The Historical Jordan Mechner

Jordan Mechner by Stuart Pettican
Jordan Mechner by Stuart Pettican

I’ll be the first to admit I had very little interest in Jordan Mechner‘s latest activities just a few months down the line. We may have had the latest Prince of Persia coming out from Ubisoft, but then again, Mechner had very little to nothing to do with that particular project. All this changed the moment Mr. Mechner started re-posting his old personal journal entries from the late 80s!

In his journal, we discover a moody young man in his early 20s, candidly writing of his wish to become a Hollywood scriptwriter(!) and the hardships of trying to stay motivated and working on a computer game seemingly destined for failure. That is, a game that later received an endless amount of ports, sequels and turned out to be one of the most iconic platformers of all time…

The constant air of disappointment, dissatisfaction and disillusion make the journal entries quite interesting to read. At the beginning of the entries, Mechner is just coming off a successful game in the form of Karateka, and is about to sequence into what became the first Prince of Persia. The posts begin from July 4, 1985; at the time of writing, we are up to August 8, 1990. Mechner does state that he planned to stop posting when Prince of Persia got ready in October 1989, but he soon realizes – the scriptwriter that he is – that at that point, the story has only reached its climax, but the payoff in the form of resolution is still nowhere in sight.

Prince of Persia 1To highlight some interesting entries, one entry consists of one of Mechner’s workmates exuding fears over how the “Apple IIe market has started its long downward spiral” 1)http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1988/07/july-11-1988/. Another has a good friend of Mechner’s telling he’s “…too dumb to appreciate what you’ve got and too lazy to finish what you’ve started” 2)http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1988/08/august-29-1988/. A staff member offended by breasts on the game’s cover art. An earthquake. Too many great anecdotes to list!

The historical value of these posts is tremendous, and allows us considerable insight into the development of POP: Heck, even the game’s original source documentation is available! Nevertheless, the most interesting element of these posts is their confessional style: Without doing anything in particular, he paints to us a vivid picture of a young man, free of constraint and financial burden but badly self-positioned in-between two realms – scriptwriting and game design – often indecisive and highly uncertain of what the future may bring.

What I’m saying is, the guy was blogging before blogging was.

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