The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993

Introduction

I started keeping a journal in college, and kept it up for several years afterward. During those years I created my first games, Karateka and Prince of Persia, on an Apple II computer.

It was the start of a journey that would see my shape-shifting prince transform into a modern video game hero, LEGO minifigure, and even Jake Gyllenhaal in a summer blockbuster movie. But in 1985, he existed only as a few scribbles on a yellow-lined pad. In my old journals I recorded his birth pangs.

Rereading these notebooks twenty years later, reliving the creative, technical and personal struggles that brought the prince into being, I thought others might find them of interest. So I began posting daily entries on my website at jordanmechner.com, as a “developer diary from the past.”

The response has been more than I hoped for. The old journals seem to resonate not only with game developers, but with writers, artists and creators of all stripes, some of whom weren’t born yet in 1985.

Here it is — the first “Making of” Prince of Persia. I hope you enjoy it.

Note: In the interest of accurately portraying the ups and downs of this period of my life, over twenty years ago, I’ve resisted the temptation to edit out statements that today I find embarrassing, cringe-inducing, or flat-out wrong. Please understand that the journal entries reflect my state of mind when I wrote them, not what I think now.

Jordan Mechner