Fantastic read. I love the way he charts the ups and downs in his personal motivation. It's a great reminder to be persistent.

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.

This is a great find. Thanks! BTW, I love the reference videos that were shot for the animation.

Yeah, even just seeing the still frames brought flashbacks of those animations.

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 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...

1985: "And the games business is drying up."

Classic.

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.

it's "prince" of persia.

yep, first fpp, typo, duh

you can download the original prince of persia here :

http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/old-games/prince-of-persia.p...

use dosbox (http://dosbox.com) to run the exe. This brings back childhood memories. Learning how to use the command line to play prince on a 386.

The journal really motivates me to start writing my own. I would help me to clarify my thoughts and keeping my goals in mind..

Wow, this is brilliant - always interesting to read about development in the old days! Thank you!

Amazing story of a very exciting and chaotic time in computing and computer games.