Feb 15, 2012

Apple Classic Karateka Gets Reboot, Bird Punching Makes a Comeback!

Prince of Persia®

It's pronounced "cara-take-a." And the hit Apple II game is coming back this year.

Jordan Mechner's best known for Prince of Persia, the platformer action game that became one of gaming's first independently developed hits. PoP went on to get sequels and a whole new re-imagining in 2003 that led to a multi-part franchise and eventually a blockbuster movie scripted by Mechner.

But all the while, Mechner's first game—a hit in its own right—faded away into the fond remembrances of gamers of a certain age. Karateka put players in the role of a young karate master in feudal Japan trying to rescue his true love from an evil warlord. It was one of the earliest games that tried to channel martial arts combat into computer gameplay and ushered gamers into an eerily quiet landscape where losing any fight would send them back to the beginning. And a killer ending twist lay waiting for any player who bested all Karateka's opponents.

That was all in 1985, though and Mechner knows that the Karateka of 2012 needs to be a different beast. The new Karateka is being made by a small team led by Mechner and is scheduled for release this year on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. In an e-mail interview, the indie trailblazer talks about what will change in the updated version of his classic and what won't. Mechner also talks about recent indie games he admires and what old-school game he'd like to see resurrected.

Kotaku: Why re-visit Karateka? Why not something new?

Mechner: It's been eight years since my last game–-Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2003—and in the meantime I've been busy writing movies, graphic novels, everything but games. Coming off of the Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer Prince of Persia movie, which was massive, I was really itching to get back to my indie roots and make something with a smaller team, and Karateka just seemed perfect for that.

Unlike Prince of Persia, it's remained untouched for nearly 30 years. It's never been remade and there hasn't been a sequel. And yet people still remember it so fondly. I've gotten hundreds of messages from fans on my website and twitter asking about a new Karateka. It was my first game, the one that started it all for me, and I felt it really deserved to be revisited.

Kotaku: The derring-do of Errol Flynn and the literary impetus of 1001 Arabian Nights are the obvious ingredients for Prince of Persia. What were the inspirations for Karateka? It doesn't feel like a 1970 Shaw Brothers kung-fu flick…

Mechner: I made Karateka when I was in college, just discovering for the first time all those decades of cinema history I'd missed. I was obsessed with the films of Kurosawa — especially Seven Samurai, which is still near the top of my list of all-time greatest films. At the same time, I was discovering early Disney animation, and silent movies. I wanted to bring those film storytelling techniques to an Apple II computer game, which I saw as another new technology-based entertainment medium that was only beginning to tap into its storytelling potential, much as silent film had done a hundred years earlier. Japanese woodblock art was a great inspiration, the way artists like Hokusai created such a powerful mood and atmosphere with strong lines and just one or two colors. And the setting of feudal Japan was a straight homage to Kurosawa. But despite all these pretentious-sounding cultural references – remember, I was a sophomore in college at the time – under the hood, the story is straight out of an old 1970s Bruce Lee movie. And all of those things were also influences on the new Karateka.

Kotaku: Is there any way for a new version of Karateka to surprise people who played it years ago? After all, most everybody should know that you need to do a very special move before successfully completing the game…

Mechner: Believe me, I gave it a lot of hard thought and tried to rationalize any number of variations before arriving at exactly the conclusion you just did: You can't surprise people twice the same way. So, not to spoil anything for people who may still be intending to play the original Apple II version… but that sudden-death ending that startled you in 1985, as well as the other game-ending booby traps you think you remember, will NOT be in the new Karateka.

There are surprises, but they'll be new ones.

I made Karateka when I was in college, just discovering for the first time all those decades of cinema history I'd missed.

Kotaku: Your games are noted for the graceful fluidity of movement. Will you be revisiting any of the cinematic animation techniques that you used in the original Prince of Persia and Karateka?

Mechner: It's funny for me, looking at the original Karateka now. It was hailed at the time as this great cinematic breakthrough, with smooth rotoscoped animation. And it's eight frames a second, with these giant chunky Apple II pixels, and it slows WAY down when that big first gate scrolls onto the screen. So, yeah, for the new Karateka, we knew we had to work on the animation a bit to meet modern standards.

Kotaku: Karateka came out in a time when spoken dialogue was an exotic, technological feat in video games. Will this version be a silent affair as well?

Mechner: Karateka is a silent movie. Adding spoken dialog or voiceover narration would be superfluous, and I think would have detracted from the emotional immediacy of the story. Just because you have the technology to add recorded speech doesn't always mean you should. The Artist is a case in point.

By contrast, the sound effects track, environmental sounds and music are an incredibly rich and important part of the new Karateka. That's one area where I was really excited to push the envelope and go far beyond the original game. You have to remember that the Apple II could only play one note of music at a time – no chords – and every time I played a note or sound effect, I had to pause the animation on the screen until the sound was finished. That's one aspect of 1980s game technology I'm not particularly nostalgic about.

Kotaku: The presentation of hand-to-hand combat in video games has changed since Karateka originally came out. Will you be employing a different approach—different camera angles, wounds or other signs of bodily damage—to express Karateka's martial arts experience?

Mechner: Definitely, we've reinvented the combat gameplay mechanic for the new Karateka. The visuals and sound are much more dynamic and immersive. But it's very far from a brawler like Street Fighter. Even though Karateka has some claim to be considered the original martial arts game (it beat Karate Champ and Kung-Fu Master by a few months) and it could be thought of as a precursor to modern fighters like Tekken or Mortal Kombat, I don't really think of it as a fighting game. It's a cinematic, story-based game whose gameplay mechanic happens to be karate. It was important to me to keep things simple, and not get into the kind of fighting-game territory where it becomes about different moves and button combinations and inflicting different types of damage. It's a love story.

Kotaku: Your blog makes you out to be a compulsive sketcher. Are you re-designing any of the visual elements of Karateka's world or characters for this new version?

Mechner: All the visual elements are getting completely redone to take full advantage of modern day consoles. The stylistic inspirations are true to the original game – Kurosawa, Hokusai, Disney – but we've reinterpreted them to create a distinctive look for the new Karateka that's very different.

Luckily, I'm working with a team of fantastic artists and animators, so I haven't needed to draw on my own limited sketching skills this time around – except for the occasional scribble-storyboard. You may have noticed on my blog that I can only draw people while they're right in front of me, say, in an airport or café. Take the model away and I'm helpless. After twenty years, I still can't even draw a decent Prince of Persia from memory.

You can't surprise people twice the same way.

What's easier about being an independent game designer in 2012? What's harder?

Mechner: I'm actually doing a panel in a couple of weeks at GDC on that very subject along with Adam Saltsman (Canabalt), John Romero (Doom), Tim Sweeney (Epic), and Notch Persson (Minecraft), whose work spans the gamut from indie to triple-A and back again – much like the path I've followed with Prince of Persia and Karateka. I'm really looking forward to hearing about their experiences. The last few years have been an amazing renaissance for indie games, but as I think one of us wrote in the GDC session description, not all roads are paved with gold.

There are so many incredible tools available to indie game developers today – first of all a little software application called the internet, which we didn't have in the 80s. Someone who wants to create the next big thing in his or her bedroom today can draw on an amazing range of tools and a truly global community of fellow game developers – a resource I could only have dreamed of in the Karateka days when my only source of programming tips and information about the industry was my monthly subscription to Softalk magazine.

The flip side of that is, it's a lot harder to stand out when you're swimming in the same pool with hundreds of millions of people, rather than just thousands.

Kotaku: What's different about corporate video game publishing now compared to the 1980s? Is it fairer to the designer or worse?

Mechner: When I look at the Karateka contract I signed with Broderbund in 1984, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's about three pages long, is written in plain English, allows me as the game creator to retain copyright and ownership, and was personally drafted by company founder Doug Carlston. I was nineteen years old and in college. No lawyers made a nickel on that deal.

To say that in the past three decades the game industry has gotten more corporate is like saying the airline industry has grown more corporate since Kitty Hawk. But even in those early days, not every game designer's experience was as positive as mine was with Broderbund. (And if you read my old journals about the making of Prince of Persia, you can see that I spent almost as much time complaining about Broderbund's lack of marketing as I did coding.) So while the industry's growth has definitely tilted the balance of power toward big publishers, to be fair, game designers benefit when publishers invest tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in developing and marketing their titles. Prince of Persia became the global franchise it is today because Yves Guillemot believed in its potential and made a major bet on it. Anyone who's been in this industry thirty years will have had both positive and negative experiences. I've been fortunate – maybe unusually so — in that my experiences with publishers until now have been mostly positive, and I do feel I've been treated fairly.

Kotaku: What game design trends over the last decade—say, since you had a hand in The Sands of Time—have surprised you? Are you going to incorporate any of them in the new version of Karateka?

Mechner: It's a cliché to say that games are getting easier, but it's absolutely true. Players today expect controls that are not only intuitive, but much more forgiving and context-sensitive than in the past. Even in Sands of Time, in 2003, it was clear that modern console players no longer considered it fun to fall to their death just because they didn't press a button to grab a ledge, the way you had to in the original Prince of Persia.

In 1984, Karateka gave you one life. No saves, no checkpoints. If you lost a fight or suffered a mishap, even if you were almost to the end of the game, you had to restart the whole game from the beginning. And much of the gameplay depended on the player toggling between running and fighting stance using a control scheme in which it was quite easy to make a mistake. We couldn't get away with that today. No one would tolerate it.

So a major challenge in designing the new Karateka was how to make it less punishing and more inviting to play, by 2012 standards, yet still offer enough of a learning curve that players who like a tougher challenge will have something to sink their teeth into and really master. Many players cherish their memories of how good they felt when they finally beat the original Karateka, and it was important to me to honor that. The solution we found involves a new gameplay mechanic that's somewhat innovative, in its small way, and fits nicely with the story. I'm quite proud of it.

Kotaku: What contemporary independent game creators do you admire? What do you appreciate about their work?

Mechner: I've been very impressed by recent indie games like Braid and Limbo, for XBLA and PSN. They're works of art with great design integrity, that stand out despite their limited budgets because they've made strong and consistent creative choices. Elegance, artistic coherence and economy of means, are qualities I always look for in a game – in anything, for that matter – and sometimes you can find them in a smaller game, not just the bigger triple-A titles that impress with more overtly amazing technology and content.

Kotaku: What other releases from your fellow designers from the Karateka generation would you like to see revisited for the present-day?

I want Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set as an iOS app. Has someone made that already? They should!

Kotaku: Your memoir let readers into your head when you were working on Prince of Persia What would the Jordan Mechner of 2012 tell his 18-year-old counterpart if you got bathed in a waterfall of magic time-shifting sand?

Mechner: Don't worry so much about obsessively maintaining your vinyl record collection. You won't need it as long as you think you will. And senior year, when the Karateka royalties start coming in, buy shares in two little companies called Microsoft and Apple.

Oct 19, 2011

From Yale To Persia: Read the Private Diaries Of Gaming's Renaissance Man

Prince of Persia®

In 1985 Jordan Mechner was a student at Yale riding high on a mix of euphoria over the surprise success of his first video game, Karateka, and trepidation over the idea of turning that success into a career.

Trading the east coast for the west landed him in the thick of a game industry beginning to realize the potential of the medium. Mechner's journey from college student to Prince of Persia creator captures the birth of not just an influential video game, but of the industry. Fortunately, Mechner kept a diary. Below you will find a chapter from his eight-year chronicle of life as a developer and the birth of Prince of Persia reprinted with Mechner's permission. Enjoy. - Ed's Note

September 10, 1986

[San Francisco ] "I thought you were the pizza man," Tomi said when she opened the door to the Baker Street apartment and saw me there at the top of the steep steps with my two bags.
Now I'm reclining in luxury in one of their new armchairs, listening to Maurizio Pollini play Chopin preludes on their new CD player. There's a stunning view of San Francisco Bay out the windows that makes my stomach contract every time I look at it.

Did I mention that I'm scared? Getting a ride to work this morning with Tomi, pulling into the Broderbund parking lot – that was scary.

Now that the day's over and it's clear that I had nothing to be scared of, I'm not scared any more – I'm terrified. I'm scared shitless.

I have to rent a car. I have to drive it. On these insane twelve-lane racetracks they call freeways. I have to find an apartment and rent it. I have to move in. I have to buy a car. I have to buy insurance. I've never done any of this stuff before... and now I have to do it all at once.
And on top of this – or rather, at the bottom of it – I have to make a computer game.

It's gonna be fun.

September 11, 1986

Visited Danny Gorlin. He's sunk more money into developing the development system to end all development systems. Saw the final version of Airheart. It's got some staggering special effects and it's no fun at all to play.

Danny thinks spending a million bucks on a development system will give him an edge. He might be right. But the best Apple games have been developed on a plain Apple II with two disk drives. Lucasfilm spent a million bucks to make Rescue on Fractalus and Ball Blazer, and those games aren't significantly better than, or different from, the competition. The real strides forward – Raster Blaster, Choplifter, (what the hell) Karateka – were the work of solo programmers with no special resources.

Maybe Danny is leading game design into the 21st century. Maybe he's just flushing money down the toilet.

I'll stick with my Apple II.

"Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris... It's a classic, like Breakout. But I don't think Broderbund is going to publish it. The knaves."

September 11, 1986

Met with Gene, Lauren, and Ed Badasov and showed them my Baghdad ideas. (Ed B. made up the working title Prince of Persia.) The storyline didn't impress them much, but I think they saw promise in it.

It doesn't really matter a whole lot what they think – I'm the one that has to do it – but it sure as hell wouldn't hurt to have them enthusiastic. In a few months I should have something to thrill them.

I'm starting to get psyched to write this game. Slowly.

September 12, 1986

Apartment hunting with Steve Patrick. We checked out one place with a pink carpet, dusty chandeliers, and an old-lady landlord who said she doesn't like renting to kids. "They make a lot of noise," she said. "They invite their friends over."

"Not me," I said. "I just got off the plane from New York. I don't have any friends."

"Oh, you will," she said, ominously, sounding like Yoda in Empire. "You will."

Steve and Tomi told me I can stay with them until they kick me out.

"You should live in the Marina district," Doug advised. "You'd meet a lot of... (pause)... yuppies."

September 18, 1986

Looked at a house in Mill Valley, on a shady road winding through the redwoods. When I rang the doorbell the lady peered around me and said, "Is your mother down there?"

She spent fifteen minutes showing me the house, but I don't think I ever quite convinced her I was serious.

September 23, 1986

Spent much of today working on the logistical problem of how to get the footage from a VHS tape into the computer. I finally (tentatively) settled on photographing the frames one by one with a regular 35mm camera, getting prints made, then (after retouching as needed) digitizing the prints with a regular Sony video camera. It sounds like a pain but I think it's the best way.

September 25, 1986

Another solid workday. Today I stayed till around 7 and got DRAY pretty much finished. I tested it out by digitizing a page out of Muybridge. It'll do what I need it to do. It could use another day of work. Actually, I could keep working on it for a month, if I didn't have so much else to do.

September 26, 1986

Ed Bernstein called his last P.D. meeting this afternoon. He's leaving to head up Broderbund's fledgling board games division. DOUG HIMSELF will be taking over as acting head of P.D. He'll be taking my desk, the better to stay in touch with the people. So I'll be moving into Ed's office.

Life is strange.

P.D. is throwing Ed a goodbye party. "Better the devil we know than the deep blue sea," Steve said.

At lunch, Doug said: "You seem to have a very strong entrepreneurial bent." I was surprised, and said something about how I'd probably inherited it from my father.

Coming out here was definitely the right thing to do. In Chappaqua, I was in a rut. Now, I'm in the thick of it. It's great.

September 27, 1986

I have a car.

September 28, 1986

I have an apartment.

September 29, 1986

Today I moved into Ed's office. Obviously, this is a temporary arrangement; eventually some new guy will be hired to run P.D. and I'll get booted to some other part of the building. But while it lasts, it's great.

Besides vast amounts of space, a couple of armchairs for visitors, my own phone, and a door that I can close, the office has the most important thing of all – equipment. A printer. An amber screen. An Apple IIc. It didn't occur to me until I was actually confronted with two Apple II's on my desk and I had to figure out what to do with the extra one – but it's perfect. Now I can run programs without destroying the source code in memory. It's...(gulp)... a development system.

October 14, 1986

David Stenn read my screenplay. He said it has promise but would need at least one more rewrite to be saleable. Perhaps sensing my disappointment, he said: "Look, it's great for a first script – it really is.

I wouldn't show you my first screenplay. You obviously have talent, you should stick with it."

He was more impressed with the reviews of Karateka I'd sent him. "You're in the right business," he said. "What do you want to get into this one for?"

October 15, 1986

Bought a camera at Whole Earth. It was more expensive than I'd anticipated - $250 with the lens – but it's a good camera, and I imagine I'll find some use for it even after the game's done. I shot my first roll of film (David turning around) and had it developed at the local one-hour photo stop. I think this will work. The real problem, obviously, will be going from a sheaf of snapshots to the 280 x 192 Apple screen, and the loss of accuracy entailed therein. It almost makes me want to do it in double hi-res.

October 19, 1986

Shot four more rolls of film: David running and jumping in the Reader's Digest parking lot. One year ago tomorrow. Red and orange leaves... God, I'm homesick.

October 21, 1986

Today I wrote the first lines of code of the game (not counting the hi-res routines). It Begins.

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 25, 1986

Yesterday I implemented the running animation. Next I'll do the jumping... then the stopping... then the "jumping from a stopped position"... oh boy, this is great!

I restrained myself from taking all my work papers home with me yesterday... and I'm restraining myself from going to work today. There must be Balance.

October 31, 1986

Ed was pretty thrilled with the rough running and jumping animation, now under joystick control. So was Tomi. Lauren, Doug and Gary didn't act all excited, but I think they were secretly impressed.

I love the quality of the just-digitized roughs, but I'm having trouble preserving that fluidity and realism when I clean it up and stylize the figures. This is going to be a problem.

I beat out Ed and Steve for the number one spot on the Tetris high-score list. The Mets won the World Series.

November 9, 1986

God, I miss New York.

Fifth Avenue... Christmas shoppers... rich ladies in furs laden with shopping bags and kids... crisp cold autumn air... the smell of burnt pretzels... St. Peter's... the steel drum players wearing woolen gloves with cut-off fingers, breath condensing on the air...

I'm looking out the window at the San Francisco skyline across the bay dotted with white sails. It looks unreal. Like some kind of paradise.

November 10, 1986

Called Kyle Freeman in L.A. (he's at Electronic Arts now) and asked him what he'd charge to license his Apple music subroutine. He spent half the phone call dumping on Broderbund. I realized after I'd hung up that this was the first thing I'd done independent of Broderbund since I got here. Interestingly, it actually strengthened my confidence that Broderbund is the right place for me. It reminded me that I am independent.

November 18, 1986

Digitized the running skidding turn-around that was so amusing on videotape. It looks OK. I'll need to redo the straight running, but I think everything else will work as it stands.

About half the animations are in now. Next step will be getting the character to interact with the environment (climbing a rope ladder, pulling a lever, etc.)

At this juncture I think I'll redirect my attention to the game design.

December 2, 1986

Spent most of the day trying to figure out the velocity of a falling human being as a function of time. Enlisted practically everyone at Broderbund at one point or another. They all seemed to find this a more interesting problem than whatever they were working on.

December 24, 1986

Home for the holidays. It's good to be back. Not much has changed except that David has taken over my room. We played a game of go. He's seven stones stronger.

Pizza at Mario's with David and his friend Andy. We pumped about six bucks into a three-player game called Gauntlet, which has pretty good graphics and a great appetite for quarters.

People tend to be pretty bowled over by the animation test I've been showing them. "Don't you realize what you're looking at?" Jon Menell said. "This is the light bulb."

January 11, 1987

Macworld Expo '86 was pretty slick. The coolest thing there was the Radius 8 1⁄2" x 11" tall screen.

Dad called all excited because David did well in the dan tournament. I hadn't stopped to think about it until now, but the speed of his rise has been really startling. From total beginner to shodan in nine months. If he keeps this up another year or two, he could be one of the best non-Asian go players in the history of the world.

That's something.

January 22, 1987

The Nintendo game machine has sold a million units in the U.S. over Christmas. As of now, only a handful of cartridges are available. Nintendo is keeping a tight rein on new titles, presumably to avoid a flood of product like the one that sunk Atari a couple of years ago.

Broderbund - thanks to Doug's Japan connections - has three of the coveted slots.

Karateka would be a natural, but Doug is apparently leaning toward choosing some older titles - Castles of Dr. Creep or Spelunker or Raid on Bungeling Bay or even Choplifter - instead.
I talked to Ed and Alan with great passion, trying to convince them. This is the first time in my life I've had to lobby so hard for something I desperately wanted, and it's exquisitely frustrating. It's so painful wanting something from someone, being reduced to wishing and hoping they'll give it to me. I hate it.

If I'm going to be a screenwriter someday, guess I better get used to it.

January 23, 1987

Progress on Prince of Persia has slowed to a snail's crawl. I've been drifting in to work around eleven or twelve, and between that, the Butchery and the Sport Court, my workday is about forty-five minutes long. Ed and Gene and Lauren keep checking in to see what new and exciting stuff I've got up on the screen, and they go away disappointed.

Instead, I've been spending my time playing with my new Mac, Radius screen, and Scriptor screenplay formatting software. Shiny new toys.

January 26, 1987

Got up early for a change and put in a full day's work on the game. Corey talked me into switching assemblers, operating systems, and disk media (from DOS 3.3, S-C Assembler, and 5 1/4" floppies to ProDos, Merlin, and SCSI hard drive). The change should take about a week, but I think it'll pay for itself in the end.

January 29, 1987

Roland spent the whole morning helping me switch over to Merlin and ProDOS.

It was kind of a thrill to watch. Roland is a hacker of the old school. He's polite and unprepossessing in his dress and demeanor, careful about money and contracts. He drives a Saab with license plate SNABBIL. But under that conservative surface is a demon – a guy who will put his day job on hold for 72 hours and sit down and reverse-engineer an Apple II conversion of Tetris, just for the pleasure of it.

Watching him do what he did for me today, I felt a little of the old joy come flooding back. I'd almost forgotten the most basic thing: programming is fun. I've grown middle-aged these past couple of years. Roland is 23 but he's still young at heart.

January 31, 1987

Got to Broderbund around 8:30 and put in another solid eight hours. Converted BUILDER over to Merlin/Pro, but it's not working. Give me another day or two to get all the bugs out.

Showed Ed the latest (Jan. 27) working version. He was gratifyingly thrilled about the 3-D box with scrolling borders.

February 9, 1987

"When do you think you'll be finished with your game?" Lauren asked me on the way back from the Butchery. "I'm shooting for August," I said.

We agreed the important thing is to make it as good as possible, and that a few months earlier or later wouldn't really make much difference.

Today, for the first time, I constructed a really large level and played around in it. It was the first time this game had ever given me the feeling of space. It was kind of thrilling. I think it's going to be a winner. I'm going slowly this time, building on a solid foundation, and I think it'll pay off big.

February 14, 1987

It's great having David here. All the stuff I'd gotten jaded about suddenly seems cool when seen through my little brother's eyes. Like having a car, being able to drive anywhere I want, a place of my own, a key to Broderbund, free video games in the lunchroom... stuff like that. I'll miss him when he's gone.

February 16, 1987

Rented a camcorder and spent the afternoon in and around Broderbund, shooting more footage of David for the game. There were lots of people there even though it was a holiday.

March 5, 1987

The powers that be at Broderbund have decreed that Sensei (Tomi, Steve, Loring, Eric, Mike, and Robert S.), David Snider, Corey and I are all to be packed off from our present comfortable offices to a rathole on the second floor of 47 Paul. Tomi, Corey and I went there yesterday to check the place out. I'm seriously considering working from home.

The vibe at work has been kind of odd lately anyway. Doug is wrapped up in taking the company public, and the new people he's hiring have no interest in games – or in software, for that matter. There's really no reason for me to go into the office any more, except for camaraderie. I could always visit if I get lonely.

March 8, 1987

"This is a BAD day for you not to be at Broderbund, believe me. ‘Bye."

Not the message you want to find on your answering machine when you get home at 5 p.m. after having taken the day off to play hookey and explore Mt. Tam.

I called Corey back. He told me we'd been evicted from our office and our stuff transferred to the dingy, unpainted, windowless attic of 47 Paul Drive. Corey was at the bottom of the deepest depression I'd ever seen him, and was ready to move back home.

Tomi had a plan. "You've got to get the small room," she said. "It's got windows and ventilation. It'll be much better."

"Corey said he already asked Adaire about that and she said..."

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If I were you, I'd go into work early tomorrow morning and move both your desks and all your stuff into that room."

I called Corey back and told him the plan. He was terrified, but we did it that night, feeling like a pair of burglars.

March 9, 1987

I arrived at work to find Adaire furious. It seems they'd been planning to paint the room that day, and Corey and I, by moving in our furniture, had made it impossible for the painters to work. So we moved it all into the middle of the room and threw a tarp over it. We had to buy the tarp ourselves at the local hardware store, because the painters didn't have one.

***

This has been an excerpt from THE MAKING OF PRINCE OF PERSIA: JOURNALS 1985-1993. Available now for sale as an eBook on Amazon in a Kindle edition and as a PDF available for purchase on jordanmechner.com. It retails for $7.99.

Jordan Mechner is a game designer, screenwriter, filmmaker and graphic novelist. In addition to Prince of Persia, he created the now-classic video games Karateka and The Last Express. Mechner's first graphic novel - Solomon's Thieves, a swashbuckling action-adventure about the historical Knights Templar, illustrated by LeUyen Pham & Alex Puvilland - was published by First Second Books in May 2010. The next two volumes of the Templar trilogy are due in 2012. In 2010, Mechner also penned Prince of Persia: Before the Sandstorm, a Disney graphic novel movie prequel. Mechner previously collaborated with First Second, Pham & Puvilland on the 2008 Prince of Persia graphic novel written by A.B. Sina. You can learn more about him at jordanmechner.com.