Prince of Persia: How it was made.. a daily journal of the struggle
If like me you spent your late teens and early twenties in the 1980s, playing this amazing game called “Prince of Persia” then you will really admire the effort it took for another 20 year old named Jordan Mechner, half way across the world from me in India, to build this game painstakingly frame by frame.
The first time you saw the Prince jump in one fluid motion and land with bent knees you knew this was something exceptional - because, this was on bitmapped graphics on low powered CPUs in the late 1980s. It originally was developed and ran on an Apple II running CP/M or ProDOS and was written in 6502 assembly language.
I was in college studying computer engineering, at the time I first saw the game. I was hooked instantly and got the game on a floppy. My classmates and I spent hours playing and replaying every level until we got to the Princess after fighting the nasty Vazir and a bunch of his hooligans along the way. Even though there were only 12 levels we felt that it took forever to get to the top of the tower and rescue the princess.
Now you can read Jordan Mechner’s journal of how he single handedly created this amazing creative work for the ages. The game has been ported onto almost all gaming and computing platforms since it launched and you can even get it on your iOS or Android device.
