This is serendipitous as I'm just reading the making of Prince of persia from stripe press.
Goes into lots of detail as what was going on through the journal entries of the dev. Honestly it has encouraged me to start journaling again myself as I can see the value in being able to read back to a day in the last.
I will always have a soft spot for the original Prince of Persia. It was one of those games I played constantly as a child, although only when my dad would let me use his Apple ][c.
I only realize it now but it had some very unique game mechanics that even today you don't see very often (ok maybe that's a bit of a stretch but the mechanics were novel to me back then):
- Notably you have 60 minutes to finish the game. Dying doesn't reset the timer, so there is constant pressure to keep moving.
- There is a satisfying parry mechanic. This is still rare to see in 2d platformers.
- Incredibly smooth animation. This could be nostalgia goggles but the rotoscoped animation really stood out compared to other games of the era.
Such an absolute classic. My brothers and friends and I played this so much when we were kids that we had a notebook written up to overcome the game's "DRM", which required you to find a letter in a particular page/paragraph/sentence in the game's manual. You then drank the potion with the right letter floating over it. If you got the wrong one, you died and had to restart the game, but this was only at the end of level 1 so that wasn't a huge setback. Theoretically you didn't have this manual if you pirated it, but kids have nothing but time so our notebook ended up quite complete.
The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. And my god, the vertical chopping blades you have to carefully jump through...those things are brutal.
"The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. "
Skyrim did that also pretty well. The first draugh zombies/skelletons lying km the catacombs
are just objects to loot from.
But then you tried to loot the next one and it moves and gets up ..
When I was a kid, my grandparents were involved in a pretty decent intercontinental floppy disk piracy ring. They would buy and clone software sold locally and send it forward and get copies of games in response. My parents ran a small business converting peoples university notes/recordings into well written essays. My grandparents had a PC with Prince of Persia, and as payment for my parents essay writing services one of their friends from Hong Kong used to come around and teach me how to play. See he couldn't speak or understand english very well, but he had memorised the potions you needed to drink to get past each level, and also the fighting technique of most of the bad guys.
These are some of my earliest memories of computing, and the conversations I had with that guy, who was doing computer science, plus the things he opened up for me on the computer really pushed me into the industry.
I ended up visiting the US with my grandparents sometime later, and got to see the original disks most of my games had been cloned from. They even had the original F-15 Strike Eagle box from memory.
> When I was a kid, my grandparents were involved in a pretty decent intercontinental floppy disk piracy ring. They would buy and clone software sold locally and send it forward and get copies of games in response. My parents ran a small business converting peoples university notes/recordings into well written essays. My grandparents had a PC with Prince of Persia, and as payment for my parents essay writing services one of their friends from Hong Kong used to come around and teach me how to play. See he couldn't speak or understand english very well, but he had memorised the potions you needed to drink to get past each level, and also the fighting technique of most of the bad guys.
Sounds like the summary of the opening chapter of a Bruce Sterling novel.
Love that your Hong Kong friend memorized the DRM codes.
Of course, DRM was no issue with a cracked copy of the game...
Stripe did such a good job with this book (and the others I bought that they published). Each one feels like an artifact I can show off on top of having interesting information inside.
> The Apple II was dying as a platform by the time the game came out [...] it was rereleased on PC in the US and sales picked up. You wouldn’t get that second chance today.
On a much smaller scale, I was actually part of something similar a few years ago. The game Wavetale was originally a Stadia exclusive but launched just before the platform shut down. We were allowed by Google to port it and release it for every other platform, and I ended up being one of four programmers doing that work; I mainly focused on optimizing the switch version.
The Stadia version barely got noticed, but the other versions, especially Switch, did quite well. The game was even featured on AGDQ, which was really cool.
I actually rewired my internal PC speaker to a big external speaker just so that I could hear the music/sfx of the game in all its glory.
And that awesome intro animation too - never seen anything like it at the time, like simply seeing realistic human faces being drawn in a DOS game was just mind blowing.
I have a soft spot for Prince of Persia, but I have an even softer spot for Karateka, its (rotoscoped) predecessor on an ancient green phosphor Apple //e, a computer (and an age) where everything seemed possible.
Goes into lots of detail as what was going on through the journal entries of the dev. Honestly it has encouraged me to start journaling again myself as I can see the value in being able to read back to a day in the last.
I only realize it now but it had some very unique game mechanics that even today you don't see very often (ok maybe that's a bit of a stretch but the mechanics were novel to me back then):
- Notably you have 60 minutes to finish the game. Dying doesn't reset the timer, so there is constant pressure to keep moving.
- There is a satisfying parry mechanic. This is still rare to see in 2d platformers.
- Incredibly smooth animation. This could be nostalgia goggles but the rotoscoped animation really stood out compared to other games of the era.
But still it was an amazing experience whenever I played it. I felt the pressure and the need to start again like no other game nowadays.
But maybe that’s just because I was a kid.
The first time we got to the skeleton that comes to life and fights you, my heart was absolutely pounding. I didn't expect that kind of thing from a game, and you walk past a few other skeletons that don't move at all so the game conditioned you to kind of ignore them or just treat them as part of the environment. And my god, the vertical chopping blades you have to carefully jump through...those things are brutal.
Skyrim did that also pretty well. The first draugh zombies/skelletons lying km the catacombs are just objects to loot from. But then you tried to loot the next one and it moves and gets up ..
These are some of my earliest memories of computing, and the conversations I had with that guy, who was doing computer science, plus the things he opened up for me on the computer really pushed me into the industry.
I ended up visiting the US with my grandparents sometime later, and got to see the original disks most of my games had been cloned from. They even had the original F-15 Strike Eagle box from memory.
Sounds like the summary of the opening chapter of a Bruce Sterling novel.
Love that your Hong Kong friend memorized the DRM codes.
Of course, DRM was no issue with a cracked copy of the game...
On a related note, I also highly recommend the "War Stories" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o
highly recommended as 90s gamer
Also, Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8
On a much smaller scale, I was actually part of something similar a few years ago. The game Wavetale was originally a Stadia exclusive but launched just before the platform shut down. We were allowed by Google to port it and release it for every other platform, and I ended up being one of four programmers doing that work; I mainly focused on optimizing the switch version.
The Stadia version barely got noticed, but the other versions, especially Switch, did quite well. The game was even featured on AGDQ, which was really cool.
Also, the steps, the gates and all other sound FXs.
Most people are/were fascinated by the fluid animations, but this game was perfect from every angle.
And that awesome intro animation too - never seen anything like it at the time, like simply seeing realistic human faces being drawn in a DOS game was just mind blowing.