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Prince of Persia source code documentation [1989] [pdf]
- heed 17y agoMechner has also taken the liberty to share his old journal entries from the Prince of Persia era. A lengthy, inspiring read, and highly relevant to people trying to build something. Check them out on his website: http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/ http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/
- whatusername 17y agoCan I just second that these are an engrossing read. See the HN discussion here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952029 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952029
- wallflower 17y agoThanks!!! Plowing through it, enjoying the read, sad it will soon be done. It's like reading Coders at Work in autobiographical form. One of the best non-book books I've read in months. > We chatted for an hour about peripherally related topics. Broderbund, corporate America, the rat race, capitalism, freedom. I was seducing him. At the critical psychological moment, I remarked: “You know, all my clipping is done on the byte boundaries.” There was a pause April 3, 1989 > The other thing is, I liked them. Lately I’d been starting to feel jaded about this whole enterprise – “Oh well, it’s just a computer game” – but watching Chris and Stu, I realized: These guys love games. They love games the way I loved movies in college. Even more, because they’re not interested in girls yet. Computer games are like the air they breathe. If I can make one that they can get excited about, that’s a real accomplishment. That’s something I can be proud of. So I worked till ten with renewed enthusiasm. May 6, 1989
- drawkbox 17y agoThis entry is funny: http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1985/07/july-5-1985/ http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1985/07/july-5-1985/ "There’s no guarantee the new game will be as successful. Or that there will even be a computer games market a couple of years from now."
- waterlesscloud 17y agoYeah, I loved that one. Does provide some perspective. On the other hand, I kept thinking how thrilled he must be that his game is going to be a huge movie, since he really wanted to be a filmmaker all along.
- dk 17y agoI hope it lives up to the potential. Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame went down that path and has barely been heard from since. OTOH he never got anywhere close to a $200m budget.
- enki 17y agoand it seems he worked for 4 years to write POP in 6502 assembler (non-fulltime - via http://jordanmechner.com/page/4/ http://jordanmechner.com/page/4/). with all the usual HN talk about release early, release often, that's a pre-release timeframe i have problems even imagining. wish jordan was a HN reader!
- wlievens 17y agoI third this. It's like reading Microserfs, except it's REAL
- swannodette 17y agoLovely Total RAM: 127.75K Total Diskspace: 252.5k
- pgbovine 17y agoha awesome, compare that with how much space a "hello world" executable takes when compiled on a modern OS with standard libraries
- sorbus 17y ago4.6k, for 2 lines of code and 66 characters (in C). Wow.
- teuobk 17y agoAnother way to think about it is that the game used almost all of the available RAM and drive space. That would be like a game today needing 3.5 GB of RAM and 0.90 TB of disk space. :)
- gaius 17y agoYou've played Crysis then ;-)
- wallflower 17y agoI am really intrigued what the redacted ##magic marker'd##-out line could be... PRINCE OF PERSIA--Cheat Key Version August 27, 1989 ??? Enable cheat keys With cheat keys enabled: [Return] Disable cheat keys SKIP Skip to next level (up to Level 12) ################################## (Redacted!) TINA Go the end of level 12 R Restore full strength BOOST Boost max strength (origstrength) by 1 Z Reduce guard to 1 unit of strength ZAP Zap guard (he drops dead)
- mkelly 17y agoWhen I saw the same page in the development journal he posted, I assumed that code got removed from the game after he printed out that page -- not something that was redacted, per se. :) [edit: attempting to use something resembling English grammar this time]