The Making of Prince of Persia

Jordan Mechner's journal is the best thing I've read this year (so far).

Apr 10, 2023

a programmer developing a game on his apple ii, blue background, pixel art

(Programming note upfront: I missed last week’s post because life came in the way. I also haven’t been able to put as much effort into this week’s post as I’d like to, but I still think it’s a nice read. Hope you like it!)

Over the past two weeks, I finished reading The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner. The book contains Jordan’s journals from the years that he was working on the first Prince of Persia game. There are lots of motivating and interesting things in the journal, so I thought I’d share a few of them with readers here.

Obsession to the point of dreaming about your work.

I found this quite interesting. I’ve had this happen to me a few times, but not for large projects. Perhaps I haven’t found something that’s made me obsessed enough yet.

Then a strange thing happened. I started getting images in my head of the characters: The Sultan. The Princess. The Boy. I saw the scenes in my mind as if it were a Disney movie. So I wrote up a scenario — churned it out in an hour. It came out pretty well, I think.

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.

You should feel good about what you’re building.

Another consistent theme throughout the journal was that Mechner was convinced that the game was going to be good. He wasn’t sure how successful it would be, but he was always sure that it’d be a high quality game. That’s one thing I’m trying to do as well. I should try to build the best thing I can build, because otherwise what even is the point?

The amount of painstaking work still ahead of me is too huge to contemplate, but it’s paying off more dramatically than anything I’ve done in months. This is going to be a good game.

It’ll all be worth it. This is going to be the greatest game of all time.

Been working hard on POP (48 hours last week) and it’s really looking good.

Shouldn’t be afraid of confrontation if you believe in something.

There’s a few moments where Jordan has issues because something some other person had to do for the game wasn’t being done well. It’s never nice to have to confront people about these things, but to get a good result in the end, sometimes you have to. Also, it’s much better to signal that you care about the thing, because that makes other people realize that it’s a thing worth caring about.

I’ve got to learn to get more pumped up for these things. I was so blasé, I really brought the energy down in the room. I think they’d have been more excited if I hadn’t been there to demo it.

It’s not that I insist on doing everything my own way. I’m always hoping someone else will come up with something better than I would have done myself. But when they don’t…?

It made me realize how much I usually avoid confrontation. Conflict always gives me the anxious feeling that I need to say something to defuse the situation and restore goodwill, even if it’s at my own expense. Today, I realized the formidable power of acting tough. Not only did I get my way, I actually gained goodwill points, because I made Brian feel bad for having upset me. There’s a lesson in that. I need to develop the ability to stand my ground.

There were other parts of the book that I really enjoyed too. Mechner’s evolving thoughts on what would make Prince of Persia fun were really nice to read through.

If you liked these small parts of the book, give it a read and tell me what you thought of it on Twitter! (or leave a comment here, I read all of them.)

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