Thread by @doctorow

From an early age, it was clear that @jmechner was extraordinarily talented. While he was a Yale undergrad, he created the game Karateka, which Broderbund published and which went to #1 on the Billboard software charts.

1/

But it was Mechner's followup game, Prince of Persia, that cemented a place in game history for him once it became part of the canon of games, inventing and popularizing many of the tropes of modern sidescrollers and puzzle games.

2/

In "The Making of Prince of Persia," Mechner reproduces three years of personal journal entries describing the trials and tribulations that went into PoP.

jordanmechner.com/store/the-maki…

3/

It's a genuinely delightful book, even if you don't care about the history of video games.

First, because of the ingenuity of the technical tricks that Mechner invented to create the breakthrough graphics in the game.

4/

Mechner was a multi-talented kid: a visual artist, a gifted programmer, and a would-be filmmaker. To get the fluid movement that redefined the look of video-game characters, he filmed his kid brother (a budding Go champion) doing acrobatics.

5/

Then he did all kinds of crazy things to turn that motion into a rotoscopic basis for his hero, like photographing the frames with a still camera (bought from the old Whole Earth Store!) and scanning them, then turning those scans into pixel art.

6/

To read Mechner's contemporaneous logs of his wrestling with his tools and his machines is to take a journey back to a heroic age of games authorship, when even programmers affiliated with industry-leading studios like Broderbund were making tools to make tools to make games.

7/

There's also a sense of living in a dynamic moment, when really different new computers were shipping regularly, each with radically different capabilities and limitations, and how that played into the calculus of a hacker wrestling with optimizations for just one platform.

8/

But the book also works on entirely different levels. It's also really fun to peek inside the head of this driven, smart kid as he graduates from Yale, moves to San Francisco, arriving with a major success under his belt to take up a position at an industry-leading giant.

9/

He's brash and smart, and really observant and insightful about the dynamics of the people around him - Broderbund was incredibly dysfunctional - while at the same time, he was just a kid, making stupid mistakes about his life and the people around him.

10/

So that even as you're rooting for this bright prodigy, you're also cringing at his self-destructive work habits and worrying about how far out of his depth he's gotten. It's got a hell of a dramatic arc.

11/

And finally, this is a snapshot of a moment when the tech industry had an enormous amount of *slack* in it - despite the long hours and high stakes, the industry was made up of lots of different people trying different things.

12/

It was an industry that grew when new people showed up and did new things - not like today's growth model: giant companies buying little companies and killing or co-opting the ideas that might grow to threaten their dominance.

13/

It was an industry where you got a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, because there were lots of magazines that might review your game; there were lots of new platforms were players might discover them. There were lots of different retailers who might stock them.

14/

Countries had their own computers and their own retail channels. There were multiple distributors bidding for products, hungry and coming up with new ways to make them into hits.

15/

And that is the true story of Prince of Persia! Because the game was a giant flop. The original Apple ][+ version TANKED. Mechner scrambled hard to get a DOS version out, betting everything on it, and...that failed too.

16/

Indeed, the last 20% of the book is just a series of journal entries wherein the young Mechner is collecting these rave industry reviews, using them to get PoP launched on another platform, and then having his hopes dashed.

17/

Until, eventually, the game became a hit. It didn't become a hit because Mechner had some incredible new insight or lucked into a brilliant new tactic. He just got a ton of shots, and eventually, he got lucky.

18/

Luck is key to every success (of course). You can improve your odds by doing something amazing (as Mechner did with PoP), but the other key way to improve your odds is to get more chances.

19/

In the decades since Mechner created PoP, endless rounds of consolidation has led to a denuded, monopolized world where all the chances are hoarded by the winners - the ones who are getting bailouts during the crisis - and the rest of us get one (or fewer) chances.

20/

THAT'S the lesson of Mechner's diaries: that, in the absence of more chances, there are countless significant, breakthrough works created by brilliant, unsung prodigies who labor over them with heartbreaking intensity that just...disappear. They get one (or fewer) chances.

21/

Mechner's success begat a long, fruitful career that brought delight to millions. He's had moderate success with the screenwriting and directing that obsessed and distracted him while he was creating PoP, and has created some stunning graphic novels.

boingboing.net/2013/07/10/tem…

22/

He's someone who was very good, very lucky, and who got lots of chances.

BTW: back in 2012, he recovered and posted the original PoP sourcecode:

jordanmechner.com/archive/#2012-… …

eof/