The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993

by Jordan Mechner

  “Think of the game as an old car you’re fixing up in your spare time,” Tomi suggested, urging me to resume work on it. This old car has an engine block that’s rusted solid. I can’t even think about how much work lies ahead.

  November 24, 1987

  John Avildsen read the script and declined. Larry is still waiting to hear from John Boorman, Michael Apted, Michael Ritchie, and Peter Yates; but something tells me he’s pinning his hopes on dark horse Thomas Carter, director of the Miami Vice season pilot, and doesn’t really expect any of these big names to say yes. It all feels pretty remote to me now.

  January 7, 1988

  On impulse, more to escape cabin fever than anything else, I drove into Broderbund and actually put in a full day of work, oiling the gears that have rusted in place inside my head. I was startled to realize that the most recent code printouts in my folder are dated March 26, 1987.

  In essence, I stopped working on the game the day I got the call from Virginia Giritlian… eight months ago.

  What the hell have I been doing for eight months?

  Restarting

  January 12, 1988

  I’m back in work mode.

  For a solid week now I’ve been going into Broderbund in the mornings and coming home late at night, happy and tired. It’s hard to overstate the transformation this has wrought in my attitude toward life, the universe and everything. A week ago, I’d pretty much given up on the game. I only had to take the final step – a formality, really – of informing Ed that the project was dead.

  Now Ed’s overjoyed; at dinner last night he was grinning from ear to ear; even Robert Cook is impressed with my renewed dedication. People at Broderbund have been greeting me enthusiastically and asking “Where have you been?” and when I tell them about Hollywood, they get all excited.

  A week ago, I was an aspiring screenwriter. Now, I’m a working computer game designer with an ace up my sleeve.

  It’s daunting to contemplate the vast amount of work that lies ahead – it’ll be six months before the game is close to code-ready – but I’m getting excited.

  January 13, 1988

  My agent, Toby Jaffe, called me at work and asked: “So, how’s the screenplay going? Writing away?”

  “Yup,” I said (recompiling a source file as we talked).

  January 21, 1988

  Two more turndowns, from Michael Apted and Bob Swaim. Swaim told Larry he enjoyed the script, would have jumped at it had it come along before his last movie, but he’s now looking for a love story.

  These phone calls from Larry are my only link to the movie industry, to L.A., to that whole set of aspirations. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the script exists, that I wrote it, that dozens of Xerox copies of it are circulating and getting read by people. It doesn’t seem real.

  February 4, 1988

  Prince of Persia is looking good. The kid now runs, jumps, swings and falls like a pro. When he steps on the pressure plates the gates go up and down the way they’re supposed to. The project’s back on track.

  The only problem is I’ve been working such long hours, I can’t remember the last time I did anything fun outside work, or even went to the movies. My budding screenwriting career is a distant memory.

  Dr. S says my mono is getting better, but I shouldn’t be discouraged if it’s another six months before I’m 100%. And in the meantime, I should take care to avoid getting overtired or chilled. Six months!

  February 28, 1988

  I shipped Mom my 512K Mac. She upgraded it to a Plus and now she’s happily learning how to use it.

  Dad wants me to move out of San Francisco. He’s worried about earthquakes.

  March 1, 1988

  MGM passed. Michael Crichton passed. On deck: Roger Spottiswoode, Henry Winkler, John Boormann.

  March 25, 1988

  Larry called to say Peter Yates has passed. Now that all the top guys have said no, we go down a notch. Andy (Bad Dreams) Fleming’s agent, Eric Rosenberg, liked the script and wants to meet me.

  “The top guys were all very positive,” Larry said. “Keep your spirits up.”

  April 21, 1988

  My Apple II hard drive arrived today – about a year after I got Ed to agree to order me one – and with some help from Robert I got my entire development system converted over. It’ll save me endless hassles. It’s the most exciting hardware event in years.

  May 31, 1988

  Janice Kim gave me some advice: “You should just let go. Take a trip where you don’t have your return ticket booked ahead of time.”

  I agreed, but explained that I needed to conquer the world first.

  She said: “You’ll still be saying that when you’re 60.”

  Janice was fascinated by the way things seem to work out for me. “I mean, if I thought of writing a computer game, I’d just assume it would be terrible and nobody would want to buy it, so I wouldn’t do it.”

  I pointed out that at 18, she’s the first woman go professional in the U.S.; but she didn’t seem to feel that was much to write home about.

  David is going to Japan for the next two or three years or however long it takes him to turn pro.

  June 8, 1988

  SHADOW MAN. Credit Tomi with this one.

  I was explaining to her why there are no enemies in Prince of Persia. The animations for the player’s character are so elaborate, there’s not enough memory left to add another character.

  “Why not use the same animations for your enemies, the way you did in Karateka?”

  “Wouldn’t work so well this time. This character is designed to look cute. He has a very specific personality in the way he runs and moves. The enemies would have to be cute too.”

  “Can’t you just change the face, or the costume?”

  “Not possible. If I change anything, it’s a whole new set of shapes. There’s just no memory.”

  She wouldn’t give up. “Couldn’t you make him a different color – say, black?”

  I started to explain: “This is the Apple II…” and then it hit me: What if I exclusive-OR each frame with itself, bit-shifted one pixel over? I visualized a ghostly, shimmering outline-figure, black, with white face and arms, running and leaping, pursuing you. I described it to Tomi.

  “Shadow Man!” she exclaimed.

  □ □ □

  Tomi, Robert, and Eric all huddled around my screen while I paged through my source code.

  Me: “Uh, you don’t actually have to watch me do this. It might take a while.”

  Eric: “No, we want to. It’s a test.”

  In about two minutes I had Shadow Man up and running. He looked great. It was as if he’d always existed. Everybody was wowed. How could I have ever contemplated the game without him?

  Robert suggested that Shadow Man could come into being when you run through a mirror. You leap through the mirror; simultaneously your evil shadow self leaps out the way you came, and slinks off into the darkness. For the rest of the game he’s lurking in the shadows, dogging your steps… until the end, when you don the magic amulet and become powerful enough to reabsorb him into yourself, thus gaining the strength you need to defeat the Grand Vizier.

  “You’ll sell a billion copies,” Tomi predicted. “All I want is a Honda Legend. Coupe. Silver.”

  July 11, 1988

  Doug told Tomi that the Apple IIe market has started its long downward spiral. If I expect to make any money off POP, I’d better get cracking.

  My Karateka royalty stream has dwindled to a trickle. At this point, I’m living on savings. I made an Excel spreadsheet to track the number of months I have left.

  Larry told me he’s feeling disheartened. We’ve been turned down by several of the smaller studios, who failed to evince even the level of in
terest shown by MGM and United Artists.

  Virginia’s lost her job because of the strike.

  July 18, 1988

  Been putting in full days on Prince of Persia: 40 hours last week. It’s starting to show visible progress.

  August 5, 1988

  Yesterday was an unusually productive day. Robert put fire extinguishers into his game (D/Generation), I put falling floors into mine.

  A Fish Called Wanda: hilarious.

  August 14, 1988

  [In Paris] Brought Mom, David, Janice and Emily along to a dinner party at Larry Turman’s – actually, the Paris pied-a-terre of his friend Larry Gordon, three blocks from the Eiffel Tower. Mom liked the Turmans a lot; she had a great time. Afterwards, Larry’s sons Peter and Andrew and their friends came to the St. Eustache with us and we stayed out past midnight playing go.

  August 24, 1988

  [San Rafael] 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.

  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.

  The Crucible

  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.

  October 9, 1988

  Tomi and Doug got to be present at the historic unveiling of Steve Jobs’ new computer, the “Next,” at the San Francisco Symphony.

  October 13, 1988

  Larry Turman informed my agents that he’s throwing in the towel on Birthstone.

  October 20, 1988

  Deep in programming mode. Nine hours today trying to integrate the new game code with the old builder code I haven’t touched in six months. It’s like going in with a wrecking ball and bashing the building to the ground, then saying “Now, can we use any of these timbers? Oh, here’s a nice chair we can save! Let’s put it over here!” A nightmare.

  October 23, 1988

  Drove to Broderbund early in the morning, let myself into the building and worked for ten hours straight. Like in the old days. I’m starting to see code patterns floating in my brain as I drift off to sleep at night… and, disturbingly, when I wake up in the morning.

  The game and the editor are now integrated on a single disk. Very slick.

  Five months of this and I really will be done by March.

  November 11, 1988

  “I like games where you can shoot things. Your game has no rewards except getting to the next level. It’s all survival and no triumph.” –Tomi

  She’s right about POP. It’s empty and lifeless. I don’t know if even the shadow man and swordfighting will change that.

  On the other hand, I put in a new door which looks pretty good.

  Oh, God. I want this game to be a hit. Like Karateka.

  Maybe this whole modular-design approach is wrong. Maybe the thing to do is put in a whole bunch of hard-wired enemies, one after another, and forget the whole free-floating, random-access, 24-screens-per-level idea.

  24 screens, if they’re linked sequentially, could give a playing experience as satisfying as a whole level of Karateka. But they should be in the form of obstacles to be overcome one after another. For example:

  A chasm that has to be jumped

  A gate that has to be raised

  A guard that has to be killed

  The way it is now, you’re plunged into a huge arena with no overall idea of what you’re trying to accomplish except “get out.” It’s too perplexing, especially at first.

  Maybe after the first 10 or 15 levels, I could start introducing some real Lode Runner/Dr. Creep “puzzle” type game play. But in the beginning, it should be pretty much left-to-right (like Karateka) with a little bit of up-and-down. So the player can get his bearings.

  YEAH!

  November 12, 1988

  Still not enough.

  What’s the point in running, running to get to the exit, if all it gets you is more of the same?

  The princess waiting at the end is a reward only in the story. We need rewards in the game – like beating a guard in Karateka. What makes a game fun? Tension/release, tension/release. Prince of Persia has neither. It’s like going on a 25-mile hike. Every now and then, you get to step over a log or cross a stream. Big deal.

  Running, jumping, and climbing, no matter how beautifully animated, hold your attention for maybe the first three screens. Then you start to wonder: when is something going to happen? Like: a guard to fight. An airplane to shoot down. Something.

  There need to be sub-goals. Places where you can say: “Whew! Did it! That was a tough one!…What’s next?”

  Like:

  clearing a screen in Asteroids or Pac-Man

  beating a guard in Karateka

  solving a level in Lode Runner

  Right now, solving a level in Prince of Persia has none of the feeling of accomplishment of any of these. It’s more like “Oh… so that’s the end. Oh.”

  What elements do All of the Above share?

  1. You can tell at any moment, by glancing at the screen, how close you are to finishing, how much is left.

  2. There are setbacks and successes on the road to ultimate success. You get a smaller version of the “Whew! Did it!” when, say, you clear a difficult area (Pac-Man), or drive a guard back with a series of blows (Karateka), or retrieve a
hard-to-get sack (Lode Runner). Conversely, you get the “Oh, shit…” reaction when you accidentally split up a bunch of bigger asteroids into more smaller, faster ones; or when you finish a pattern and see that you’ve missed one dot; etc. Some setbacks are fatal, some are just irritating. But when they happen, you feel they’re your own fault.

  3. You can hold off on the next task, waiting for the right moment, before saying “OK… Now” and going for it… plunging into a period of higher tension, higher chance of either a setback or success.

  Persia has none of these features at present.

  If the sub-goal is “solving the level,” you need a consistent visual indicator of how close you are. You don’t just stumble onto the exit and say “Oh—guess I’m done.” Or stumble onto a sack of gold and say “Oh—here’s another one.” That’s why collect-the-dots games like Lode Runner and Pac-Man always show the entire screen at once. That’s key.

  But POP doesn’t show the entire screen at once. That’s a problem.

  November 13, 1988

  How can I be so up on screenplay story structure, and so blind when it comes to my own game?

  A story doesn’t move forward until a character wants something. So – a game doesn’t move forward until the player wants something. Five seconds after you press start, you’d better know the answer to the question: “What do I want to happen?”

  There always has to be a range of possible outcomes, some better than others, so you’re constantly thinking: “Good… Bad… Terrible.” Every event has to move you closer or further away from your goal, or it’s not an event, it’s just window dressing.

  The overall goal of POP is to get the girl. But that’s not a strong enough magnet to pull the player through all that distance. It needs sub-goals.

  Beating a guard in Karateka buys you time to gain distance. You want to get closer to the palace because the princess is there; every guard you beat brings you closer. It’s simple, but it works. In psychological terms, it even follows the classic addictive pattern of diminishing rewards: each subsequent guard is harder to kill, and gives you a smaller reward for your pains, until you reach the intermediate goal (the end of the level), at which point there’s a bigger reward, and things get easier again… for a while.