The Making of Prince of Persia: Notes on a four-year project

The piece summarizes Jordan Mechner’s journals from 1985-1993, republished as The Making of Prince of Persia with helpful annotations. It traces how a young developer built Prince of Persia on an Apple II over four years, showing that the visible bursts of coding were only half the story: long pauses, social breaks and reflection made up roughly half the elapsed time. Specific production details illustrate how the game was assembled from real-world sources - rotoscoping Mechner’s brother in a parking lot for animation, borrowing tone from Raiders of the Lost Ark, basing combat on a 1938 Robin Hood duel, and drawing setting from One Thousand and One Nights - and how collaborators (father composing, colleagues advising) formed a small but essential village around the auteur. Mechner’s “old car” metaphor and his accounting of about 3,800 hours (roughly two years’ earnest work) underline the claim that gaps and journals were integral, not incidental.

The journals functioned as an active creative tool - thinking on the page, testing design, and recovering momentum during doubt - and meals and conversations served as critical checkpoints that reshaped decisions. After shipping, entries become more exploratory as Mechner travels and asks what to build next, yet the notebook habit persists. The Stripe Press edition is noted as definitive for its margin notes, photos and curation, and the overall takeaway is a practical case for sustained, journal-driven work, loose collaboration, and the value of idle time within long creative projects.