The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993

“Do I Really Want to Make Another Game?”

MAY 6, 1985

[New Haven] Picked up my Mac from Technical Services; they’d run it for a few hours without crashing, so they just packed it back up again. On the way back I bought a surge suppressor at the Coop. Hope that takes care of the problem.

Wrote my two-page Psych paper. Now there’s just one lone Music exam between me and the rest of my life. I practiced by trying to transcribe the beginning of Raiders. It’s hard, even with Music Shop to test my work out on.

Dad called. Billboard’s top-ranked program for this week is, indeed, Karateka. That’s Step Two in my convincing myself of this. Step Three will be when I see it for myself.

MAY 7, 1985

I’m done.

I’m done with Yale.

The music exam was pretty tough — I blew the dictations — but, hey, I did my best. I might get a B in the course. After the exam I spoke to Dwight and Tom, in a whisper because a lot of people were still writing. They wanted to know what I’d be doing next year.

“Write computer games,” I whispered.

I bought Billboard. Karateka is indeed number one. Me and Madonna. Yow.

MAY 10, 1985

Dinner with Bill Holt at Whistler’s. He brought me up to date on what everybody at Broderbund is doing. He also asked me about my summer plans. I said I was thinking about doing another game. He said Gary would love to have me back.

So, I figure I’ll fly up there around the middle of July, stay with somebody for a while, see if I can get a new project lined up. I’ll call Gary on Monday and tell him.

Note: call — not write. Gary — not Ed. Writing to Ed hasn’t worked for me too well in the past. He’s a Busy Man. I have a feeling they don’t use letters much out there, anyway.

Bill suggested I ask Gary, not Ed, to pick up the tab. “If your dad ever disowns you,” Bill said, “I think Gary would adopt you.”

I’m psyched to Return to Marin.

Lunch with Jeff Kleeman. Afterwards, he came over and I recorded the score to Vertigo for him. I’ll look him up in L.A. this summer. Also, jogging this morning, I ran into Mike Saltzman and Eve Maremont.

MAY 14, 1985

Stopping by the post office after jogging, I found the letter from Ed I’ve been waiting for for nearly two months. I was amazed at how happy it made me. It didn’t say much — basically, just “sure, come on out” — but it lifted a weight off my chest, one I hadn’t even realized I was carrying. I am going out there in July. And I’m seriously looking forward to it.

The issue of who pays hasn’t yet been addressed, but I think they’ll probably agree to pay for my ticket. If not (don’t tell them this), I’ll go anyway.

Dad had a useful insight on my upcoming negotiations with Broderbund. My position should be: I don’t need an advance, or a salary, or a guarantee that they’ll publish the program when it’s finished. I’ll take all the risk. I just want the highest royalty rate I can get. And the pressure to negotiate the contract should come from them, not from me.

MAY 17, 1985

Breakfast at Naples with Dwight Andrews. We talked about computer music.

A pleasant surprise: Got my first royalty check for Karateka, for $2,117. 2,000 units sold in April. The advance is now paid off.

MAY 24, 1985

The Baccalaureate address was pretty good. Giamatti always brings a lump to my throat when he does his routine about a liberal arts education and learning for learning’s sake.

The Class Day exercises boasted a very funny routine by a pair of senior stand-up comics, and a good speech by Paul Tsongas. The thrust of it was that one should maintain perspective as one strives to Get Ahead in life; material gains are empty; nobody wishes on their deathbed that they had spent more time on their business.

Friday must have been ninety degrees, but like a fool I wore a jacket and tie under the heavy black gown. Boy, was I sweating. The procession to Old Campus was a very big deal; we took a rather circuitous route through the New Haven Green, where we stopped and waited in a long line while the band and the President’s party paraded by. We doffed our caps to Giamatti as he passed. Ward, Larry, and Dominic whistled Elgar and Sousa marches to keep from getting bored. Larry had fun with the parasol he’d brought along.

Our parents snapped picture after picture as we passed. We smiled and basked and kept moving. It all seemed unreal. Filled with an ocean of chairs, packed with people, approached by an unusual route through gates that had always been locked, the Old Campus felt like no place I’d ever been.

Once we got in our seats, we were graduated almost before we knew it. A hymn, a prayer, and then, suddenly, one-thousand-some-odd “IN NUMBER,” we were graduated “as designated by the Dean.” And it was over.

JUNE 4, 1985

[New York] I turned 21 today.

Irv Bauer dropped by. We chatted for a couple of minutes. He congratulated me on being a boy wonder and asked me what I had in the works. I told him I was writing a screenplay.

“It’s a hard business,” he said. Then he said: “I’m going to give you a gift.” He thereupon recommended James Agee’s two books On Film. I thanked him profusely. I guess I’m supposed to buy the books myself.

I saw Aviva off (to Australia via LaGuardia) and went to see Jules and Jim.

JUNE 5, 1985

A cold, drizzling day. I was a little grouchy, I guess because I’m feeling confused and indecisive about my future. Kay from Broderbund called and told me it’ll be OK for me to stay at Dane’s place. I booked a flight to L.A. and S.F. on July 5th. So everything’s set. Except –

Do I really want to write another game? Can I do that and write screenplays at the same time? Can I write screenplays at all?

I played the Gremlins soundtrack to evoke last summer and get me psyched about movies. It worked. Tomorrow I’ll write something.

The Commodore version of Karateka must be out, because I got a copy in the mail. Shrink-packed and everything.

JUNE 15, 1985

Chris Columbus must be a happy guy. Steven Spielberg latched onto him and now Chris is cranking out fun movies one after another. I loved Gremlins. I liked Goonies. A lot.

I’m glad I’m going to San Rafael in two weeks. I think I’m going stir crazy. My social life here is zilch. I never do anything. I’m turning into a lump.

I’m not crazy about the prospect of sitting down to write another video game and getting up a year later. But it would be good for me to live in Marin and work at Broderbund. Meet new people. My own place, my own car. Get around. Yup — I’m set on that.

JULY 4, 1985

[L.A.] Staying with Robert Cook in Huntington Beach. Beach party last night with his family and about 500 other people. We talked about computer games, movies, and our future.

Today we drove into Westwood and saw St. Elmo’s Fire. The first movie I’ve ever seen about people my age, i.e., just out of college. Usually it’s either the summer after high school, or freshman year in college. It’s refreshing to see these actors who’ve been playing 17-year-olds for the past five years get a chance to act their age.

Karateka is #2 on Billboard’s bestseller list.

JULY 5, 1985

Robert is all psyched up to do a new game now. My presence seems to have that effect on him. Me, I’ve been having serious doubts about doing another computer game.

On the one hand, if I live at home for much longer I’ll go stir-crazy. What I need is a place to go. Friends. Work. Moving to Marin and doing another game for Broderbund would give me that.

But it would take time away from screenwriting. In the time it’ll take me to do a new game, I could write three screenplays. And… the games business is drying up. Karateka may make me as little as $75,000 all told, and it’s at the top of the charts. 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.

JULY 10, 1985

[San Rafael] It was fun walking into the Broderbund offices and seeing everybody. Had lunch with Gene Portwood and spent a couple of hours sitting around his office with Lauren Elliott and Gary Carlston, talking about ideas for my new game. David Snider showed me the Amiga — wow! — and Chris Jochumson showed me Mac Print Shop.

Broderbund’s doing well. Print Shop is doing insanely well. I’m almost convinced I want to move out here and do another game.

After I write my first screenplay.

JULY 16, 1985

Danny Gorlin took me to his house to show me Airheart, which, a year later, is now double hi-res. He asked for feedback.

It had the same problem it did the last time I saw it. Small detailed objects against a black background. It should be cosmic, mind-boggling; people should look at it and say “I can’t believe I’m seeing this on an Apple II.” But the truth is, right now, it doesn’t look especially impressive.

I said: “You’ve gone the honest, hard-to-program, hard-to-represent route at every step. You need to put in some cheap effects so people will notice the expensive ones.” I offered a bunch of suggestions. He was listening, but I could tell he really wanted to believe it was almost there and he could be finished in a month.

Danny’s sunk a lot of time and money into this. I’m worried. Technically, it’s a wonder, but the universe he’s chosen to represent with this awesome piece of programming is so exotic that I’m afraid people won’t respond to it. It’s what Gene Portwood calls “an effect in search of a game.”

JULY 17, 1985

Gene and I came up with a setting for the new game before lunch. Ali Baba; Sinbad. It’s versatile, familiar, visually distinctive, and — in the video game field — hasn’t been done to death.

Robert, Tomi, Steve and I had dinner at Acapulco. The waitress wouldn’t believe I was 21, because my New York learner’s permit didn’t have a photo on it. “You could have written this yourself,” she said. So Steve ordered a Margarita, then pushed it across the table to me. I was on my third sip when the manager came by and whisked it away from me with a curt “Thank you.” He was so steamed, even after that, he had to come back to the table and give us a lecture.

What gets me is that they charged us for the drink.

JULY 18, 1985

Driving me to the airport, Tomi said:

“I think you should pursue screenwriting. Go for it.”

I was surprised and asked her why. She said that Broderbund is a really nice, warm, friendly place to work, but for programmers it’s actually not that great a deal. The older ones, like Chris and David, are starting to get scared, because programming’s the only marketable skill they have, and it’s a young man’s game. The new crop of kids coming up are willing to work harder and cheaper, and don’t have girlfriends or families yet to cut into their working hours. And nobody knows how long the games market will be around, or what it’ll be like next year.

I never would have thought of it quite like that.

AUGUST 28, 1985

[Chappaqua] One of those rainy late-summer days. Woke up at 11:30, drove Mom into town and back.

Finished that letter to Ed Bernstein at Broderbund. I needed to come up with some kind of storyline, so I just wrote something off the top of my head. I sealed the letter and mailed it.

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. It’s just similar enough to Karateka, but more plausible, more intricate, and most important, more humorous. Gene will love it. Maybe the back story could even be written up and illustrated, like a comic book, and published with the game.

My night thoughts lately have been along the lines of: “Do I have it in me to do another computer game? Is this what I want to do? Can I do it? What if the code-writing part of my brain has atrophied? Will I fail ignominiously? Should I just turn to screenwriting full-time?”

Today made me feel better.

AUGUST 30, 1985

Another good day on the game. (Screenplay? What screenplay?) I’m getting to the point where I want to rush out and buy a video camera, a VCR and a digitizer and get to work.

Atari Karateka arrived FedEx. It looks great, sounds awful. Dad and I spent the day troubleshooting the music. It should be OK, but nowhere near Commodore quality.

I’m unutterably happy that I’m getting psyched up for this new game. It fills me with joy and confidence in the future.

Then again, maybe feeling good doesn’t necessarily mean that what I write is good. Maybe the best stuff is produced out of blackest despair. Or maybe not.

SEPTEMBER 24, 1985

I passed my driving test, despite hitting the curb while parallel parking, failing to check the rear-view mirror, stopping at a green light, and having trouble getting the key out of the ignition. So now I’ve got a driver’s license. Scary, isn’t it?

Got a letter from Ed. He waxed enthusiastic about the new game and proposed they fly me out to discuss terms “as soon as it’s convenient.” How cool is that?! (Sorry, Mom, Dad… can’t make dinner. Gotta fly out to California for the weekend. Business. You know how it is.)

SEPTEMBER 25, 1985

The Diners Club VCR and video camera arrived. It’s scary to have $2,500 worth of equipment I don’t own and can’t afford. David and I (mostly David) spent the day fooling around with it. It’s a fantastic piece of technology, but I’ll breathe easier when it’s out of the house.

I feel so dishonest.

OCTOBER 2, 1985

Last night I was kept awake by anxiety about the new game. All the detail I’m gonna have to put in… it just seems so daunting. How did I do it for Karateka? I can’t remember. I’m not sure I can do it again.

The Doubt is still there in the back of my mind. It talks to me from time to time. “Jordan!” it says. “What are you doing? You’re taking a step backward. You want to be a filmmaker. It’s time to move on! You brought the Apple-computer-game thread of your life to its climax a year ago. You caught the industry just before it started to die, before you started to lose interest in games yourself. Now you want to do ‘just one more game’… why? Timidity! Fear of breaking loose! You’ll waste a year, man! If you’re going to try for Hollywood, now is the time!”

“Shut up,” I say, and Doubt grumbles and crawls, for the moment, back into its hole.

OCTOBER 17, 1985

I ought to videotape David this weekend, because I have to return the camera by Tuesday. Problems with using David as a model: By the time I figure out what additional footage I need, he’ll be 3,000 miles away (and probably several inches taller).

Ed Bernstein called back. “I get the feeling I’m supposed to make you an offer,” he said. “Why don’t you make me a counter-offer?”

I wondered how you can make a counter-offer when there’s been no offer to begin with. But I said: “No advance, no salary, and a 20% royalty. That would be my ideal.”

He came right back with: “My ideal would be no advance, no salary, and a 15% royalty.”

I hate negotiating with people I like. My impulse is to be nice. I don’t want them to think I’m greedy. On the other hand, I want as much money as I can get.

This morning I sat in the sun and reread My Side of the Mountain. It got me thinking about how far removed from nature my life is. Staring at a computer screen all day. Fast food, fluorescent lights. I’m only 21; my eyes should be bluish-white, instead they’re bloodshot.

The yen to wander is still in me. It’s not dead. Thanks, Jean George.

OCTOBER 20, 1985

Videotaped David running and jumping in the Reader’s Digest parking lot. It’ll do for a start.

Negotiating

OCTOBER 23, 1985

Ed said there was no way he could go above 15%. I said OK. I’ll draft a contract and send it.

MARCH 13, 1986

I have to get out of here. This isn’t even half a life. It’s like living under house arrest. Moving to California is no longer a career move, it’s an escape hatch.

MARCH 20, 1986

This negotiation with Broderbund has dragged on so long and gotten so frustrating, it’s pretty much cured me of any lingering sentimental feelings of being part of the “Broderbund family.” I still feel affection for Doug and Gary, but the reality is, it’s a corporation. To the people I’m actually dealing with, it’s just business.

Mom just showed me an article in Venture magazine about how Electronic Arts gave Timothy Leary a $100,000 advance for his new game. Why am I still talking to Broderbund?

MARCH 28, 1986

Bill McDonagh called to tell me that Karateka has sold a quarter of a million units in its first month of release in Japan.

APRIL 15, 1986

Got a new contract draft from Broderbund. They’re still offering $0 advance, but I think it’ll be OK.

APRIL 29, 1986

The digitizer arrived. I fired it up and quickly determined that the tape I shot in October is useless.

Basically, the digitizer recognizes two shades: black and white. The background needs to be dark enough to be perceived as black even when the brightness is turned up high enough to make David’s arms and face and feet visible.

Second, it can’t reduce or enlarge.

Maybe if I paint his skin white and give him a white turban and shoot it against a black wall?

I still think this can work. The key is not to clean up the frames too much. The figure will be tiny and messy and look like crap… but I have faith that, when the frames are run in sequence at 15 fps, it’ll create an illusion of life that’s more amazing than anything that’s ever been seen on an Apple II screen. The little guy will be wiggling and jittering like a Ralph Bakshi rotoscope job… but he’ll be alive. He’ll be this little shimmering beacon of life in the static Apple-graphics Persian world I’ll build for him to run around in.

APRIL 30, 1986

Spent the day getting DRAY to pack and unpack, load and save. Another couple of days and it’ll be doing everything DRAX should’ve done all along.

This is the utility I should have had for Karateka. It seems like a lot of work now, but it’ll pay for itself many times over when it comes time to cut out all those frames and put them in order.

MAY 17, 1986

I think the best way to do the digitizing for the game may be to shoot it in Super 8, put it on the Moviola, then train the video camera on the screen and feed it directly into the digitizer. That’d result in a cleaner picture, eliminate the freeze-frame noise. Also, I could manipulate image size by zooming in and out.

One disadvantage is the hassle of getting Super 8 film developed. And I’d need a movie camera as well as a video camera.

How’s this: Buy a video camera now, shoot on video the best I can, digitize it – noise and all – and use it as a dry run placeholder, while I program the rest of the game. Then shoot the final stuff on Super 8 once I have a clearer idea of what I need.

JULY 7, 1986

Got a call from Ed Badasov at Broderbund.

“I understand you want to come out here,” he said.

I explained: “I figure it’ll take me a year to do the game, so what I’d like to do is relocate to the Bay Area. If I could stay with someone for the first couple of weeks until I find an apartment, that’d be a big help.”

He asked if the project was a sequel to Karateka. When I told him it wasn’t, his enthusiasm dimmed noticeably. I felt like I was talking to a studio executive.

JULY 25, 1986

Moving 3,000 miles away on the strength of nothing more than a vague idea – “an Arabian Nights-type-game” – feels kind of scary, and appealing.

JULY 31, 1986

Just looked at the “final” version of PC Karateka. It seemed OK, I guessed, except for overall sluggishness, frequent disk accesses, and a few minor graphics glitches. Then I booted up the Apple version to compare… and it was so smooth, it made me want to cry.

The PC version is maybe 50% of what it should be. I can’t even tell these guys what to fix… it’s a million little things, and they’re just not up to the hassle. That kind of attention to detail is why the Apple version took me two years. This version is probably the best I’ll ever get out of them.

Oddly enough, this makes me more psyched to do the new game. It reminded me why I’m good at this – of what I can do that others can’t, or won’t.

AUGUST 1, 1986

Ed sent sketches of someone’s ideas for Karateka II – Gene’s, presumably. I wasn’t too enthused at first, but now it occurs to me there is a way that this could work.

If I get actively involved in the game design – make up a storyline, draw up sketches, brainstorm with Gene, etc. – and stay on in a kind of supervisory capacity, while turning the programming over to Steve Ohmert – that’ll let me keep some control over the project’s development, and also justify asking for a higher royalty rate than if I weren’t involved at all.

It makes sense. They can’t very well turn me down – I own the copyright to Karateka, so there’s no sequel unless I agree to it.

AUGUST 2, 1986

I told Ed Badasov I’d like to design Karateka II for them. He said:

“We already have two designers, Gene and Lauren. We don’t need a third. After all, designing it is something that, basically, anyone can do.”

As for royalty, he offered 3% — one-fifth of the original rate — and seemed to think that is basically a gift and they are doing me a huge favor.

He went so far as to point out that they could release Karateka II under a different title and pay me nothing, and word would get around that it was in fact an unofficial sequel to Karateka, so they’d still benefit from Karateka’s success without having to pay me a royalty.

I’m proud of myself for not having lost my temper.

Dad advised me to hold out for 15%, the same as on Karateka. I’d be happy with 10%, which is what Doug Smith got on Championship Lode Runner. But I don’t think they’ll give that much.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1986

It’s official – I’m going to California. I have a plane ticket and everything.

“Actually,” Ed said, “I was expecting you today.”

My life is about to change.

California

SEPTEMBER 10, 1986

[San Francisco] “I thought you were the pizza man,” Tomi said when she opened the door to the Baker Street apartment and saw me there at the top of the steep steps with my two bags.

Now I’m reclining in luxury in one of their new armchairs, listening to Maurizio Pollini play Chopin preludes on their new CD player. There’s a stunning view of San Francisco Bay out the windows that makes my stomach contract every time I look at it.

Did I mention that I’m scared? Getting a ride to work this morning with Tomi, pulling into the Broderbund parking lot – that was scary.

Now that the day’s over and it’s clear that I had nothing to be scared of, I’m not scared any more – I’m terrified. I’m scared shitless.

I have to rent a car. I have to drive it. On these insane twelve-lane racetracks they call freeways. I have to find an apartment and rent it. I have to move in. I have to buy a car. I have to buy insurance. I’ve never done any of this stuff before… and now I have to do it all at once.

And on top of this – or rather, at the bottom of it – I have to make a computer game.

It’s gonna be fun.

SEPTEMBER 11, 1986

Visited Danny Gorlin. He’s sunk more money into developing the development system to end all development systems. Saw the final version of Airheart. It’s got some staggering special effects and it’s no fun at all to play.

Danny thinks spending a million bucks on a development system will give him an edge. He might be right. But the best Apple games have been developed on a plain Apple II with two disk drives. Lucasfilm spent a million bucks to make Rescue on Fractalus and Ball Blazer, and those games aren’t significantly better than, or different from, the competition. The real strides forward – Raster Blaster, Choplifter, (what the hell) Karateka – were the work of solo programmers with no special resources.

Maybe Danny is leading game design into the 21st century. Maybe he’s just flushing money down the toilet.

I’ll stick with my Apple II.

SEPTEMBER 11, 1986

Met with Gene, Lauren, and Ed Badasov and showed them my Baghdad ideas. (Ed B. made up the working title Prince of Persia.) The storyline didn’t impress them much, but I think they saw promise in it.

It doesn’t really matter a whole lot what they think – I’m the one that has to do it – but it sure as hell wouldn’t hurt to have them enthusiastic. In a few months I should have something to thrill them.

I’m starting to get psyched to write this game. Slowly.

SEPTEMBER 12, 1986

Apartment hunting with Steve Patrick. We checked out one place with a pink carpet, dusty chandeliers, and an old-lady landlord who said she doesn’t like renting to kids. “They make a lot of noise,” she said. “They invite their friends over.”

“Not me,” I said. “I just got off the plane from New York. I don’t have any friends.”

“Oh, you will,” she said, ominously, sounding like Yoda in Empire. “You will.”

Steve and Tomi told me I can stay with them until they kick me out.

“You should live in the Marina district,” Doug advised. “You’d meet a lot of… (pause)… yuppies.”

SEPTEMBER 18, 1986

Looked at a house in Mill Valley, on a shady road winding through the redwoods. When I rang the doorbell the lady peered around me and said, “Is your mother down there?”

She spent fifteen minutes showing me the house, but I don’t think I ever quite convinced her I was serious.

SEPTEMBER 23, 1986

Spent much of today working on the logistical problem of how to get the footage from a VHS tape into the computer. I finally (tentatively) settled on photographing the frames one by one with a regular 35mm camera, getting prints made, then (after retouching as needed) digitizing the prints with a regular Sony video camera. It sounds like a pain but I think it’s the best way.

SEPTEMBER 25, 1986

Another solid workday. Today I stayed till around 7 and got DRAY pretty much finished. I tested it out by digitizing a page out of Muybridge. It’ll do what I need it to do. It could use another day of work. Actually, I could keep working on it for a month, if I didn’t have so much else to do.

SEPTEMBER 26, 1986

Ed Bernstein called his last P.D. meeting this afternoon. He’s leaving to head up Broderbund’s fledgling board games division. DOUG HIMSELF will be taking over as acting head of P.D. He’ll be taking my desk, the better to stay in touch with the people. So I’ll be moving into Ed’s office. Life is strange.

P.D. is throwing Ed a goodbye party. “Better the devil we know than the deep blue sea,” Steve said.

At lunch, Doug said: “You seem to have a very strong entrepreneurial bent.” I was surprised, and said something about how I’d probably inherited it from my father.

Coming out here was definitely the right thing to do. In Chappaqua, I was in a rut. Now, I’m in the thick of it. It’s great.

SEPTEMBER 27, 1986

I have a car.

SEPTEMBER 28, 1986

I have an apartment.

SEPTEMBER 29, 1986

Today I moved into Ed’s office. Obviously, this is a temporary arrangement; eventually some new guy will be hired to run P.D. and I’ll get booted to some other part of the building. But while it lasts, it’s great.

Besides vast amounts of space, a couple of armchairs for visitors, my own phone, and a door that I can close, the office has the most important thing of all – equipment. A printer. An amber screen. An Apple IIc. It didn’t occur to me until I was actually confronted with two Apple II’s on my desk and I had to figure out what to do with the extra one – but it’s perfect. Now I can run programs without destroying the source code in memory. It’s…(gulp)… a development system.

OCTOBER 14, 1986

David Stenn read my screenplay. He said it has promise but would need at least one more rewrite to be saleable. Perhaps sensing my disappointment, he said: “Look, it’s great for a first script – it really is. I wouldn’t show you my first screenplay. You obviously have talent, you should stick with it.”

He was more impressed with the reviews of Karateka I’d sent him. “You’re in the right business,” he said. “What do you want to get into this one for?”

OCTOBER 15, 1986

Bought a camera at Whole Earth. It was more expensive than I’d anticipated — $250 with the lens – but it’s a good camera, and I imagine I’ll find some use for it even after the game’s done.

I shot my first roll of film (David turning around) and had it developed at the local one-hour photo stop. I think this will work. The real problem, obviously, will be going from a sheaf of snapshots to the 280 x 192 Apple screen, and the loss of accuracy entailed therein. It almost makes me want to do it in double hi-res.

OCTOBER 19, 1986

Shot four more rolls of film: David running and jumping in the Reader’s Digest parking lot. One year ago tomorrow. Red and orange leaves… God, I’m homesick.

OCTOBER 21, 1986

Today I wrote the first lines of code of the game (not counting the hi-res routines). It Begins.

OCTOBER 23, 1986

Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris – a Russian submission for the IBM PC. It’s a classic, like Breakout. But I don’t think Broderbund is going to publish it. The knaves.

OCTOBER 25, 1986

Yesterday I implemented the running animation. Next I’ll do the jumping… then the stopping… then the “jumping from a stopped position”… oh boy, this is great!

I restrained myself from taking all my work papers home with me yesterday… and I’m restraining myself from going to work today. There must be Balance.

OCTOBER 31, 1986

Ed was pretty thrilled with the rough running and jumping animation, now under joystick control. So was Tomi. Lauren, Doug and Gary didn’t act all excited, but I think they were secretly impressed.

I love the quality of the just-digitized roughs, but I’m having trouble preserving that fluidity and realism when I clean it up and stylize the figures. This is going to be a problem.

I beat out Ed and Steve for the #1 spot on the Tetris high-score list.

The Mets won the World Series.

NOVEMBER 9, 1986

God, I miss New York.

Fifth Avenue… Christmas shoppers… rich ladies in furs laden with shopping bags and kids… crisp cold autumn air… the smell of burnt pretzels… St. Peter’s… the steel drum players wearing woolen gloves with cut-off fingers, breath condensing on the air…

I’m looking out the window at the San Francisco skyline across the bay dotted with white sails. It looks unreal. Like some kind of paradise.

NOVEMBER 10, 1986

Called Kyle Freeman in L.A. (he’s at Electronic Arts now) and asked him what he’d charge to license his Apple music subroutine. He spent half the phone call dumping on Broderbund. I realized after I’d hung up that this was the first thing I’d done independent of Broderbund since I got here. Interestingly, it actually strengthened my confidence that Broderbund is the right place for me. It reminded me that I am independent.

NOVEMBER 18, 1986

Digitized the running skidding turn-around that was so amusing on videotape. It looks OK. I’ll need to redo the straight running, but I think everything else will work as it stands.

About half the animations are in now. Next step will be getting the character to interact with the environment (climbing a rope ladder, pulling a lever, etc.)

At this juncture I think I’ll redirect my attention to the game design.

DECEMBER 2, 1986

Spent most of the day trying to figure out the velocity of a falling human being as a function of time. Enlisted practically everyone at Broderbund at one point or another. They all seemed to find this a more interesting problem than whatever they were working on.

DECEMBER 24, 1986

Home for the holidays. It’s good to be back. Not much has changed except that David has taken over my room. We played a game of go. He’s seven stones stronger.

Pizza at Mario’s with David and his friend Andy. We pumped about six bucks into a three-player game called Gauntlet, which has pretty good graphics and a great appetite for quarters.

People tend to be pretty bowled over by the animation test I’ve been showing them. “Don’t you realize what you’re looking at?” Jon Menell said. “This is the light bulb.”

JANUARY 11, 1987

Macworld Expo ’86 was pretty slick. The coolest thing there was the Radius 8 ½” x 11” tall screen.

Dad called all excited because David did well in the dan tournament. I hadn’t stopped to think about it until now, but the speed of his rise has been really startling. From total beginner to shodan in nine months. If he keeps this up another year or two, he could be one of the best non-Asian go players in the history of the world.

That’s something.

JANUARY 22, 1987

The Nintendo game machine has sold a million units in the U.S. over Christmas. As of now, only a handful of cartridges are available. Nintendo is keeping a tight rein on new titles, presumably to avoid a flood of product like the one that sunk Atari a couple of years ago. Broderbund — thanks to Doug’s Japan connections — has three of the coveted slots.

Karateka would be a natural, but Doug is apparently leaning toward choosing some older titles — Castles of Dr. Creep or Spelunker or Raid on Bungeling Bay or even Choplifter — instead.

I talked to Ed and Alan with great passion, trying to convince them. This is the first time in my life I’ve had to lobby so hard for something I desperately wanted, and it’s exquisitely frustrating. It’s so painful wanting something from someone, being reduced to wishing and hoping they’ll give it to me. I hate it.

If I’m going to be a screenwriter someday, guess I better get used to it.

JANUARY 23, 1987

Progress on Prince of Persia has slowed to a snail’s crawl. I’ve been drifting in to work around eleven or twelve, and between that, the Butchery and the Sport Court, my workday is about forty-five minutes long. Ed and Gene and Lauren keep checking in to see what new and exciting stuff I’ve got up on the screen, and they go away disappointed.

Instead, I’ve been spending my time playing with my new Mac, Radius screen, and Scriptor screenplay formatting software. Shiny new toys.

JANUARY 26, 1987

Got up early for a change and put in a full day’s work on the game.

Corey talked me into switching assemblers, operating systems, and disk media (from DOS 3.3, S-C Assembler, and 5 1/4” floppies to ProDos, Merlin, and SCSI hard drive). The change should take about a week, but I think it’ll pay for itself in the end.

JANUARY 29, 1987

Roland spent the whole morning helping me switch over to Merlin and ProDOS.

It was kind of a thrill to watch. Roland is a hacker of the old school. He’s polite and unprepossessing in his dress and demeanor, careful about money and contracts. He drives a Saab with license plate SNABBIL. But under that conservative surface is a demon – a guy who will put his day job on hold for 72 hours and sit down and reverse-engineer an Apple II conversion of Tetris, just for the pleasure of it.

Watching him do what he did for me today, I felt a little of the old joy come flooding back. I’d almost forgotten the most basic thing: programming is fun. I’ve grown middle-aged these past couple of years. Roland is 23 but he’s still young at heart.

JANUARY 31, 1987

Got to Broderbund around 8:30 and put in another solid eight hours. Converted BUILDER over to Merlin/Pro, but it’s not working. Give me another day or two to get all the bugs out.

Showed Ed the latest (Jan. 27) working version. He was gratifyingly thrilled about the 3-D box with scrolling borders.

FEBRUARY 9, 1987

“When do you think you’ll be finished with your game?” Lauren asked me on the way back from the Butchery.

“I’m shooting for August,” I said.

We agreed the important thing is to make it as good as possible, and that a few months earlier or later wouldn’t really make much difference.

Today, for the first time, I constructed a really large level and played around in it. It was the first time this game had ever given me the feeling of space. It was kind of thrilling. I think it’s going to be a winner. I’m going slowly this time, building on a solid foundation, and I think it’ll pay off big.

FEBRUARY 14, 1987

It’s great having David here. All the stuff I’d gotten jaded about suddenly seems cool when seen through my little brother’s eyes. Like having a car, being able to drive anywhere I want, a place of my own, a key to Broderbund, free video games in the lunchroom… stuff like that. I’ll miss him when he’s gone.

FEBRUARY 16, 1987

Rented a camcorder and spent the afternoon in and around Broderbund, shooting more footage of David for the game. There were lots of people there even though it was a holiday.

MARCH 5, 1987

The powers that be at Broderbund have decreed that Sensei (Tomi, Steve, Loring, Eric, Mike, and Robert S.), David Snider, Corey and I are all to be packed off from our present comfortable offices to a rathole on the second floor of 47 Paul. Tomi, Corey and I went there yesterday to check the place out. I’m seriously considering working from home.

The vibe at work has been kind of odd lately anyway. Doug is wrapped up in taking the company public, and the new people he’s hiring have no interest in games – or in software, for that matter. There’s really no reason for me to go into the office any more, except for cameraderie. I could always visit if I get lonely.

MARCH 8, 1987

“This is a BAD day for you not to be at Broderbund, believe me. ‘Bye.”

Not the message you want to find on your answering machine when you get home at 5 p.m. after having taken the day off to play hookey and explore Mt. Tam.

I called Corey back. He told me we’d been evicted from our office and our stuff transferred to the dingy, unpainted, windowless attic of 47 Paul Drive. Corey was at the bottom of the deepest depression I’d ever seen him, and was ready to move back home.

Tomi had a plan. “You’ve got to get the small room,” she said. “It’s got windows and ventilation. It’ll be much better.”

“Corey said he already asked Adaire about that and she said…”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If I were you, I’d go into work early tomorrow morning and move both your desks and all your stuff into that room.”

I called Corey back and told him the plan. He was terrified, but we did it that night, feeling like a pair of burglars.

MARCH 9, 1987

I arrived at work to find Adaire furious. It seems they’d been planning to paint the room that day, and Corey and I, by moving in our furniture, had made it impossible for the painters to work. So we moved it all into the middle of the room and threw a tarp over it. We had to buy the tarp ourselves at the local hardware store, because the painters didn’t have one.

The Attic

APRIL 1, 1987

In the past three weeks I’ve put in the equivalent of maybe one full eight-hour day on Baghdad. I’m starting to feel guilty about it.

My reluctance to actually sit down in the new office and work on the damn game is so strong, I’ve been procrastinating by doing everything else under the sun I’ve been putting off since 1986. Even my taxes.

APRIL 2, 1987

It’s probably a good thing I didn’t get into work until three, because sometime early this morning they had a little accident at the Fairchild plant next door to Broderbund and spilled some hydrochloric acid. They evacuated the whole industrial park for a few hours. They were going to shut down the freeway, but luckily the wind was blowing in the other direction – ours. My lungs actually do feel kind of irritated.

APRIL 23, 1987

Sensei moved in yesterday. Six desks: Eric, Loring, Tomi, Steve, Mike and Ty now occupy the big outer room. Overnight, the place has been transformed from an attic into an office. Seeing it gave me this incredible urge to tidy up the small room – the one Corey, Cathryn Mataga and I share – but I stifled it. Instead, I put in my first real day of work in weeks, and maybe my second since Corey and I got kicked out of our old office.

MAY 3, 1987

I’m back in work mode. Whatever the reasons, the long dry spell that began with Corey’s and my exile to the attic ended the day Sensei moved in with us. I got a hell of lot done this week, and I’m actually starting to look forward to arriving at work every morning, sitting down at the Apple to make things happen.

MAY 4, 1987

BIG NEWS. Virginia Giritlian of Leading Artists called to say she loved my script. She’s given it to her boss Jim Berkus to read and will get back to me in the next couple of days.

MAY 5, 1987

Jim and Virginia called back the next morning. He’d read Birthstone, loved it and asked if I have other movie ideas and if I am available for rewrite work?

So I’m flying to L.A. on Monday for a meeting with Leading Artists. This is ridiculous, dreams-come-true stuff. If I saw it in a movie I would never buy it.

MAY 11, 1987

Sat in a big room with leather couches with Virginia, two of the partners (Jim Berkus and Gary Cosay), and another agent, Anne Dollard.

(“They’re just guys,” Tomi coached me before I flew down. “Pretend you’re going into a meeting with Doug and Gene Portwood.”)

They all listened in attentive silence while I pitched my high-school-narc script idea. Finally Jim Berkus broke in, gently. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “But…”

Whereupon they all informed me that there are about three feature films involving undercover cops in high school already in development. Plus a TV series called 21 Jump Street, which I would have known if I ever watched TV, or looked at a TV Guide. I felt like an idiot. Awkward moment. The meeting broke up soon after.

They still want to take me on as a client, though.

“Try to think of some other movie ideas,” Virginia suggested. She gave me about nine scripts to take home, Xerox and send back to her. Screenplays of films actually in production. She also let me pore through her “red book” for a couple of hours while she went to lunch with a guy from UA. It was terrifically exciting.

The “red book” contained a capsule description of every feature film currently in development anywhere, with notations like “Status: Needs Director” or “Needs Major Star” or “Needs Script.” The descriptions were “Like Alien underwater” or “Remake of The Hit only funnier.” Bizarre.

MAY 22, 1987

Virginia called me at work to say that Curtis Hanson (writer/director of The Bedroom Window) had read the script and wants to talk to me about it. I called him at home.

“I’ve been reading a lot of thrillers lately,” he said, “obviously, because of Bedroom Window. Most of them are boring and bad. Yours was interesting and unusual. I had some ideas on how you might improve it.” We talked for an hour.

□ □ □

Don Daglow, who just came over from Electronic Arts, wants Broderbund to do Karateka II. We sat in his office and chatted while Ed Badasov sat there, eyes darting nervously back and forth between us. Don offered a 3% royalty. They both wanted me to say yes. I didn’t.

JUNE 10, 1987

I told Virginia my Anasazi and secret-society movie ideas. I think she was sort of bemused that they were so incomplete. She said a 14-year-old lead is a hard sell, and anything to do with Indians is a hard sell.

“I have faith that you’ll work these into something good,” she said. “But it would be good if you could do that within the next week or so.”

JUNE 22, 1987

I finished the rewrite and sent it to Virginia and Curtis Hanson this morning.

Virginia says she showed the first draft to a lot of people and everybody is all excited. “The word ‘genius’ has been thrown around,” she said. (In what context, I wonder: “Who’s the GENIUS who made me waste my time reading this #$@#! crap?!?”)

But the big news is that Larry Turman, big-name producer (The Graduate; more recently, Short Circuit) wants to make Birthstone. We talked for about an hour Saturday about the changes he’d like to see. He’s going to Europe for three weeks. I told him I’d do another rewrite while he’s away, then we can talk when he gets back.

Virginia apologized for not getting me any money to do the rewrites.

I told her not to worry, I don’t feel like I’m being exploited. “The way I see it, I’m getting the benefit of these guys’ talent and experience for free. And even if nothing happens, I end up with a better script for my trouble.”

There was a long pause, then she said: “I think you’re going to do very well here.”

JULY 1, 1987

Curtis Hanson called back. He liked the rewrite and wants to “attach himself” to the project.

JULY 8, 1987

I told Virginia I’m no good at “pitching” and would rather write the secret-society idea as a “spec” screenplay. She said that in that case, it might be a good idea for me to go into these meetings and talk about kinds of movies I like, “so you don’t appear tongue-tied.”

Oliver North is testifying on TV as a sort of running background to everything.

(Game? What game?)

JULY 9, 1987

Working at home is not working out. I need to find a way to start splitting my time between screenwriting and the game. It would be ideal if I could finish the game, achieve some kind of closure on that, before I move to L.A. and devote myself 100% to screenwriting.

JULY 29, 1987

A day of meetings set up by Virginia. One was with Hal Lieberman at Disney. Just being on the Disney lot was quite a thrill.

AUGUST 25, 1987

Gary Cosay called to tell me that Virginia is leaving the agency. I need to sit down and think about this.

Had lunch Tuesday with Ed Badasov. I told him I’ll be done with the screenplay rewrite in a month, then we can sit down and work out a new timetable for Prince of Persia.

Ed tried to talk me into staying with video games as a career. He said I have an extraordinary talent and ability, possessed by only a few people, to actually conceive, design and execute a game all by myself. I felt like he was talking about somebody else. All I could do was stare at him and nod politely.

I have no idea what will happen now with Prince of Persia. Maybe I can hire someone else to finish it? Or sell it to Broderbund as it stands, as a work-in-progress? I can’t think about it. I’ll think about it a month from now.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1987

Gary Cosay encouraged me to write my secret society script on spec, if I have the inclination and the financial freedom to do so.

“You’re in a good position right now,” he said, “in that Larry Turman is waiting for a script from you that stands a very good chance of going. If this movie gets made, whatever you write next will automatically have a lot of interest, and potentially be worth a lot of money.”

He also said: “If you write a couple more scripts on spec, and if they’re good, you’ll be in a position to do more than just write. You’re carving out a road for yourself. You can drive your car down it any time you want.”

I want Birthstone to get made so bad… I can’t let myself think about it.

SEPTEMBER 21, 1987

Lunch at the Skywalker Ranch with Mary Ann Braubach and Steve Arnold. GEORGE LUCAS HIMSELF came over and sat down and Steve introduced us. I just had to enter this momentous event in the record, for the sake of my 18-year-old self.

Steve Arnold, for some reason, is dying to hire me. For what, I have no idea. He asked me what I know about interactive video. I said: absolutely nothing. He said if I don’t want a job, he’d be willing to hire me as a consultant or as a freelancer – basically, on whatever basis I want.

Oh well, enough excitement. Back to work.

SEPTEMBER 24, 1987

Virginia said Gary is “sweet” and “one of the best minds in the agency business in Hollywood,” but he can be easily talked in and out of things, and he doesn’t like to fight, so it’ll always be Jim who calls the shots. She thinks Jim will probably try to frustrate Larry off the project so he can replace him with one of his “boys’ club” buddies.

My new agent will be Toby Jaffe.

OCTOBER 1, 1987

Gary loved the rewrite. Larry’s response was more mixed. Curtis said straight out he was disappointed.

OCTOBER 5, 1987

Don Daglow said: “When are you going to leave F. Scott Fitzgerald emulation mode and finish Prince of Persia so we can publish it?” whereupon Gary [Carlston] said: “I take a more low-key approach, based on the possibility that F. Scott Fitzgerald mode might actually work out.”

Broderbund is really hurting for games. Last night Gary and Doug and Bill McDonagh were talking about third-quarter sales. Doug turned to me and asked “Can you have it ready by tomorrow?”

OCTOBER 19, 1987

Larry Turman called. “You did really good work – I think it’s the absolute best yet.” He still has a few suggestions, but he wants to go ahead with this version. He asked one curious question: “Is Leading Artists your official agent – have you signed contracts with them?” I told him I had.

“Congratulations,” he said. “We’ll go out into the world!”

The stock market crashed. A 500-point drop in one day.

OCTOBER 20, 1987

Larry called me to find out what’s going on. He hasn’t heard from my agents or anyone and is getting antsy. Is Curtis in or out? I didn’t know what to tell him.

OCTOBER 30, 1987

Curtis is out. No hard feelings.

NOVEMBER 17, 1987

My long-postponed lunch with Ed Badasov. I levelled with him. I told him everything that’s been happening with the screenplay, and (Tomi’s suggestion) asked for his advice.

Ed thought about it gravely, admitted he could see my dilemma. We left it that I’ll try coming in a few days a week and see how much I can get done.

Basically, I’ve done no work on POP for six months.

NOVEMBER 18, 1987

The Yale Alumni Magazine came in today’s mail. The Class of ’85 notes had an entire paragraph about Yalies in film. David Kipen is living in L.A., writing a screenplay about Yale “the themes of which are suicide and murder”; Mandy Silver is going to USC film school; David Lee is shooting a movie in New York; Bob Simonds is doing deals in Hollywood. These are my classmates – how come I’m not with them? What am I doing in an industrial park in Northern California hanging out with people in their thirties?

OK. I’m calm now. Whew.

NOVEMBER 20, 1987

Yesterday I went in to work for the first time since I can’t remember when. I booted up the game and looked at it. It was deeply depressing.

“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 interest 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.

Getting through a dungeon in Prince of Persia doesn’t give that satisfying feeling of getting closer to the goal. Partly because it all looks pretty much the same. That, I can fix.

But there’s another key element in story stucture that also applies to games, and is missing from this one: The Opponent. Someone competing for the same goal as the hero, or trying to stop him from attaining it. The more human, the better. (The days of Asteroids and Pinball are over.)

In this case (we’re short on time, so let’s use the opponent we’ve already got), it’s Shadow Man.

Some games boast a whole series of different opponents. (According to Truby, this is characteristic of Myth, and it weakens the story.) We’ll make the shadow man your opponent for the entire game. You’re competing for hit points. Each blow you deal him weakens him. Each power dot you eat makes you stronger. But if he gets there first and he eats it, he gets stronger. So when you face each other with crossed swords, the balance of power is not predetermined (as in Karateka), but is the result of your own actions thus far in the game.

It links the combat with the running-around. It’s brilliant. I love it!

(Forget the boring damn keys.)

NOVEMBER 14, 1988

Spent the morning talking to Eric about the game. Conclusion: My next step should be to implement the fighting. Until I do, it’s too difficult to imagine in the abstract what the game will feel like to play.

NOVEMBER 17, 1988

Showed POP to the Tribunal – Gary, Gene, Brian, Sophie K. (of Marketing), and Ann Kronen.

Ann and Sophie, who hadn’t seen it before, gasped over the animation. Gene grudgingly admitted it might be pretty good, “if it ever becomes a game.” Gary liked the puzzle angle, didn’t mind the two disks, liked the level editor, didn’t think it needed all that much combat, thought it had big conversion and coin-op potential and I shouldn’t limit it on account of the Apple II’s shortcomings.

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.

NOVEMBER 18, 1988

A glorious day. Freezing cold, but maybe that was part of it. The air was so clean, the sky so blue; I felt happy for no reason at all. I drove 80 on the freeway blasting Talking Heads all the way home.

Today definitely marked the close of a week of anguish over my game. It’s gonna be great. I put in a set of chomping jaws that added some much-needed real-time danger to the action. That was easy. The big step will be the swordfighting with the guards, but it’ll be worth it.

If only the Apple II weren’t a dying format. Better get cracking pronto on the MS-DOS conversion.

October royalty check for Karateka was $166.

NOVEMBER 20, 1988

Worked all day again, made great strides. I put in a strength meter and made it work. I also put in footsteps, and improved the chomping jaws.

But the real breakthrough this week was invisible: I moved a bunch of stuff around so the main game code can use the auxiliary language card. Basically, I’ve just freed up an extra 12K. That gives me some breathing room I’ll sorely need if I’m going to put in all this swordfighting.

It was a good weekend.

NOVEMBER 21, 1988

Put in burning torches, and bricks in the background. It’s totally changed the look of the game. Robert was impressed.

I’m very happy with how things are going. With combat, this will be one of the greatest games of all time.

DECEMBER 1, 1988

I’ve been thinking more and more that I need some kind of major life change. I’ve never felt so restless. Maybe after POP ships I should enroll in the directing program at AFI, or USC.

DECEMBER 2, 1988

Doug wandered into my office today and I gave him the joystick to play with. He was impressed. When he left he said: “I feel like I’ve had an adventure.” I told him I’d have a version in a couple of months that would really be playable. He said: “Seems to me it’s pretty close.”

Also spent a couple of hours with Lauren E., and some good ideas came out of that.

I realized that the 50-level, Lode Runner approach is all wrong. What made Karateka so compelling is that it’s easy. You boot it up and pick up the joystick and it’s obvious what you have to do. You’re there, the guard’s there, he’s in your way. The goal – the bad guy and the princess – is somewhere off to your right, and every step brings you closer. It’s mindless, repetitive – and addictive.

Prince of Persia, with all its elaborate complexity, stretches that thread past the breaking point. The world is so big that the player is lost and confused.

So here’s the new idea: Ten levels. Easy levels. About the same difficulty and amount of game play as Karateka. You start in the dungeon; you end with the princess.

But that’s not the end. The princess gets taken away from you again and you have to go through another, more challenging castle — four castles in all, ten levels each — to win the game and get her for good. Castle four is where we’ll put the really tough levels – for fanatics only, like the last 50 levels of Lode Runner.

At the beginning of the game, story is everything. By the end, it’s practically nothing. The experience distills into pure game play.

So there it is: Slap a story frame on it. Add combat. Design ten easy levels. That’s Prince of Persia. The rest is a bonus.

I’m starting to think there’s no reason to include the level editor with the disk. In a way, it cheapens it.

The real trick will be designing those first ten levels. Finding the right balance of action, strategy, and adventure. That will make the difference between an OK game and a great one. I could slap together ten levels in a day… but it should take weeks. Weeks of watching beginners play, and revising, and finding new beginners to test it out on.

But first: Combat.

DECEMBER 3, 1988

Rented a bunch of swashbuckling movies and took them to Robert’s new apartment to study the swashbuckling. Of course we ended up watching Captain Blood straight through. We were both amazed by how good it was. I can’t remember when I’ve seen a movie with such a well-constructed plot. Why don’t they write screenplays like that any more?

Then we spent a couple of hours at Broderbund, working out the logic and joystick interface for the swordfighting in POP. This must be the tenth time I’ve torn it all down and come up with a new way to do it. I hope it’ll be the last.

DECEMBER 5, 1988

Doug told Tomi my game is going to be a smash hit.

Spent much of today on hands and knees, poring with Eric over three dozen snapshots spread out on the office floor, trying to deconstruct Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn’s climactic duel in Robin Hood. We really busted our brains.

As a result, my conception now is totally different from what it was yesterday, or Sunday. It’ll all be worth it. This is going to be the greatest game of all time.

I just got off the phone (at 1 a.m.) with Lawrence Payne of Compu-Tech Systems in London, who make the digitizer that so inconveniently stopped working a few months ago. It’s 9 a.m. in London. He gave me his home number so Russ and I can call him tomorrow morning and he can help us try to fix it.

But really, what I need to do is rent a video camera and find two people to re-enact the moves of Guy of Gisbourne and Robin of Locksley for digital posterity. I want to have it up on the screen now. When I’m pumped up like this, I can hardly sleep at night.

DECEMBER 8, 1988

Russ and I “fixed” the digitizer (it was in the wrong slot) and changed my life. In the past week, swordfighting has gone from a vague notion of something I’d have to put in the game someday, to reality. The little guy now thrusts and lunges. Everyone who’s seen it is thrilled. 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.

DECEMBER 15, 1988

I came up with an idea for Robert’s game. The goal is to rescue people who are trapped in the building; you disinfect the rooms and make it safe for them to escape.

Robert, for his part, came up with a good idea for me – solid blocks to fill up the empty spaces. It’s totally changed the look of the game. Now, it really feels like a dungeon.

JANUARY 3, 1989

Been playing Super Mario 2. First time in ages I’ve been addicted to an arcade game. Several points worth noting:

It took me hours of play to get through the first area; but having done it once, I can now zip through it

reliably in minutes.

I’m building up a repertoire of skills.

There are certain things that it pays to do in the first area – like boost your life meter from 2 to 3 to 4, and

collect an extra life – but you can also keep playing forever in the same area, if you like, without achieving

anything.

New Year’s Resolution: Finish Prince of Persia. (Ship by June 30, 1989.)

JANUARY 17, 1989

Been working hard on POP (48 hours last week) and it’s really looking good. The swordfighting is starting to take shape, and it not only looks terrific, it’s actually fun. It blows Karateka out of the water. It’ll become the centerpiece of the entire game. Tomi was right all along. (“Combat! Combat! Combat!”)

JANUARY 30, 1989

[In L.A.] Lunch with Larry Turman. He was in a good mood, but it sounds like being a film producer has been frustrating for him lately. He asked me if I was still with Leading Artists. I wonder if they’ve dumped me and I just don’t know it?

Dinner with Virginia. “You’ve changed!” she said immediately. “It’s like you’ve grown up!”

I mentioned that Leading Artists hasn’t contacted me about renewing our representation agreement. She said that’s probably their way of tactfully waiting to see if I write anything new.

She still loves Birthstone. “Are you kidding?” she said. “It was, what, two years ago? And I still remember the plot in, like, this incredible detail. It’s a great script. I can’t believe it hasn’t gotten made.”

FEBRUARY 6, 1989

Worked from home today. I did a lot of work, actually. I finished the CWP (“Creative Work Plan”) and documentation they’ve been asking for, and I think I finally licked the problem of the prologue. I described it to Tomi over the phone and she loved it.

Also, I wrote up a schedule that has me giving a preliminary playable version to QA on April 15. The game should be done around Memorial Day – in time for CES – and ship shortly thereafter.

Forget screenwriting. This is my project. For the next four months, I’m going to focus on POP full time.

Home Stretch

FEBRUARY 7, 1989

Brian was thrilled with the CWP. He couldn’t believe that I’d done it and now he doesn’t have to. “I want you to know,” he said, “that this is absolutely unprecedented.”

The plan: Beta version by April 15. Show it at CES the first week in June. Ship by June 30.

It’ll sell for $35-40 and be a one-disk product. Brian didn’t put up a struggle when I told him I was ditching the level editor. He agreed, and even persuaded me to limit the game to one scenario rather than four. “People expect to get a certain amount of value for their money,” he said. “Why give them more?”

Reducing it to one castle will save me weeks of work – at least. The more I think about it, the more I like it. I’d been worried that including really hard puzzles in the basic game would render it unwinnable for the majority of players. But, as Brian pointed out, if players get frustrated they can always call Tech Support for hints.

FEBRUARY 13, 1989

Spent the day fine-tuning the swordfighting. It’s tons better now. I’ve simplified the controls so blocking is now automatic with retreating, rather than a separate action. It’s finally starting to get that back-and-forth feeling of a real Hollywood sword fight. It’s gonna be great.

FEBRUARY 16, 1989

A lot of heavy work, most of it invisible, but which will make it much easier for me to implement the enemy guards in their flowing robes and turbans.

FEBRUARY 21, 1989

Worked all day long finding and fixing bugs in the collision detection. It was like swatting flies.

Came up with a bunch of really slick ideas for the shadow man and how to use him.

FEBRUARY 22, 1989

Another productive day. Got rid of a couple of nasty collision detection bugs that had the characters occasionally falling through solid blocks (plenty more where those came from), and simplified the controls so that you no longer need to hold the button down to climb up onto a ledge. It’s a big improvement – it makes the controls much less daunting at first.

FEBRUARY 28, 1989

Tomi may move to Paris to run Broderbund France. Her maybe-future colleagues, Dominique and Veronique (whom she calls “the puppies”) stopped by this morning and I gave them a demo of POP. They flipped. They love it. They want to sell it in France. I told them how valuable Tomi’s input has been on the game design (can’t hurt, if she’s going to be their boss).

In the afternoon, I demoed the game for Gary and Dianne Drosnes, who is in charge of acquisitions and licensing.

MARCH 3, 1989

Doug told Tomi that POP is the only product Broderbund has in the works that he thinks will be a hit. “It’s been four years since we had a hit,” he said.

Joe from Tech Support cornered me and talked for ten minutes about how my game is “setting a new standard.”

All I have to do is finish it.

MARCH 20, 1989

I called up Avril Harrison, highly recommended graphic artist, to ask if she could do a title screen for POP. She’ll come by tomorrow morning to see the game and show me her samples. She charges $30 an hour.

Last night I went to Tower Records and bought a bunch of the stuff George’s friend Erik recommended – Lloyd Cole, Grace Jones, Tom Waits. Blew $100 in thirty minutes.

Avril Harrison is a bargain.

Started working on the title and demo sequence for POP… double hi-res unpack routines… according to schedule. I’m a little nervous to be forging ahead like this, considering the millions of bugs I’m leaving behind (for now), but if I don’t plunge into it, it’ll never get done.

MARCH 21, 1989

Hired the lovely and talented Avril Harrison to do a IIGS title screen for POP. She’s Scottish. And married.

The title and demo sequence is taking shape. It’s a lot of logistical hassles with disk access and memory management. Robert lent me his double hi-res unpack routines. Another few days and all the major pieces will be in place.

I’m obsessed with this Tom Waits album (Big Time).

MARCH 23, 1989

Sophie K. is going to be my marketing manager. That sucks. I want it to be Latricia.

MARCH 24, 1989

All day alone at the office. The game now fits on a single two-sided disk and seems to be working pretty well. Now I’m home on my Mac, working on the story line and opening sequence.

The game is definitely entering a new phase. The serene, solitary part of it (two and a half years) is ending and all kinds of other people are getting into the act. My job now is not just trying to make a fun game, but getting people excited about it, and, to a degree, orchestrating their efforts, without stepping on their toes or impinging on their territory. The world has left me alone for two and a half years, and now it’s bursting in.

I’m not ready. There’s so much work still to do.

MARCH 25, 1989

Doug told Tomi he’ll talk to Latricia and discuss with her “which products are important and which she should be focusing her efforts on (!)”

MARCH 27, 1989

Broderbund’s sales are way down. It’s an industry-wide slump. Nobody knows why it’s happening, or how long it will last.

Doug is convinced Prince of Persia will be a major hit. He urged me to get going on the MS-DOS conversion immediately.

Today I put in a self-running demo, and made the guards slightly less dumb, so they can pursue you onto the next screen.

I’ll be so depressed if this game isn’t a hit. Doug’s right: unless there’s an MS-DOS version out pretty close on the heels of the Apple version, it’ll be another Wings of Fury. “Huh,” the dealers will say. “I thought this one was gonna be really hot – but look, it’s not selling all that well.”

I’ve gotta find an MS-DOS programmer – soon. I’ll call Doug Greene tomorrow. Again.

MARCH 28, 1989

Stayed at the office till 7:30, then came back after dinner and worked on Level 1 till midnight. I’m burned out.

My most concrete achievement today was to print out the entire source code – all 1,000 pages of it.

Doug Greene is reluctant to take on the MS-DOS port (despite my subtle, repeated mention of the words “BIG HIT” and “ROYALTY”), but he recommended his friend Jim St. Louis, an “old-time hacker” who’s worked for Atari and Lucasfilm.

Avril gave me a picture. It’s really quite beautiful; it’s got that magical Arabian Nights storybook feel to it. Ed Badasov, Brian and Greg Hammond all flipped over it. It’ll lose a lot in the transition from super hi-res to double hi-res, but I can use the original in the MS-DOS and Amiga versions. It took her 29 hours: $1,015.

Spend the next couple of weeks getting what I have cleaned up, fine-tuned, and bug-free, before I start adding new features (the opening sequence animation, the stair-climbing, the white mouse, etc.)

My mind is spinning ahead to completion… packaging… conversions… sequels… It’s incredibly distracting.

Focus. Finish.

MARCH 30, 1989

Brian showed the game to the Star Chamber (aka Publishing Committee) – Gary, Bill, Harry, Ann Kronen, Ed Badasov, Richard Whittaker, Cathy, Dianne Drosnes, and Ed Auer (Doug, traveling in Japan, having already voted “yes”). He told me it “passed with flying colors.” So, green light to go ahead with packaging, scheduling, etc.

Doug talked to Bill and Bill talked to Latricia about the marketing situation. Latricia said she just wants to give Sophie a chance to handle a new project. Doug said firmly: “This is not an appropriate project for that. We’re counting on this to be our next big hit. It’s the only product we have in development that’s going to be a hit. We want to give it the biggest push we can.” (I got all this second hand, of course.)

So now Latricia’s going to oversee it and Sophie, basically, will do the gruntwork. Whew.

They’re desperate for an MS-DOS version. Jim St. Louis wants to do it, with a friend of his, Josh Scholar. I just don’t know if these guys are technically up to par.

APRIL 2, 1989

Tomi advised me not to sign a contract with anyone but Doug Greene. Let him subcontract to these other guys. If he balks at that, I should take that as a sign.

I’m seeing them all tomorrow at Doug’s place, two hours north of Broderbund.

APRIL 3, 1989

A gorgeous spring day. I drove like a maniac on narrow, winding country roads to Cazadero for the big meet with Doug Greene, Jim St. Louis, Josh Scholar, and Mike Larner.

I showed them POP and we went for a walk around Doug’s property, had a beer and smoked a joint (probably grown by one of his neighbors), broke out the yellow pads and discussed the technical challenges of the MS-DOS conversion while Doug’s wife cooked dinner.

After dinner Doug said he’d been chewing all day on the idea of subcontracting to the other guys and he just didn’t think he could do it. “See, if I took this on, I’d be putting my name on the line. I’ve done lots of conversions for Broderbund and I haven’t messed up once. And that’s an important thing to me. Now I’ve got this business thing taking up 80-90% of my time, and I just don’t know if I could handle the pressure of taking on a project this size.”

I said that in that case, I’d have to reconsider. There was a silence. “Whew! Doug said. “I didn’t realize it had come down to that.”

Doug drove the others down to their car (parked, like mine, at the stream that blocked Doug’s driveway and which only Doug’s Volkswagen bus could cross) while I stayed behind. After Doug came back, he and his wife and I sat and talked some more. He’s confident in Jim, but admitted he has his doubts about Josh and Mike.

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.

“Well, that was a nice thing to say!” Doug exclaimed. He started stroking his beard and asking more questions. “Huh. This is starting to sound not so bad.” In the end he said he’d sleep on it.

APRIL 4, 1989

Doug and Jim will do the port. Yeah! We spent the day hammering out a deal. Ended up at 7.5% royalty, to drop to 5% after 67,500 units, and $35,000 in advances.

First POP packaging meeting with the marketing department. I’ve never heard so many bad ideas proposed in such a short time (“We could package a bag of popcorn with the sneak previews!”) At least everyone was enthusiastic. Brian thought it had gone well.

APRIL 7, 1989

Doug Greene called me to say he’d woken up with the night sweats and paced until dawn and finally came to the conclusion that he can’t do it after all. I talked him down and offered a six-week trial period, at the end of which he can decide whether or not to take on the whole job. That, he agreed to.

Shit. I’ve spent all week on this, and now all I’ve got is a “maybe.” I need to find a backup.

APRIL 11, 1989

Packaging meeting #2 with Sophie and Brian. Latricia wasn’t there. Sophie was extremely nice to me. Nevertheless, she’s an idiot.

Worked on the in-game cosmetics. Tomi advised me to keep it strong and simple. The Byzantine latticework and intricate patterns should be inset, as part of doors and windows and so on. Good advice.

APRIL 12, 1989

The game is coming together. I spent an hour at QA today watching them play it. They’ve been developing levels and playtesting them on their own time, just for the fun of it. That’s a good sign.

Everyone says POP will be a huge hit. Everyone. I can’t walk from one building to the next without someone stopping me to tell me how great it is. This product has both grass-roots and top-down support.

All I have to do is finish it.

The urge to go to my Mac and work on the new screenplay is overpowering.

(Patience… just a few more months… Hang on to that urge. You’ll need it. Put it away somewhere where it’ll be safe. You’ll have the whole rest of your life to pursue your screenwriting and directing dreams… after you finish the game.)

APRIL 14, 1989

Robert got into Yale!

APRIL 22, 1989

By the time POP ships I’ll have been out here three years. Two years of actually working on the game, plus six months working on screenplay stuff and another six months screwing around and traveling and so forth in between.

APRIL 24, 1989

Dropped in on QA. Will and Randy showed me some of the levels they’ve worked up for Prince of Persia. It was a strange feeling, picking up the joystick and finding myself in a world I didn’t create. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of what this game must seem like to everyone else.

Met with Brian and Bill McDonagh to ask for an advance to pay for the IBM conversion. I don’t think there’ll be any problem.

Reality Check

APRIL 25, 1989

Paul Dushkind showed me his sketches for the package design. I wasn’t blown away. So, when I got home I made a few of my own. Now I have a problem; namely, how do I show them to Paul without making him feel threatened?

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…?

APRIL 26, 1989

I didn’t have the nerve to show Paul my sketches, so I showed them to Robert. “They’re a lot better than Paul’s,” he said. Uh oh.

Doug Greene spent yesterday over at Jim’s, setting up to get started on the IBM version. They’re coming to Broderbund on Monday. Doug’s really pumped up. I’d like to have a really hot demo to show them, to maintain their current level of enthusiasm.

It’s a strange feeling – all this machinery is being set in motion without me. People are going off and doing things on their own. It’s exciting.

APRIL 28, 1989

Dr. Ward said I should rest as much as possible, so I stayed home and built a really boffo level. Named it BACH cause that’s who I was listening to.

APRIL 29, 1989

Stayed home again and listened to opera and built game levels. I’m fed up with being home.

MAY 1, 1989

Doug and Jim came by. Amazingly, IBM POP is really happening.

Impromptu meeting with the art dept. to go over Paul’s sketches. David K. is my nemesis. It’s Brian and me against the world.

MAY 2, 1989

Today when Brian started to give me a hard time about paying for Jim and Doug’s equipment (a mouse and a couple of joysticks – maybe $150 worth of stuff), I did something almost unprecedented in our relationship: I argued back. To my surprise, Brian not only caved, but ended up practically apologizing.

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.

The biggest conflict I see looming is with David K, who’s bent on doing something stupid with the box design, and who likes sleazy-looking princesses with pouty lower lips (like the Karateka box) whereas Brian and I prefer a more cool, chaste brand of ingenue, as exemplified by the poster of Diane Lane in Robert’s and my office. (During our meeting with Nancy and Paul, Brian got excited and pointed to the poster: “Like her!” he exclaimed.)

Alan Weiss dropped by to show me the new hand-held Nintendo “Game Boy” (a play, I guess, on Sony “Walkman.”) They’re licensing a version of Karateka for it.

Tomi says that since Dominique came back raving about POP, the programmers in France have been trying to adopt my animation techniques, but that they don’t have it quite right yet.

MAY 6, 1989

Robert’s friend Jim came by the office with his three sons. Ages 3, 5 and 7, blond kids with runny noses and an insatiable lust for computer games.

I gave them the joystick and watched them spend a good half-hour trying to get through Level 1. It was instructive. Chris — the oldest, an extremely sweet-natured and gracious kid — was generous about sharing with his brother Stu, who insisted on repeating the first three screens himself every time, then handing the joystick to Chris when he got to “the sharp part,” as he put it.

“It’s so lifelike,” Chris marveled. I asked him if it was too hard. (This was after they’d died on the spikes about 50 times in the first half-hour.) He said “No, it’s just about right. But it’s challenging.”

The whole thing was very encouraging. For one thing, they liked it. I don’t mean they said they liked it; I mean they played it. These guys are my target audience. After watching them I’m more certain than ever that this game will be a hit.

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.

The game is really turning out well, by the way. When you’re fighting a guard, forcing him back toward a ledge, and the spikes spring out below, and you’re down to your last unit of strength, and you push him off the edge – it’s incredibly thrilling. It’s like an Indiana Jones movie. There’s no other game that even remotely approaches this. If there’s any games market left by this Christmas, this one should corner it. (He said modestly.)

MAY 7, 1989

CGDC (Computer Game Developers Conference) in Sunnyvale. Robert and Doug and I skipped out early and went to Great America. We rode the Demon and the Grizzly and Loggers Run.

MAY 9, 1989

Spent the day hard-wiring the shadow man into the level I built yesterday. It’s kind of a letdown. For over a year now, the shadow man has been this awesome idea that everyone gets all excited about when they hear it. Now, it’s just… what it is. The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concrete reality of what I programmed today.

This time, there’ll be no time for me to tear it all down and reprogram it five more times, to try to more fully realize the dream. The hundreds of thousands of kids who I hope will play this game will encounter the shadow man just as I programmed him today. I hope he blows them away. I’m too close to it to be able to tell. If not, well, I blew it.

MAY 10, 1989

Paul showed us nine color comps for the Prince of Persia box. “Us” was David, Nancy, Sophie, Diane Rapley (head of marketing), Brian, and me. In the end everyone agreed on #5. I had the feeling that if I hadn’t been there, they might well have picked #6, which showed a bunch of guys with swords bursting out of a paper movie poster.

MAY 11, 1989

Everyone is being nice to me because they think my game is going to be a hit.

MAY 15, 1989

Mo, Larry and Sebastian were very impressed by the game. Mo especially liked the new additions – the Fat Guard, who I put in today, and the blood smear on the slicer.

Got a check for $9,000 from Bandai for Nintendo Game Boy Karateka. Snatched from the jaws of bankruptcy once again. My checking account, previously parched and gasping for funds, is now overflowing.

Brian and I sat at the Mac working on the game documentation (which I promised Nancy for tomorrow).

MAY 17, 1989

Made a disk to give to Doug tomorrow (Brian’s advice – actually something I should have done a long time ago). I made one for Gary too.

Nobody thinks we’ll make this August 29 ship date. I keep telling Brian: “We’ll make it! We’ll make it!” And I don’t even know if I believe it. But I’ve got to try.

Microsoft Word 4 arrived via Fed Express. I booted it up and it crashed immediately.

Added a balcony window that looks out onto a starry night. It really helps define the palace section as a different place. Someday I’ll make the stars flicker.

The game is taking shape by leaps and bounds, but unfixed bugs are piling up behind me.

MAY 18, 1989

Gave Doug his disk.

Worked all day on level design and background graphics.

Everybody’s gone away.

Just me and Domino’s now.

I should go running except… I’m so hungry I’d probably faint.

MAY 19, 1989

After happy hour Doug and Mary and Gary and Nancy left for the invitation-only sneak preview of Indiana Jones at the Skywalker Ranch. Lucky bastards.

I went home and watched an incredibly depressing TV movie starring Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich.

Someone’s killed the General

Sheep, their shepherd gone

If only we Russian people had one neck!

MAY 20, 1989

“I can’t believe you watched that Shostakovich program,” Claire said. “It was supposed to be incredibly depressing! You’re probably the only person in America who watched it.”

MAY 22, 1989

Talked to Doug Greene and Jim St. Louis. Work is proceeding on IBM POP, although not as quickly as Doug had hoped.

Brian says we’ll be doing a 3.5" disk version after all. That means we can put in some IIGS-specific stuff like Avril’s title screen.

MAY 23, 1989

14 days to beta.

Things are getting more frenzied. I put in twelve hours today and got a fair amount done (added two new potions and a whole new level), but it definitely wasn’t one-fourteenth of the work that’s left before beta. I’ll just have to work twice as fast, or something.

Brian handed me the Larry McDermott draft of the box copy. It wasn’t very good. He asked if I could “rewrite it” (i.e., write it) – another little task to fill in the cracks.

I can’t even think about all the work I’ve postponed until after the beta version – princess and vizier animations, title screen music – and six weeks to do it all.

(How complete was Karateka two months before its QA signoff? I can’t remember.)

One thing’s for sure: This is no time to come up with new bright ideas. I’ll put in the little white mouse because I said I would, and because I’ll never hear the end of it from Tomi if I don’t (remember the leopard in Karateka?), but all other nifty additions go straight to the bottom of the list.

By June 6, I want things firmly under control. Levels 1 through 8 should be completely playable, with all features implemented, and as bug-free as I can manage. The things that are missing should be clearly defined, with a beginning and an end and no hidden ramifications in other areas. The palace and dungeon background graphics should be in their final form (although last-minute tweaking of the images themselves is, of course, allowed). Michael C. should have done his thing, and I should have it on videotape. (I’m hoping to shoot it Thursday.)

Aiiiii……….

MAY 24, 1989

Put in the skeleton-coming-to-life animation (under Eric’s supervision).

Packaging meeting. Things are proceeding with agonizing slowness.

MAY 25, 1989

Robert’s game passed the Star Chamber. I met him in the parking lot at 9:30 this morning as I was arriving and he was leaving after spending the whole night getting the disk ready for the presentation. That’s a great piece of news, just great.

Going-away picnic for Cathy Carlston at the Marin Civic Center duck pond. Flipped disc with Brian and Rob. Said goodbye to Cathy.

MAY 26, 1989

Yesterday I showed Paul the skeleton. He was thrilled (it was his idea) and has been going around telling everyone about it. It’s paid off more than I could have imagined, in terms of boosting his enthusiasm about the whole project. Just goes to show you.

People in PD, art and marketing are starting to treat me differently. Brian is delighted and amused by the amount of work I take upon myself. (When I told Sophie today I’d like to take the box copy home and “play with it” over the weekend, Brian laughed out loud. “Sure,” he said. “I’d like to have you ‘play’ with something I wrote.”)

Brian’s away all next week for CES and is leaving a lot of things in my hands – the final box copy, getting a beta version to QA, possibly the selection of the artist to do the box. I don’t know if it means anything, but I noticed that in the latest schedule Nancy made up, the blank for “Product Manager” now reads “Brian Eheler/Jordan Mechner.”

So I’m not just a programmer any more.

The bad part of all this, though, is that I only have about three hours a day to actually work on the damn thing.

MAY 31, 1989

Spent the morning rewriting the box copy. That’s a load off my mind, for the moment.

More problems with the IBM conversion. Jim just isn’t putting in the hours. He’s getting muscled by Atari to keep putting more last-minute fixes into his other, supposedly finished project, and Doug Greene is getting pissed at him.

I called Jim and told him he’d have to choose between Atari’s project and mine. A difficult conversation. I’m not used to being the one who lays down the law. I gave him a couple of days to think it over.

Tomi is back! I showed her the game. She was duly impressed, especially by the palace background graphics, the fighting skeleton, and the upside-down and weightless potions.

Stayed till 11 pm with Robert, designing levels.

JUNE 3, 1989

All hell is breaking loose in China.

Meanwhile, I rented a camcorder and spent the morning videotaping Michael J. Coffey at his apartment. I think I got everything I need. Can’t wait to digitize it.

JUNE 4, 1989

It’s my birthday. I’m 25 years old.

Put in the potion-drinking animation. It looks really good but takes up more memory than I’d expected, which is a problem.

Sometimes I feel like I must be no fun at all. Bored and boring. Burnt out and empty inside. Not depressed – just tired.

Maybe I’m just working too hard.

Beta

JUNE 5, 1989

The new animations I shot with Mike are going in very quickly. Already the “potion drinking,” “unsheathing your sword,” and “collapsing” are up and running.

The only big ones left are:

climb stairs

pick up sword and hold it up

sheathe sword

“alert turn” for guard

“collapse” for guard

I think I can squeeze it all into the available memory, except for “climb stairs”; that one might need a disk access. I could live with that.

My major achievement today, though, was to completely redesign the first two levels to make them more fun to play. There’s more freedom now, more exploration, more rewards. The previous versions were rather humorless – you go from A to B to C and if you mess up, you die.

Level 3 is still pretty punishing and bleak. I don’t know quite what to do about it. I guess I’ll hand it in to QA like this and see what they think.

Level 4 is pretty good.

Level 5 is nonexistent.

Levels 6, 7, and 8 are pretty good, although they need work.

I guess tomorrow I’d better come up with a Level 5. Then my “beta version” will at least have the first two-thirds of the game.

There’s no getting around it. To achieve the reasonably complete, reasonably bug-free beta version I’d hoped to deliver tomorrow will take me another solid week’s work.

Should I ask QA to hold off for a couple of days (how humiliating!) or just turn in what I’ve got and then give them an updated version a week from now?

JUNE 6, 1989

“B-Day”

An extremely productive twelve-hour day. I fixed lots of bugs, designed a brand-new level (5), and hard-wired the shadow man to steal your potions. Another couple of hours to make sure it all fits together smoothly, and I think I’ve got a beta version.

One day late.

Boy, will Brian be impressed.

In the middle of it all Doug Greene called to say he thinks he’ll probably pull out of the project at the end of the trial period.

I’ve pretty much had it with Doug and Jim. They’re good programmers, but enough is enough. I should have listened to Doug when he said no in the first place, instead of working so hard to change his mind.

I went and talked to Glenn for an hour about Alick D. Glenn says he’s a good programmer, but the bad blood between him and Broderbund could be a problem.

I need to teach the little animated character not to draw his sword when the other little animated character who’s trying to kill him is on the other side of a pair of snapping steel jaws.

JUNE 7, 1989

Incredibly, I turned the game in to QA today. Now the real fun begins. Six weeks to finish the whole thing.

The Apple market is dying. It’s definitely affected the level of enthusiasm for Prince of Persia within the company. No matter how hard I try to convince people that there’s going to be an IBM version, they’re behaving as if there isn’t one. I found out today from Nancy and David that Latricia/Sophie balked at spending $5,500 for the box art. After making the rounds and lobbying everyone, I think they’ll OK it, but the whole thing was a really disturbing vote of no-confidence in POP.

Kevin in QA gave me more of the same. When I told him I hoped to ship August 29, he shook his head gravely and said he’s been mandated to put two men full-time on Carmen Sandiego 4 and two on some other product, which leaves no one to test the beta version of POP I handed in today.

It pisses me off.

I shouldn’t be surprised. When has Broderbund ever thrown its weight behind a game? Choplifter, Lode Runner, Karateka all made it on their own, on the strength of good reviews and word-of-mouth.

There’s no one looking out for me, no one to go to bat for POP. Brian is out of town, Sophie is an idiot, and Latricia – despite Doug’s instructions to the contrary – is leaving everything up to Sophie.

I should probably be putting more energy into trying to cultivate these people and work up some enthusiasm for my project; but what with having to actually design and program it (not to mention documentation, box copy, IBM conversion, etc), I just can’t spare the time.

Meanwhile, the IBM conversion, which I need so desperately, has fallen victim to Doug Greene’s angst.

Oh well, it’s a cold cruel world out there. If I’m going to be a movie director someday I’d better learn to deal with it.

JUNE 8, 1989

I don’t think I have it in me to write and direct films. Where is the strength going to come from to persevere, to fight all those battles, when even this current situation with Broderbund – near-ideal as it is – is burning me out? Have I ever had what it takes? Am I losing it? Give me a signal; show me a sign. Where’s the meaning in all this? Nobody cares about the fucking game, not even me. Why am I doing this?

If POP is a hit and the royalties start flowing again and my bank account swells and the fan mail rolls in, will my spirits also soar? What if it’s a dud – if the Apple market is truly dead and the IBM version is delayed and Nintendo doesn’t pan out – will it break my heart? All that wasted work. What will I do next? Will I deal with failure as well as I dealt with success?

Robert’s going off to Yale

Corey’s gone off to Harvard

Doug’s going to cash out

What happens to me when this part of the story is over?

Got to have faith. Faith in my game. Faith in myself. Lighten up. Nobody wants to be around someone who’s stressed out and in the dumps. Got to rise to the occasion. Charm everyone around me with my youthful enthusiasm, unshakeable optimism, etc.

These are 2:30 am thoughts. I know I’ll feel cheerful and serene in the morning if I can just get to sleep. Just shut down my mind and make it through the night.

You can’t talk in your sleep if you can’t sleep.

Oh God, I see why people take sleeping pills.

JUNE 9, 1989

In the morning I put in the stair-climbing, and in the evening, the sword-sheathing.

In between I wandered the halls of Broderbund in search of human interaction, dropped a disk off on Doug’s desk, and ended up demoing the entire first six levels for a group that started out as just Ed Badasov and Sophie K, and expanded to include Rob, Greg Hammond, Henry, and Tom Marcus, about ten people in all. They were wowed. The whole room gasped in unison whenever the little guy had an especially close call. They groaned as one when he bit the dust. They were thrilled by the skeleton and the potions and the swordfighting and the shadow man. Basically, it all works. Hardly one of the touches I’d put in went unappreciated. It was a real vindication of all that effort.

Even Sophie, who knows nothing about games, got excited. She kept saying “This is the first game I’ve seen that I can really get into!” She made a point of telling me, not once but twice, that she’s given Nancy the go-ahead to hire the “expensive” $5,500 box artist. “It’s going to be a great package,” she said.

Here I was afraid I’d alienated Sophie by strong-arming her over the phone yesterday about the box art, and today she’s practically fawning in an effort to make sure I’m pleased. It’s true: People like you better if you stand up for yourself. There’s no percentage in being self-effacing and making them think they can walk all over you.

Good (anyway, better) news from Jim St. Louis. He is working, and he says Doug has cheered up somewhat. God, I hope it works out.

Talked to Roland too and got him all fired up to do the Mac version. Only trouble is, he’s locked into Print Shop Companion at least until August.

Despair has been banished.

JUNE 10, 1989

Accomplished relatively little today – just cleaned up a few animations and diddled around. Sent out new packets to Doug, Jim, and just-hired artist Robert F. Showed the game to Lauren Elliott. I’d better work this weekend.

JUNE 20, 1989

Took Lance to lunch and tried to woo him out into the world of independent programmers. He was tantalized (and totally gung-ho about POP – he thinks he could do it in four months, working in his spare time), but I don’t think he’d seriously consider forsaking the security of his salaried position.

Promised Brian screen shots by next Tuesday. The photo shoot is set up for 2 pm Wednesday.

JUNE 11, 1989

Spent this sunny Saturday alone in the office listening to Götterdämmerung and trying to draw a decent room for the princess to live in. On my way out, I swung by 77 Mark to see if anyone was there. Found Doug playing solitaire on his Mac II. He invited me on a river rafting trip on the Salmon River in Idaho at the end of July. I said yes. I ought to be done with the game by then. If not, five days off should do me good.

Could it be that I have a mild manic-depressive affective disorder? Last week I was depressed. Now I’m bouncing off the walls. It’s a desperate, manic kind of energy, and I can’t say I’m happy, but I will say this: The colors seem brighter. The air seems cleaner. The sun is warmer, the rain is wetter, the mist is mistier. The stacks of plates on the Nautilus machines go up and down easier and I can feel my blood pumping with every heartbeat. I don’t know why, or how long this will last, but I like it a whole lot better than going through the day half-asleep.

JUNE 12, 1989

Did some fine-tuning on the guards’ swordfighting program and related issues. Wrote a letter to Dad all about the music for POP.

JUNE 13, 1989

Eleven hours at the office. I put in comic-book-style impact stars like the ones in Karateka. It helps a lot. It only took three hours. A very good thing to have done.

I’m worried about Jim. I’m starting to wonder if this wasn’t a big mistake. He acts like a good, old-school programmer, but the further along we get, the more it seems like he’s doing all these things for the first time.

Brian strongly advised me not to hire Alick, but said it was up to me.

I signed on for this river trip to Idaho. It’s expensive. The other three people going with Doug are Robert Garriott (president of Origin Systems), Ken Wasch (pres. of the SPA), and Laurent Weill (pres. of Loriciel). As an act of self-definition, this trip terrifies me. It’s the sort of trip that Ed Bernstein and Steve Patrick would go on. I’m 10-20 years younger than these guys and my personal fortune is comparatively miniscule, but sooner or later I’ve got to stop presenting myself to the world as a meek and nerdy kid.

Everyone has their own particular form of self-destruction. Mine, I’m starting to think, is standing outside myself, watching myself live my life, turning my face so as to give the cameras a better angle, and thus missing the whole thing.

JUNE 14, 1989

Greg Hammond has been playing POP and is just so excited. It’s incredibly gratifying. I dropped by QA and watched Randy and Will playing it. Yup – it definitely works. I’m not crazy. The only questions are (1) will I finish on time and (2) will there be an Apple market left and (3) can we get the conversions out fast enough?

JUNE 15, 1989

Roland’s going to start coming into the office on Thursdays and Fridays. With Robert gone, I really appreciated the companionship.

JUNE 16, 1989

Everyone at Broderbund is being nice to me. They think my game is hot. Bill McDonagh told me POP is going to be a #2 testing priority (“Don’t worry, they go way lower than 2,” he added dryly). I asked him what I needed to do to make it a #1. He said: “Get the IBM conversion done!” Ha ha.

Brian, however, said that the QA guys told him: “We don’t care what priority this is – in our book it’s a #1.” They’ve been playing it after hours and on their lunch breaks.

JUNE 19, 1989

We’re dead with Doug and Jim. I need to find a new IBM programmer fast. And I’m out three thousand bucks.

I’ve talked to Alick, and half-seriously to Lance (who is a salaried employee of Broderbund). Also considering a couple of conversion houses, like Don Daglow’s; but as The Connelley Group proved on IBM Karateka, the comfort of having an organization is largely illusory. It still comes down to one programmer in the end.

I stopped off in Mill Valley on my way home and had a Bordenave Burger at Phyllis’s. There was a smell of honeysuckle, or something, in the air that broke my heart, it was so beautiful.

Had lunch with Tom Marcus today. I’m trying to grow up.

It Takes a Villiage

JUNE 22, 1989

Went to Las Parrillas in San Rafael for Diana Slade’s goodbye dinner with a dozen other Broderbund receptionists past and present, who all seemed to be about 21. Brian, Peter LaDeau, Matt Siegel and I were the only guys in a sea of Kerris and Kristys.

Afterwards we all went next door to George’s and Brian gave me a serious talking-to about the IBM conversion. He said that Bill McD, after consultation with Gary and Doug, is planning to make me an offer to do IBM POP as an in-house conversion – ideally, by Lance – at a “reasonable royalty” that “takes everyone’s interests into account.” Meaning they’d go up from the contractual 6%. This is good news. It means they’re as anxious to get the IBM conversion going as I am. As Brian said: “You have to shit or get off the pot.”

I’ve been sitting on this pot for months now, doing a lot of groaning and pushing, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. And I’m out $3,250.

JUNE 23, 1989

Doug came up to me at Happy Hour and said cheerfully: “Hoist on your own petard!” Four years ago, I asked for – and got – the contractual right of first refusal to do my own conversions. They don’t give programmers that right any more, and my flailing about with Doug Greene and Jim St. Louis has just proved why.

I understood what Doug was saying. They’re going to make me an offer, and I should accept it.

JUNE 24, 1989

Peter LaDeau rescued me from the office (“Come on, man, what are you doing here?”) and brought me to Brian’s house and then to the Gemini Party in Corte Madera. My third night in a row partying with my product manager.

Everybody is convinced POP is going to be a megahit. “It’s another Choplifter!” said Chris Jochumson. Of course, nobody knows anything, but it’s still heartening.

JUNE 25, 1989

I’m supposed to have three screen shots ready by Wednesday. To say after two and a half years: “This is it – this is what the game looks like, it’s never going to get any better – you can go ahead and photograph it and put it on the box.” This terrifies me.

I’m waiting for Doug or Bill or Gary to call and make me the offer I can’t refuse. Will it be 7%? 8%? 10%? I wish they’d surprise me and offer 10%. But knowing how tight they are with money, I’m expecting between 6 and 7%.

Each royalty point could be worth as much as $10-15,000. So the stakes are quite high. I should drive as hard a bargain as I can.

On the other hand, I’m doing this for love too, not just money.

JUNE 26, 1989

Got a call from Brian inviting me to meet with him and Bill tomorrow afternoon. Guess this is it.

I passed through the programmers’ area this morning and was nearly swamped by praise, some of it tinged with envy. “I hear Prince of Persia’s going to be a megahit,” said Glenn. “I guess lightning does strike twice.”

“I hope you’ve begun your training,” Doug remarked at Gary’s birthday party Thursday. “Heavy weights… endurance… holding your breath for two minutes underwater. Remember, this rafting trip is less than six weeks away.”

JUNE 27, 1989

Bill surprised me. He offered 8%, to go up to 10% after 30,000 units have been sold. It’s such a fair offer, it practically restored my faith in Broderbund singlehandedly. It’s not definite that Lance will be the one to do the conversion, but it seems pretty likely.

I’m happy.

Box sketch came in today. Total nightmare. Not the sketch, but the process of dealing with Paul and others to agree on what to tell the artist. Paul has zero interpersonal skills.

Another nightmare is the box copy. The art department’s new draft sucks. I asked Brian if he could throw a fit and insist they use my draft? He seemed willing to try.

In the 15 minutes of the day that weren’t spent in negotiations of one kind or another, I did manage to get three screens ready for the photo shoot tomorrow.

JUNE 29, 1989

Yesterday was hectic. Robert Florczak delivered a revised box art sketch. Rob Martyn and I spent half an hour at the Mac rewriting the back-of-box copy while Brian sat behind us and dryly interjected: “Five minutes… ten minutes… Can we print it?… Are we done yet?”

The moment it came out of the LaserWriter, Brian wrote the date and time on it and it disappeared into his folder. When he brought it to Nancy, she was too exhausted to argue. “You’ve worn us down,” she said.

Now Latricia is complaining because the girl in the picture has breasts and the guy is grasping her wrist. At this point, I’m counting on Brian to steamroll over any and all objections put forward by Marketing, Art, Sales, and anyfuckingone else.

Roland and I spent the morning trying to put POP on a 3.5” disk, but for some reason we couldn’t get it to work. We’ll try again next week.

Spent the night fixing bugs, backing up, making disks, etc. in preparation for my early-morning departure. I haven’t gotten up at 6:30 AM in ages. Now I’m on the plane to New York, toting an Apple IIc in my carry-on, along with about eight pounds of CDs I grabbed off my shelf at the last minute (Scheherezade, Walküre, Götterdämmerung, Aida, Lawrence of Arabia, Ella Fitzgerald singing “Night in Tunisia,” and anything else that seemed like it might be useful).

I promised Brian a final version by July 26, a month from now. I showed him the schedule I’d made up. He read it through carefully, then looked at me with that amused smile that could mean anything. Brian and I have an understanding. Only, I’m not sure what it is.

Rob is a great guy. It was fun working together on the box copy under the gun like that. This project is still 90% solitary work, but I’ve really come to treasure that remaining (and increasing) percentage of human bonding.

The flip side of that is the incredible frustration of dealing with people like Latricia, who seem put on this earth just to make life miserable. (“It’s like we’re all playing in a sandbox and she comes over and wrecks our sand castle,” I told Brian when he informed me of her latest Anti-Bondage campaign. “Why does she do it? Because it’s there!”) But the flip side of the flip side is the bond of “us against the world,” which makes it all worth it.

Whatever instinct made me want to become a movie director was right. This is life the way it should be lived. Holing up alone in a room with my muse is half a life at best. Maybe some people are cut out for it, but I now realize that I’m not one of them. I’m having too much fun. My interpersonal skills still aren’t up to the level of my solitary work habits – I’ve got years of nerd-dom to make up for – but I like this road I’m on.

JUNE 30, 1989

[Chappaqua] Took the 1:08 train into the city with Emily and bought a CD player at Harvey’s on 45th Street (the Chinese salesman was impressed that I was buying it for my dad). Spent the evening showing Dad the game and listening to “Persian” music for inspiration. Dad was really impressed by the game, and even more by the CD player.

Dad is in a bad state because of his business worries and the stress between him and Mom. I think the best way to cheer him up is to concentrate on making this music happen.

“It’s a big job,” Dad said. “What if we can’t get in all done in three days?”

I said: “Then we have to scale it down to a size that we can do in three days.”

Robert called to say Lance had come into the office looking for me, looking glum. He’s just gotten a really high salary offer from some company in Mountain View, which Broderbund probably won’t be able to compete with. If Lance quits and takes this other job, he won’t be able to do POP, and there’s no one else at Broderbund who’s available that I’d trust to do it.

I could call Brian/Bill on Monday and tell them I won’t sign anything until I know who they’re going to give the job to… but I don’t want to look like I’m the gun Lance is holding to their heads in order to get a raise. It’s tricky.

JULY 1, 1989

God, this music-making is grueling.

The Apple II is a piece of shit. Kyle’s sound routines are a piece of shit. His user interface is a piece of shit. The music we play on the CD player for inspiration sounds fucking awesome. Maurice Jarre’s rousing overture to Lawrence of Arabia – amazing. Then when we try to recapture some of that drive and ferocity on the Apple II, it sounds like a bunch of frogs’ croaking being drowned out by the crinkling of cellophane wrappers. It’s depressing.

Even so, today we managed to come up with a Princess theme and a Vizier theme that aren’t too bad. Also a heartbeat-like “hourglass” theme that interweaves nicely with the Princess theme, and a “staircase” theme with a nice Eastern twist to it. But if you step back and give it a fresh hearing, it still sounds like shit.

The part I’m most worried about is the opening titles. 30 whole seconds to fill, and so far we’ve got nothing. And tomorrow is our last full day – I’m leaving on the 5pm flight Monday.

It’s great to be in New York in the summertime during such beautiful weather, but we’ve hardly left the apartment. I’m serious, this is depressing.

JULY 2, 1989

I’ve never seen Dad so tired and fragile. It’s terrible how this last year of KVC/Atlantic has aged him. Sometimes, when he gets excited about a new musical idea, his old energy shines out briefly; but in repose, the exhaustion shows in his face and in the way he sits.

This weekend of music-making has been a good change of pace for him, but he’s worried about my imminent departure (I already changed my ticket to give us an extra day). I know he’s afraid of not finishing in time, of letting me down. So in a way, I’ve added to his burdens. And me – maniacal auteur taking precedence over dutiful son – I’m pushing him as hard as he can take, hoping that my tireless cheerfulness will somehow cheer him up.

(They’re taking out a second mortgage on the house!)

JULY 3, 1989

I think we’re over the hump. Nearly all the music is done, and it’s fine – better than I’d hoped for, once I got over the initial disappointment of remembering what a piece of shit this machine is. There’s an opening-titles crescendo that’s genuinely thrilling. (Or at least, Dad and I have talked ourselves into believing it is – remember, this is an Apple II.)

Robert had better be blown away. The sad thing is, probably very few other people at Broderbund will be – they’re used to Mac and Amiga and Atari ST music. Oh well. Somewhere, someone must appreciate this.

I’ll miss the San Francisco 4th of July fireworks, but it was worth it.

JULY 5, 1989

[Back in SF] Fixed that eerie bug in the music routines. It was Roland who came up with the answer – I’d relocated Kyle’s sound routines so that the page boundaries fell in different places and subtly changed the timing. I never would have thought of that. Anyway, the music’s in now, mostly, and it’s gotten a great response so far (from Brian, Greg and Robert).

Bill offered 9% at 50,000 units, 10% at 100,000. I plan to counter-offer 10% at 30,000 units. The difference isn’t worth blowing the deal for, but it’s not chicken feed either.

It’s still not clear whether Lance will stay on at Broderbund to do the conversion.

JULY 6, 1989

This music is great. It’s terrific. It’s everything I’d hoped for. It gives the game a whole new dimension. I’m incredibly thrilled, actually.

Brian suggested a candidate of his own to do the Princess shoot – Peter LaDeau’s 18-year-old daughter Tina – and I agreed. The problem with Alison was, I couldn’t think of who to have her embrace. She might feel awkward about me asking her to throw herself into the arms of a total stranger. This way, it’s all within the family (so to speak).

Brian and Peter enjoyed the pastrami I brought back from the Carnegie Deli.

Dad is in a tough spot. The Prince of Persia music is practically the only bright spot in his life right now. I’m glad he did such a good job. We did.

JULY 7, 1989

Worked all day. By happy hour I was so burned out, I was dead on my feet and could hardly keep up a conversation. Then I went to the gym and worked out really hard in the heat. Then I went to Japantown and sat at a table by myself and slurped up a bowl of udon.

Now I’m all charged up again and rarin’ to go. Except… everybody’s gone. That’s OK. Maybe I’ll clean up the apartment. I feel the need to do something to restore my self-image as a human being (as opposed to a brain, a set of fingers, and the parts necessary to keep them the right distance off the ground to operate the computer).

Robert’s gone to LA for the weekend. He said Corey said Tomi seems lonely and doesn’t know many people in Paris.

JULY 10, 1989

I seem to be in a slump… I’m putting in the hours, but nothing gets done. Then again, the stuff I’m working on is the kind you need to chew on for a while. Level design is a creative process, like screenwriting: you can’t just sit down and put in ten hours at a stretch, you need time in between to let your ideas work themselves out.

I have a feeling I’m on the verge of a breakthrough, and one of these days I’ll hit a roll and get more done than in the three days preceding.

Eric came in today and I showed him the game. “There’s nothing more for me to do,” he declared. “It’s all fixed.”

Brian reported that the guys from Egghead said it was the best animation they’d ever seen.

I’ve talked to Dad almost every day since New York. He’s writing an “epilogue” track that he says will last about 45 seconds. I could use it.

Slowly but surely, the end of the game is falling into place: Tower, Shadowman, Vizier, Princess. I think it’ll work. It’s all in the pacing.

JULY 11, 1989

Put in the shadowman merging, which looks pretty cool. I think I’ve cracked the design of that level, finally, after two days (hell, three months) of struggling and feeling dissatisfied. Tomorrow I’ll work out the details.

Lance said: “I’ll do it! Quit worryin’!”

JULY 12, 1989

Designed most of Level 12. At this rate it’ll take another whole day to finish it.

Digitized the POP logo and put it in. Ten minutes to do, four hours to set up.

Michelle’s going to get started converting Avril’s title screen to double hi-res. I’m grateful; that’ll save me a day or two, and maybe she’ll do a better job than I could.

I thought of a way to do the prologue screens that will save time – just typeset ‘em on the LaserWriter, then digitize the whole thing. Brilliant, eh?

Assuming Michelle comes through, the whole job (credits, title, prologue, epilogue) shouldn’t take me more than a day. Not even.

Which leaves… let’s see now… four days to get the Complete Beta Version into QA. Assume half of tomorrow and half of Friday will be taken up with the princess shoot and various issues relating to packaging, documentation and IBM POP. That leaves three days to:

finish Level 12 – hard-wire shadowman’s attack, dungeon falling apart, etc. (1 day)

put in something for Level 11 – if possible, use Greg’s idea of killing a guard and a skeleton arising in its

place (1 day)

fix a few bugs just to show I haven’t been ignoring their bug reports completely

Then it’s Monday – breathe a huge sigh of relief – and get back to work quick because it’s only 9 days left till Idaho!

If I’m smart I’ll spend those nine days fixing bugs, visiting QA, and in general making a big push to get all the hard, complicated stuff out of the way before I take off for seven days. The alternative would be to get the opening sequence up and running (with newly digitized Tina) and title cards finalized, so that I can give Brian something that looks polished to “wow” everyone before I leave. But that, I think, would be the wrong choice.

JULY 13, 1989

A productive morning. Fixed some long-standing bugs.

Lance will do it. Thank God. He and Robert and I went out for burgers at Frank’s Country Garden to seal the pact. I’ll meet with Bill on Monday and work out the remaining deal points.

Film shoot tomorrow morning. I’m actually nervous at the prospect of having to direct a beautiful 18-year-old girl I’ve never met before. I’m definitely not ready to direct a feature film. When this is over, top priority (besides screenwriting) will be to shoot some short no-budget student films.

JULY 14, 1989

Shot Tina LaDeau this morning. Man, she is a fox. Brian couldn’t stop blushing when I had her embrace him (through six or seven takes). I took them out to lunch afterwards.

Went out for burgers and milkshakes with Ed and Rob and their programmers, Brian “Playmaker Football” Brinkman from New Orleans, and Carlo “Jeanne D’Arc” from France.

JULY 16, 1989

Eleven hours at the office on a Sunday, making this my first recorded 72-hour week.

Dinner with Ed, Robert, and Brian Brinkman.

JULY 17, 1989

Got that disk into QA.

Doug’s back from Japan and France. He said everyone there is really pumped up about my game.

The box illustration is finished. The good news is, it’s beautiful. Brian and I were thrilled. The bad news is, they’ve sent it back to the illustrator to “make some changes.” It seems Sophie was offended by the lady’s breasts.

I’ve never seen Brian so mad. Robert said he’d never seen me so mad.

It’s water under the bridge now – I don’t want to raise my blood pressure by thinking about it. I just hope Florczak hardly touches the illustration. It was perfect the way it was.

Met with Bill, worked out the last details of the deal. IBM POP is a go.

JULY 19, 1989

Working 12- and 13-hour days: fixing bugs, preparing stuff for Lance, restaging the climactic battle with the Vizier to make it feel more climactic; and, as of today, digitizing Tina. The princess now turns, with her dark hair flipping as she spins around. Tomorrow I’ll make her take a step backwards, and maybe lounge about a bit. It’s a drag, having to spend hours reviewing video footage of this girl in slo-mo and frame-advance, but these are the sacrifices I have to make to get this game done.

Denis Friedman came into Brian’s office and expressed a desire (on behalf of Broderbund France) to do one of the POP conversions: Atari, Amstrad or Amiga.

Brian Brinkman leaves for New Orleans tomorrow morning. In this past week of working late I’ve come to feel a certain bond with him. (When I left at 11 pm, he and Rob and Carlo were still at it.)

Seven days left.

I broke the news to Brian that I wasn’t going to be able to finish the game by Wednesday. “That’s OK,” he said. “You’re still pretty much on schedule, right?” Bill didn’t take it so well.

I promised to get the princess animations in, and fix at least a couple of the major bugs, before I leave. I’d also like to jazz up some of the levels with more potions, shortcuts, cul-de-sacs, secret compartments, etc., and digitize at least rough versions of the opening prologue and epilogue, so that it’ll really be a complete game. Then I won’t have to put in any major features after I get back. (Except the little white mouse.)

I keep waking up at 7 am, no matter how late I go to sleep.

Finishing

JULY 20, 1989

Michelle delivered the cleaned-up double hi-res title screen to Brian today. I plugged it in and redid the opening credits to match. It looks pretty darn good. I’d like to make the stars twinkle, but that’ll have to wait.

Met with Lance early this morning and got him started on the background graphics. By five o’clock he was already pretty far along. He’s jazzed. I’m jazzed. This is going to be a great conversion.

Alan Weiss dropped by to talk about Nintendo Game Boy Karateka.

Strange incident with Lee McDougall. He showed up with his assistant around five and started emptying out Loring’s and Eric’s desks. What the ?!? Robert and Brian and I were in the back room and didn’t know what to do. Finally I called Tom Marcus, since he’s Lee’s boss. Of course Tom didn’t know anything about it. I put him on the phone with Lee. So the homestead was saved from the cattle barons yet again… for the moment.

I’m feeling quite optimistic. All I have to do is work like a demon for the next six days and not get sick, and by the time I leave for Idaho, the game should be pretty close to finished.

Sleep. Got to get some sleep.

JULY 21, 1989

The Broderbund Picnic. Everyone knows I’m going on this trip next week and was eager to contribute horror stories of river rafting mishap and misery.

Doug told me that if I don’t finish the game by Wednesday, he’s going to be in trouble with Bill. “Hurry up,” he urged me. “My reputation’s on the line.”

It took me all day, but I think I finally came up with an acceptable princess model in single hi-res. Not as cute as Tina, but cute enough.

JULY 22, 1989

The entire opening sequence is in place. The sand flows, the stars twinkle, the princess does her thing. Only the Grand Vizier is missing. If I can keep up this momentum till Wednesday, I’ll be in good shape.

JULY 23, 1989

After lunch I started to feel so run down, I was afraid I was coming down with a virus. But after a Snickers bar, two aspirin and a gallon of water, well-being returned. Thank God. I can’t afford to get sick now.

Got some stuff done today, but not as much as I needed to. No matter. It’s going well.

Big relief to finally have the princess and the title sequence in place. I keep forgetting no one has seen this stuff yet. It’ll blow them away. It totally transforms the game. It was worth spending all that time on.

JULY 24, 1989

Fourteen hours at the office. The last two were the most productive.

Two more days to fix as many bugs as I can.

Lance is puttering away on the IBM conversion.

JULY 25, 1989

Quit early today, eight o’clock. I actually got quite a bit done. Crossed half a dozen bugs off my list, and spent some time with Lance. The version I leave for QA tomorrow won’t be perfect, but it’ll be the cleanest yet, and substantially complete. Two weeks of good work after I get back should do it.

I’m seriously psyched for this river trip. It sort of crept up on me. For weeks I didn’t think about it at all, then I was wishing I hadn’t gotten myself into it in the first place, then I was just resigned to it. I didn’t realize how much I needed a vacation until just now. I took a real look at the pictures in the brochure for the first time… and now I’m yearning to go. I can’t wait.

Saw the retouched box illustration, finally. The triumph of Sophie K. There’s some kind of bright green garment now covering up the exposed skin. It looks like someone painted it on in a hurry, which he probably did. Oh well. There are battles you win and battles you lose, and in the big picture, this one is pretty meaningless. Still, it pisses me off. It was better before.

Now that the packaging is safely completed (or almost), it might be a worthwhile political endeavor to try once again to switch marketing managers – to the equally evil, but more competent, Latricia T.

Who cares. We’ll sell a million of ‘em anyway, despite marketing’s obstructive incompetence. All I should be worrying about is finishing it and making it good.

Virginia Giritlian called. She’s got a new boss, Jim Alex, and wants to try to set up In the Dark with him as producer. I said sure.

Virginia is really a sweetheart. Every time she gets a new job she tries to sell my script all over again. And she’s not even my agent any more. “It’s the script that never died, for me,” she said. But I push this out of my mind, to concentrate on the tasks at hand.

Brian wants to set up a Mac version. I wish Roland could do it. The truth is, Mac is the conversion that’s closest to my heart. It’s the one that would allow me to play my own game at home. And Mom. And Ben. And most everyone else I know outside the computer games industry. But officially, Mac has a 5% share of the games market, or something like that.

JULY 26, 1989

Left a stack of disks three inches high on my desk for Brian. Eleven for sales, three for QA, plus seven more. Hope they work.

I played the whole game straight through for the first time ever, start to finish, cheat keys turned off. Made it with seconds to spare (my hour ran out while I was fighting the Grand Vizier).

You know what? It was fun!

There’s a level of tension generated when you know you can’t cheat, which is completely absent from the normal playtesting I do. By the time that final battle rolled around, I had a solid hour invested, and damned if I was going to lose!

Still a few bugs – two weeks of work, like I said – but it’s a game, and a damn good one. I’m content. I’m ready to go river rafting.

The package mechanical looks good. I asked Brian to tell them to make my name bigger.

Should I bring this notebook on the river trip? It might be good to have. Other people bring cameras. So why not bring the book?

Then again, this is a vacation. This journal is like a tether. It keeps bringing me back to myself. And letting other people see me writing in it, I’ve come to feel, is kind of rude. It shuts them out. It undermines the bonding process that’s part of the reason to go on a trip like this one.

I’ll leave the notebook home. Instead, I’ll just pay attention.

AUGUST 2, 1989

Back from six and a half days out of time.

Doug drops me off at my front door. I let myself in and take a twenty-minute shower as hot as I can stand. Inventory my collection of scrapes and bruises. Healing nicely, as far as I can tell. Very tan in the face and arms and legs. Six days’ beard growth. Lingering nausea from the choppy flight back in a five-seater from Salmon to Boise with forest fires raging below. Sand washed out of my hair, teeth brushed, nails cleaned, and I’m back.

I could have stayed in SF and kept working and the week would have flashed by like any other week. Instead, I went to another planet and it didn’t cost me anything but a chunk of money out of the bank and seven days out of the calendar.

Note to self: If you ever get half a chance to do something like this again, do it. Do it at the drop of a hat.

AUGUST 4, 1989

Brian’s on vacation.

More controversy over the package design: Dianne Drosnes saw it and threw a fit. So Bill McDonagh put it on hold until Doug got back.

Doug glanced at it first thing yesterday morning and said: “Looks fine.” Today a bunch of irate women put a message on the LAN to Doug, Bill, and Ed Auer complaining that it’s sexist and offensive.

Doug wrote a two-page response to cool them down. It looks like we’re in business again, though this cost us a week. The whole thing is ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with the package design.

Tech Support is crazy about the game. Everyone thinks it’ll be a megahit. I keep getting asked if I’m going to do a sequel. The first one isn’t even done yet.

David is back from Japan.

AUGUST 5, 1989

Got an idea for POP 2. A ripoff of Ladyhawke.

That’s how you know the end is in sight, when you start thinking about the sequel.

AUGUST 7, 1989

Finally got down to work and fixed a couple of long-standing bugs. What I need to do is keep this up for a few more days.

Got a speeding ticket on the way home. I was so clearly guilty, I didn’t even try to plead with the officer. One of these days I’ll get one ticket too many and my insurance will go up to $3,000 a year.

Robert’s MG has broken down. With only three weeks left to finish his game, he just said “I don’t have time for this,” and left it at his mom’s house in LA. Now he’s riding his bike to work.

To meet my own deadline, allowing one week for copy protection, I need QA to sign off on the game within the next ten days. If I fix all the bugs by the end of this week, that leaves me a few days to fiddle with it and put in stuff like the mouse. (There has to be a mouse – I promised Tomi.)

AUGUST 8, 1989

Woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t know why I was awake. It was a quarter past one, just an hour after I’d fallen asleep. Half a minute later, the bed began to shake. The room was shaking. I lay there half asleep as the shaking went on and on, and suddenly the adrenaline hit and I was scared shitless. I realized the building could fall down and I could die.

Later I found out it had only lasted 30 seconds. It felt like longer.

5.2. Epicenter, San Jose. Five percent chance this is just a precursor to a bigger quake within the next few days.

An encouraging day. Cathy (Brown) saw the game for the first time in months and was as thrilled as I could hope for. Oliver delivered a bug report that was reassuringly thin.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This game is going to be a hit. All I have to do is finish it.

Weird weather. Lightning storms, flash floods, forest fires all over the West, and now this quake. It’s like signs from God. But what does it mean?

Why do I feel so sad tonight?

AUGUST 9, 1989

Slowly but steadily, I’m fixing bugs. The only new things left to do are the Vizier walking, the Princess embracing, and… the mouse.

AUGUST 10, 1989

A very productive day. Fixed a few of the very nastiest bugs I’d been dreading facing for months. Now, suddenly, it seems very close to finished.

Saw the sell sheet mechanical. Pretty exciting.

Met Andrew Pedersen, clean-cut young marketing guy just hired a couple of weeks ago. I like him.

AUGUST 13, 1989

Today I finally put in the mouse. I’m glad I did. It’ll probably take another full day to get it perfect, but it’s worth it. People are going to love it. Tomi will be thrilled.

AUGUST 14, 1989

Brian is back from vacation.

Put in the last two princess animations today (“Embrace” and “Send”). Only Jaffar, the Grand Vizier, remains.

Oh, and I talked to George. Good things are happening. His Texasville documentary is shooting in two weeks. He wants me to visit him in Texas once it starts.

Virginia called to say she is trying to set up In the Dark for $3 million with her new boss, James Alex. She’s all excited.

AUGUST 16, 1989

Full lunar eclipse.

A productive day. Put a disk into QA. Got the Vizier footage I’d shot with Robert over the weekend developed, and put in the Vizier walking. It looks OK. A relief, actually. That was the last thing I’d been wondering if it would be good enough. From now on it’s all downhill. Finishing what I’ve started, cleaning up, fine-tuning.

(Keeping my fingers crossed. No sinister new bugs, please. No disk crashes or corrupted data. Just another seven days of clean work, and a QA signoff at the end of it. Please, no nasty surprises.)

Robert is in deep panic about finishing his game. He did, however, put in a hilarious decapitation sequence this afternoon, in which the C-Generation knocks off your head and it bounces around the room while you stand there, convulsing and headless.

I called Tomi in Paris and told her about the climactic battle with Shadow Man. She was thrilled.

Thank God for this game. It’s the only area in my life where I feel sure that my efforts are doing good, not harm. It’s good, and it’s mine, and thousands of people are going to be glad it exists. How many things can you say that about?

AUGUST 19, 1989

Today was brutal. It was just me in the empty building, Saturday from 9 am to 8 pm. Didn’t talk to a soul all day, except Peter LaDeau and a pal of his, briefly.

I must have spent six hours fiddling with those Vizier arm-raising shapes. It was a big mistake thinking I could shoot it without a cape and draw the cape in later. I’d forgotten what a slow and tedious process hand animation is, and how hard it is to get decent results. But it turned out OK, considering.

The main thing is, it’s done. The opening scene with the Vizier and the princess is over. Finito. Now all that’s left is details. Text. Fiddling. I could putter about for days; but whatever changes I want to make, I’d better make before 8 am Monday.

After months of restraint, I’m starting to let myself get excited. This game is hot. It’s going to go over very, very well. If I’m wrong about that, then I don’t know anything and I should get into a different line of work. The only questions in my mind are:

1. how much of an Apple II market is left? And

2. will we be able to get the IBM version out fast enough to cash in?

It’s a great game. It’s the best I can do. After three years of work, I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. If I had to make it better, I don’t know where I’d start. I’ve given it everything I have. All I can do now is let it go, and hope for the best.

And help Lance get the IBM version done.

And make sure that Mac, Atari and Amiga versions get under way.

And Nintendo, for whatever my efforts are worth.

There’s still a whole page of things to fix. And another round of QA testing. And copy protection. It ain’t over yet.

But it sure is getting close.

AUGUST 20, 1989

A full working Sunday, but I didn’t quite finish everything. The creative part is done. What remains now is technical stuff, housecleaning, including the tedious task of cleaning up two more double hi-res digitized text screens. (I got the first one done today.) I’ll try to get the disks into QA before 4 pm tomorrow.

Tomorrow I’ll play the game all the way through a couple of times on the IIc, looking for bugs and trying to get a feel for the whole thing.

AUGUST 21, 1989

*sigh* I left work today, tired and burnt out, hoping the disk I was carrying would be The One. I went home, booted it up, and…

Those weird bugs are back. The ones that only show up the very first time you boot the disk, and only on certain machines, and then only sometimes. Obviously there are some zero-page locations that aren’t getting initialized. It looks like $06 (opacity) is one of them. That carries a sinister echo of the bizarre bug that’s been keeping the 3.5” version from running. In that case, after hours of confusion, Roland and I finally tracked it down to that same location, $06, which contained (I seem to remember) a 42. When I get in tomorrow I’m going to go over that code with a magnifying glass.

Shit.

AUGUST 22, 1989

The disks are in QA. All of ‘em.

Brian is thrilled. He immediately started hitting me up about doing a sequel.

For Brian, it’s done; but secretly, I’m still surreptitiously fixing tiny little bugs that no one will notice. I’ll slip the fixes in when we do the copy protection, Roland and I will test the hell out of it, and nobody will know the difference.

Tina came in today and I showed her her screen debut. I think she was kind of starstruck by the idea that it was her up there.

It was Robert’s first time meeting Tina face to face (not counting the virtual meeting I’d staged onscreen). After she’d left, we just sat there looking at each other, until Robert said with a sigh:

“It’s just the ephemeral beauty of an 18-year-old.”

I said: “Yes, but she’s 18 years old now.”

There was nothing more to say.

Should I start on a sequel? I could whip it out in five or six months this time, with Lance doing the IBM programming concurrently. I could even write a screenplay on the side… split my time, 50-50. (Uh… sound familiar?)

I don’t have time to think about this. I’ve still got (officially nonexistent) bugs to fix. Tomorrow Roland and I start on copy protection.

Ship It!

AUGUST 27, 1989

Roland and I stayed till midnight at the office both Friday and Saturday. We’ve been having a blast putting weird stuff into the copy-protection. Taking us back to our hacker roots. Today I’m going to stay home and test the hell out of it on my IIc to make sure none of what we’ve done interferes with anything.

QA signed off on the demo disk Friday, but it’ll be a fight to get Them to let us sneak it by the 12th.

AUGUST 28, 1989

Struck up a conversation with Peter Blacksberg, whom I’d seen around but never talked to, outside the Art Dept., where he was making signs with directions to his upcoming wedding. Out of the blue he suggested dinner.

Smart, nice guy, and pleased to discover a fellow smart person. He gave me some helpful advice about Broderbund. He’d heard the story of Brian yelling at Leslie in the scheduling meeting, and suggested I try to avoid identifying myself too strongly with Brian. “Be nice to Leslie. Maybe she’ll think ‘Well, Jordan’s a nice guy, even though his product manager is an S.O.B., so let’s try to get his project signed off.’”

His comment forced me into awareness that Brian’s temper may be doing me more harm than good, and that I should take care to build relationships with other people at Broderbund too. Like Latricia and Sophie. And Bill. And Kevin and Leslie.

As far as I’m concerned, POP is ready to go out to HLS for evals. If QA comes to the same conclusion within the next couple of days, everything is beautiful (as Brian would say).

But until I’ve talked to Bill tomorrow and gotten his word, I’m not counting on it.

It was good spending the evening with Peter Blacksberg. It got my mind off POP and onto new things. Made me realize how much I’ve damped down my curiosity about the world, these last few months, in the interest of efficiency. It’s time to start rekindling it… looking for new people, places, friends. I shouldn’t just rush on to the next project with tunnel vision. I should relax, take a look around.

AUGUST 29, 1989

Oh, Lord.

At 10 pm tonight, I was happy. QA signed off on POP today. Brian talked to Bill, Bill talked to Leslie, and we actually got it out a day ahead of schedule. Everyone was ecstatic. Congratulations from all sides. I went to the gym, left phone messages with some friends, cooked up some spaghetti. Everything was beautiful. I was thinking I’d take the day off work tomorrow.

Then I decided to boot up the game on my IIc and play it through one last time, just for the hell of it.

It’s that God-cursed IIc VBLANK routine Roland and I stuck in at the last minute. It works, but it screws up the joystick. I’d checked it on the IIc downstairs, but like an idiot, I’d only checked it in keyboard mode.

There’s no way around it. I’ve got to tell Kevin and Brian, and send new disks down to HLS to replace the ones we sent today. It’ll be anticlimactic and embarrassing, and Brian, Bill and I will lose face. The only redeeming factors are (1) it was me who found it, and (2) it’s something I can easily fix.

Shit. Oh well. It could have been worse.

I got paid for POP today. The $4,000 “development fee” Ed Bernstein agreed to four years ago in lieu of an advance. Good thing, too. My bank account’s been running pretty low.

Alan Weiss is all excited about doing POP as a Nintendo title. Henry Yamamoto is interested too. This may actually happen.

Hell. I wish I’d never messed with that VBLANK stuff.

AUGUST 30, 1989

Drove into work early this morning and fixed the game. Brian was a little bummed, and Kevin was kind of a pain in the ass about it, but it got fixed. We won’t lose more than a day. Maybe not even that.

My first day off in ages. Corey came into the city and we went to see sex, lies and videotape. Pretty unusual movie. I’m impressed, actually. The heart it revealed wasn’t one of the biggest and warmest I’ve ever encountered, but it was revealed, which is more than you can say for most movies, especially first movies by 26-year-olds.

AUGUST 31, 1989

Robert just called from a pay phone on Elm St. He’s At Yale. In New Haven. Wow… For some reason that phone call drove it home. I wish I were just starting Yale. Or even better, that we were both starting Yale together.

It was eight years ago that I did what Robert’s doing. Makes me feel old.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1989

A good day’s work with Roland. The 3.5” version is done – thank God. Now it’s really over.

The POP documentation is in, looks great. David K. gave me a box flat to take home. Eval disks are back from HLS. All the pieces are coming together.

Tony Trono said while cutting my hair: “Listen, the most important thing is that you have a good time. You’re only young once! In five years you’ll be 30. That’s the time of life when you stop asking a lot of questions and start to accept certain things and not try to change them. For now – have some fun! This time of your life will never come again.”

This from a man who’s all of 33. But he’s right. I’ve somehow gotten into the habit of worrying, in every situation: What’s the right thing to do? What’s the best thing? What could go wrong here, how can I avoid it going wrong? Fuck that! I’ve been working my butt off all year. If I don’t reap some of the rewards now, when will I?

I’m ready to enter my grasshopper phase. Someone please tell me how to do that?

SEPTEMBER 6, 1989

Oliver found a bug in POP. I’m bummed – it was one I’d fixed once, too, and it somehow got undone. But it’s shippable, even with the bug, so that’s probably what they’ll decide to do. Shit.

For kicks, I reread the last version of In the Dark. You know what? It isn’t bad. A year and half of writing, and 45 minutes to read it. I don’t feel much urge to rewrite it – it’ll never be great – but it’s a valid document of my first attempt at a screenplay. The next one will be better.

SEPTEMBER 7, 1989

Got a letter from Robert. Boy, it makes me wistful. I wish I were just starting Yale. Here I am full of this feeling of impending change, of being young and on the brink of some thrilling new adventure… and I have nothing planned.

They signed off POP today. Brian invited the boys from QA to his office backyard for root beer and champagne. Bill was there too. It really is over.

Brian gave me the pitch again about doing a sequel. I know it’s a great opportunity to make some fast bucks for a few months’ work, but, jeez… I don’t care about that. I want something new and exciting and momentous to happen.

Maybe all I need is a vacation.

Maybe it’s partly the weather. It feels like fall. Smells like fall. Makes me feel like classes should be starting.

I just want everything to change. Now. Is that too much to ask?

SEPTEMBER 8, 1989

Brian took me into the warehouse and showed me the cartons of POP boxes and manuals. He let me steal half a dozen to take home.

SEPTEMBER 11, 1989

Virginia called with an offer from James Alex to option In the Dark for 18 months against a purchase price of $40,000.

The price is ignominiously low – I think it’s even below Guild minimum – but more important, who is this guy? And where is his funding coming from?

I didn’t like it when Virginia said “Just trust me.” And “You owe me.” I do owe her, but I hated like hell to hear her say it.

SEPTEMBER 12, 1989

Gary Cosay never heard of James Alex. He offered to advise me as a favor, but he won’t be officially representing me.

Brian got a call from Henry Yamamoto, who wants all Japanese rights for POP, including Nintendo (!) It would be better for me financially if Broderbund USA does the Nintendo version, but this is a good development because it’ll create urgency for Alan to get the ball rolling. Kind of like a bidding war.

SEPTEMBER 13, 1989

Found out from Virginia that the mysterious “brothers” backing James Alex are Jack and Bob Abramoff, Orthodox Jews who’ve made three films in Lesotho (independent monarchy landlocked by South Africa), including Red Scorpion, and are looking for their fourth. They’re talking about making In the Dark for $7 million.

Brian is happy as a clam. Alan’s going to make an offer on Nintendo POP this week. Denis wants Broderbund France to start on the Atari and Amiga conversions right away. Henry is eager to get going. Applefest is next weekend.

Everything is beautiful…

SEPTEMBER 28, 1989

Home from Paris.

POP snuck on the 19th as scheduled. Everyone says it was a big hit at Applefest – they sold out of all 84 copies they brought. (Couldn’t they have brought a few more??) The release has been postponed until Oct. 3 in order to allow a full 2-week sneak.

Lance is making great strides on the IBM version. Broderbund France wants to do Amiga, Atari and Amstrad versions. Henry and Alan are hot to trot. Things are looking good.

Doug told Tomi: “Jordan’s financial problems are over.”

I signed the In the Dark option and sent it off. It’s only $1,500, but it’s kind of thrilling – the first time I’ve been paid for writing fiction. I guess this makes me a professional writer. Virginia says Mary (Pet Sematary) Lambert is interested in directing, Paramount is considering picking it up for distribution (a “negative pickup”), and Jack and Jim want to start shooting before Christmas.

There were three Broderbund Sneak Preview boxes waiting for me when I got back. (I’m still on their VIP list, so I get a copy of every new release.) One of them was Prince of Persia. That was actually a bigger thrill than anything else.

OCTOBER 2, 1989

Played Prince of Persia. It felt strange and unfamiliar. And great. Just three weeks’ distance, but what a difference it makes.

OCTOBER 8, 1989

Adam Derman is dead. A couple of weeks ago he went to the doctor because he’d been having headaches, and they found out his whole body was riddled with cancer. It was too late to do anything. He was 23.

OCTOBER 13, 1989

A Broderbund day. Finally got that source code documentation finished, sent it off to Japan and France.

Met with Scott and Dane and Nicki to talk about Mac POP. They asked for 7% royalty. That seems fair.