Read this before your next long project
Notes from reading Jordan Mechner's Making of Prince of Persia.
Probably one person will read this and one person will go read the book. That’s more than enough. Sometimes someone tells me, weeks or months after I’ve posted something, that they found the book or article I mentioned. Each time, I feel so happy seeing that. So this is for that one person.
I read The Making of Prince of Persia in Italy in three or four days. Not all-day reading -- bits of it on trains, more of it sitting in the garden, a few entries before bed. It’s a journal by Jordan Mechner, who made the original Prince of Persia on an Apple II between 1985 and 1989. Stripe Press republished it in 2020 with annotations: Mechner at 55 writing in the margins of the notebook he kept at 21. Those annotations give the book its charm.
I picked it up expecting an inspirational story about a young man who shipped a famous game. That is technically what the book is. But it’s also a book for journal keepers, a recommendation for anyone who likes reading raw notes, and a quiet manual for how to live in your twenties (and I think if you build in public, it can be useful too).
The myth of the four-year project
Here is the version of the story you’ve probably heard: in 1985, a 21-year-old kid signs a deal to make a sequel to his hit game Karateka. He spends the next four years writing assembly on an Apple II in a Broderbund office, films his younger brother running around a parking lot to invent fluid character animation, and ships a game that goes on to sell two million copies and define a genre. Four years of disciplined obsession.
I read those four years differently after the book. They were four years, yes. But the long pauses in the middle were not a detour from the work. They were part of it.
In November 1987, Mechner writes the entry I keep coming back to:
Yesterday I went in to work for the first time since I can’t remember when. I booted up the game and looked at it. It was deeply depressing.
“Think of the game as an old car you’re fixing up in your spare time,” Tomi suggested, urging me to resume work on it. This old car has an engine block that’s rusted solid. I can’t even think about how much work lies ahead.
This is the heart of the book. The “old car” line is from Tomi Pierce, a Broderbund colleague who becomes the most important person in the entire production. She catches him at the moment the game has gone cold, and gives him a frame that lets him pick it up again. The whole project pivots on that lunch.
In June 1990, with the game shipped, Mechner does the math:
In a continuing effort to gather meaningless statistics about my own life, I figured out that I’ve spent about 3,800 hours, or the equivalent of two years’ honest work, on Prince of Persia over the past four years.
Two years of honest work over four years. The other two years were the in-between. Drinks with friends. A week of staring at code and not touching it. The pages that look empty are doing as much work as the ones full of code, and the months he wasn’t building the game were doing the same thing for it.
The book is sold as a story about four years of work. It is also a story about the months when nothing got built. Both matter.
I have caught myself recently feeling some kind of nostalgia for projects with the shape of Prince of Persia -- three or four years long, one person carrying it, a clear end. I am not sure I have a project like that right now.
The journal is part of the project
Mechner started keeping a journal at 17. By the time the book ends in 1993, he’s filled dozens of notebooks. He’s still filling them today, in his sixties, on Hobonichi Techos -- Japanese planners, one page per day. He has over a hundred notebooks since 1982.
The journal in this book isn’t a record of the project. It is the project. He says this directly in a short essay called “Why I Keep a Journal” that he wrote in 2020:
In the four years it took me to make the first Prince of Persia game on the Apple II, my journal did more than record my creative process: it was part of it. I used my notebook as a sounding board -- wrestling with design challenges, discarding ideas and sparking new ones in the act of writing. In dark moments I poured out my angst, questioned whether I was on the right path, if the game was even worth finishing. More than once, my journal brought me back from the brink.
I love this. The notebook is not a passive log. It’s an instrument. I’ve been writing in Apple Notes since 2023 -- half-finished ideas, things I’m reading, what’s going on at work, what I feel -- and reading Mechner made me notice that I could improve my journaling. I’ve been recording, but he was thinking on the page.
He published his journal because Steven Soderbergh published his production journal from sex, lies, and videotape. So Mechner read other people’s published journals as fuel for his own work in his twenties. He kept his own. He read Soderbergh’s specifically, and decided to publish his own thirty years later.
If you’re reading this and you go read the book and later start journaling and maybe publish part of it in the future, the chain extends by one. I would love to read more of these.
Everything is traced from somewhere real
For me, one of the most useful entries in the entire book is November 12, 1988. Mechner sits in his office, his game isn’t fun, and he reverse-engineers what makes other games fun. He looks at Pac-Man, Asteroids, Karateka, Lode Runner, and writes:
What elements do all of the above share?
1. You can tell at any moment, by glancing at the screen, how close you are to finishing, how much is left.
2. There are setbacks and successes on the road to ultimate success. You get a smaller version of the “Whew! Did it!” when, say, you clear a difficult area, or drive a guard back with a series of blows. Some setbacks are fatal, some are just irritating. But when they happen, you feel they’re your own fault.
3. You can hold off on the next task, waiting for the right moment, before saying “OK... now” and going for it... plunging into a period of higher tension, higher chance of either a setback or success.
He follows this a few entries later with a line that should be on a wall somewhere:
Every event has to move you closer or further away from your goal, or it’s not an event, it’s just window dressing.
What’s striking is where the rest of the game comes from. Nothing in Prince of Persia is invented from scratch. Everything is traced from something real:
The running and climbing animations come from his younger brother David, filmed in white clothes in the Reader’s Digest parking lot in Chappaqua, NY. Mechner traced the VHS frame by frame.
The opening is Raiders of the Lost Ark (aka Indiana Jones) -- the first ten minutes are explicitly his reference for “an athletic hero in a dangerous environment.”
The setting is One Thousand and One Nights -- the prince, the princess, the vizier.
The sword fight everyone remembers -- the prince’s first attempts at combat were going to be a kind of jumping move. It was bad. So Mechner took six seconds of the duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The combat that defines the game is a tracing of a 1938 movie scene.
Mechner writes elsewhere: “In all creative fields, innovation comes from combining things that haven’t been put together before.” The making of Prince of Persia is a brief in favor of that line.
The lunches were the network
I had a note in my reading log that the journal felt strange because it’s pre-social-media (and they didn’t have a lot of things to scroll, which is a little crazy when you remember it; so they just played games). Mechner is constantly having dinner with people. Every week, two or three named lunches and dinners. Tomi. Adam. Roland. Janice. I noted at the time that I’m optimized in the opposite direction -- most of my work conversations are asynchronous and written, and I tend to clear my week down to one or two meetings to protect time for projects.
After the book, I’m not sure that optimization is right. Mechner’s “old car” pivot happened at lunch. The “your game has no triumph” pivot happened at lunch. The composer of the Prince of Persia soundtrack is his father, the rotoscope subject is his brother, and the princess animation reference is the teenage daughter of a Broderbund manager. The auteur identity is “Mechner made it alone.” The actual production was a small village of people he sat next to and ate with.
In a 1990 entry, he writes the cleanest version of this:
The more experiences I have, the more I realize that working with people you like and respect is more important than anything else.
The journal is the place he figures things out alone. The lunches are the place where the figuring gets corrected.
What changes when the project ships
The last third of the book is the part nobody really writes about. The game ships in fall 1989. Mechner has, at twenty-five, made one of the most acclaimed games of the era. He spent 1990 as a gofer (the errand-runner on a film set) on student film shoots in New York City. He spent 1991 in foreign cities -- Italy, Germany, and Switzerland -- learning Italian, then Spanish, and then French. He spent 1992 in Paris and Madrid. The journal entries from these years are slower, vaguer, and more searching. From inside these post-ship years, he writes the entry that I have been thinking about for a while:
I’m happiest when I’m in the midst of things -- struggling, forging alliances and overcoming problems and, dammit, making something.
“What, exactly, am I waiting for?” I know what I want to do with my life. Why not just do it?
This is a 27-year-old man who has shipped one of the most influential games of all time, asking what he’s waiting for. What surprised me is that the journal entries from these years are also among the best writing in the book. It is slower and softer, but the notebook keeps going. He doesn’t yet know that more games are coming -- The Last Express (a 1997 adventure game) in a few years, The Sands of Time (the 2003 Prince of Persia reboot) a decade later -- or that he will eventually move to France and write graphic novels. Over the years, he just keeps writing it down.
One person
If you’ve read this far, I assume you’re the one person. The book is The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985–1993by Jordan Mechner. The Stripe Press edition is the one to get -- the marginalia is the form. The four-minute essay “Why I Keep a Journal” is the appetizer; read it on the train. If you’ve never played the original, SDLPoP compiles in a minute, and the first level is harder than it looks.
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Notes
A handful of details about the book and the game that didn’t fit above but are too good not to mention.
1. Stripe Press, and why this edition is the one. Stripe Press is run inside Stripe-the-payments-company. Patrick Collison is a Mechner fan, and the 2020 republication is essentially a labor of love from inside Stripe. The original 2011 self-published edition was plain text only. The Stripe edition is functionally a different book -- the marginalia, the photos, the sketches. If you order one, order this one.
2. The journal you’re reading is curated. Mechner edited heavily before publication. He cut entries about relationships, family money worries, and a few about Broderbund colleagues he didn’t want to embarrass. So the “raw journal” is a journal-shaped artifact. The reader is seeing the version he could live with.
3. The 1989 timing parallel. Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Palme d’Or in May 1989 and was released theatrically that August. Mechner shipped Prince of Persia in October 1989. The two journals he ends up reading and publishing are by people whose breakthrough work was happening in the same season.
4. Shadowman is a memory hack. The most iconic enemy in the game -- the prince fighting his mirror image -- exists because Mechner couldn’t fit another character’s animations in the Apple II’s 128K of RAM. He XOR’d the protagonist’s own animation against itself and called it the enemy. The image you remember is a constraint that became a feature.
5. The soundtrack is by his dad. Francis Mechner -- a research psychologist and amateur composer -- wrote the music. The Prince of Persia theme everyone remembers is by Jordan’s father.
6. The original deal was insane. No advance, no salary, just a 15% royalty. Broderbund gave Mechner a desk and let him work for free for four years on the promise of future royalties. He has since said he “feels stupid” for that deal. It worked out -- Prince of Persia sold two million copies -- but it’s worth knowing how much of the four years were financially unhinged. Eventually, his royalty from the game could be around $80,000+/month.
7. The princess is Tina LaDeau -- the teenage daughter of a Broderbund manager. Mechner filmed her the way he filmed his brother.
8. The level editor that almost shipped. Mechner originally intended to ship a level editor so players could design their own levels after finishing the game. He pulled it at the last minute. Fans eventually built SDLPoP with one.
9. The game flopped for almost a year before becoming a hit. Broderbund’s marketing department underinvested, and Prince of Persia sold poorly through late 1989 and into 1990. The journal entries from this period -- Mechner thinking he’d made a failure -- are the most poignant in the book, and the reader knows what he doesn’t yet.
10. Mechner now lives in Montpellier, France. He moved to France around 2017 and now mostly writes graphic novels. In 2024, he published Replay, an autobiographical graphic novel about three generations of his family -- including, briefly, the four years of Prince of Persia. So the journal has now been re-told a third time, in a third form. Diary → annotated book → graphic novel.
Follow-ups, if you want more. Mechner also has a prequel journal called The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982–1985, available directly from his site. And Ars Technica has a great 11-minute interview with him: How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II’s Memory Limitations. It covers both Karateka and Prince of Persia, and you can see clearly how the lessons of the first game became the second.
Love this piece. Thanks for writing it and posting on r/notebooks!
I enjoyed reading this so much, I feel like it found me at the exact moment I needed it. Especially resonated with how those long drags of nothing are actually part of the process. And how new things come from combining old things in creative ways. Thank you for writing this, I am on my way to order the journal!