This inspires me to keep closer logs of my progress on personal projects -- particularly the "soft" stuff (how I'm feeling about it, etc). It's terrific motivation.
Just spent the last 2 hours reading through most of the 46 pages and skimming through the ones that didn't appear to have much "meat" on them regarding Prince of Persia.
I found the journal to be an incredibly revealing look into what game programmers, and arguably many other programmers, go through. Really makes me wish I had documented some of my earlier forays into programming just so that I could go back, read, and remember.
It's also sparked a bit of intrigue in me that I haven't felt in a while to revisit game development. I toyed around with Dark Basic and Blitz Basic back in 2001 and really haven't touched anything since.
As others have said, great find and I would love to read more from other programmers like this and like ones from Carmack recently posted on HN.
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 31, 1986
I beat out Ed and Steve for the #1 spot on the Tetris high-score list.
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Thanks for this link, great reading! my best friend had a pc and prince of persia (and karateka) when we were young, great memories...
I was fascinated to learn that Jordan was working in the same office as Robert Cook, the guy who was making D/Generation, a game I remember fondly. Like Prince of Persia, it also has an enemy who is a dark version of the player.
(The lineage of the concept is more complicated than one game borrowing from the other, however: The journal entries show that another coworker, Tomi, suggested the dark version of the player, while Robert suggested creating the dark version by jumping through a mirror.)
It's a great read, but you kind of cringe knowing in hindsight that the Apple ][ market was drying up and there was Mechner, working on screen plays and taking months at a time away from development of the game.
It does have a happy ending that the PC market started to kick in, but man.
