the making of prince of persia journals

Jordan's Prince of Persia became a massive hit. But it was far from an overnight success. We follow our hero's journey through the thick of it. Dealing with massive resource constraints both on the publisher and technological side creating a truly outstanding game experience on 48kbytes RAM.

I have to say I was pretty hyped once I learned that there is this thing called a technical artist (or graphics programmer). It's this rare creature who has fairly deep knowledge of both game design AND programming which, is an aspiring future for me. Then I stumbled upon this book and learned that there was this ONE GUY behind the massive hit of POP. It was this rare case of the game designer and developer being the same person. So naturally, I had huge expectations. And on some level, this book exceeded them, and on some level, it disappointed.

This book exceeded my highest expectations because the guy who made this is a monster. He pulled outstanding engineering and creative feats to pull this game off. And that he did for three f@cking years. I am a fan, Jordan!

Jordan Mechner introduced rotoscoping to games. He basically blent filming and animation to create fluid life character animations for the first time.

On the other hand, the book's second part was just… boring. Maybe it's me and I romanticized the story in my head, or maybe the juice just ran out. But I was not enjoying the grinding and dining and wining anymore. Frankly, I just skimmed through the rest.

Anyhow, there were some pretty valuable gems in these murky waters.

• Game design is just hard. Period. It's a rollercoaster and behind the scenes, it's anything but a romantic story. It's crawling through obstacles and muscling through doubts and stall periods.
• To push anything to a world-class level takes not just world-class skill but also world-class effort. It's a huge time investment (it took Jordan 3 years to finish) and therefore requires a shit ton of dedication.
• And luck. Even after launching it took an additional year for the game to take off. And it almost got lost in the noise. In the end, they had to change the cover to finally find a product market fit.
• And you can't escape the fact that it's a team effort. You would think that if he could make this amazing game, then this baby would sell itself. But truth be told making the game is only half the job. Selling it is the other half.
• But if you succeed and produce an item of this magnitude, it could have long-lasting effects even after many years. For Jordan, this meant that Ubisoft invited him to make the Sand of Time game 10 years later. Not to mention that 17 years later, he was hired to write the script for the Prince of Persia movie.