book about the making of PoP.
(The book is something I really want but never decided to pull the trigger, go figure. Maybe because I already read a lot of it way back when it was a free blog?).
How come you didn't read it? Did you lose interest?
If I do buy it, I prefer the physical book with photos rather than a Kindle version.
I'm not actually asking for help here, just musing.
(Again, thanks for your reply anyway).
As I said, I'm not looking for help here. I do know where to buy the book and I can afford it. I just haven't decided to buy it (yet) for the myriad of reasons people sometimes refrain from impulsively buying all the things :)
Also, I'm afraid of buying it and then never reading it, like it happened to the other commenter.
It's more the satisfaction of (a) doing a small nice thing for a stranger on the Internet while also (b) freeing up a little shelf space is also worth the ~$5 it would cost me to mail it to someone.
Just out curiosity, PoP ran on 8088/8086, while Flashback on 286/386.