Jordan Mechner, creator of the original Prince of Persia, has been posting his original development diary entries to his official blog to coincide with the exact date they were written 23 years ago. Each post is a treasure for fans of the games, but the October 20th entry is particularly special: it contains the animation reference video for the Prince Mechner shot in the Reader's Digest parking lot in 1985, using his kid brother as a model. Anyone who has ever played this game will know every once of David's motions by heart. Amazing.
October 20, 1985 [Jordan Mechner (Thanks, Joel!)
This is very cool, reminds me of the good old days 🙂 Though I find his July 5th, 1985 post more interesting/funny:
“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.”
Interesting extract –
“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?”
From Wikipedia –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#Leary.27s_last_two_decades
By the mid 1980s, Leary had begun to incorporate computers, the Internet, and virtual reality into his aegis of thought. Leary established one of the earliest sites on the World Wide Web, and was often quoted describing the Internet as “the LSD of the 1990s.”[citation needed] He became a promoter of virtual reality systems,[13] and sometimes demonstrated a prototype of the Mattel Power Glove as part of his lectures (as in From Psychedelics to Cybernetics).
Now THAT is funny, I always wondered why the animation in PoP was so good.
Mystery solved.