How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica5 HN recommenders · 2020–2026
1.5M views · documentary · evergreen · Uploaded 2020-03-17
In an Ars Technica War Stories episode, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner describes how he made the game on the Apple II, fighting hardware memory limits and the platform's decline. It covers the rotoscoped animation and the engineering tricks involved.
Repeatedly called essential viewing for game development history and clever work under memory constraints.
1:25:348 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box
GDC Festival of Gaming
24:26The Beauty of Bézier Curves
Freya Holmér
22:21Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!
suckerpinch
3:36elevated by Rgba & TBC | 4k intro (FullHD 1080p demoscene demo)
Demoscene High-Quality Videos (Annikras)
54:11Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small
Stanford Graduate School of Business
1:01:07The Ultimate Game Boy Talk (33c3)
media.ccc.de
31:37How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica
2:22A Mind Is Born (256 bytes)
lftkryo
7 comments from Hacker News
Arstechnica has a great interview with Jordan Mechner, the creator of this game. A true technical and artistic wizard: [VIDEO]
If you haven't seen Jordan Mechner talking about the development of Prince of Persia yet (definitely recommended): [VIDEO]
The link doesn't work for me as I don't have an X account, but you can see more in this Ars Technica interview with the X poster: [VIDEO]
> "For the first time I felt what it's really like to play Prince of Persia when you're not the author and don't already know by rote what's lurking around every corner." This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions. I remember seeing the following short but extremely interesting documentary about makings of the game as well: [VIDEO] - Essential viewing for anyone interested in game development history.
> no more engineering for engineering’s sake I'm not sure many successful engineering orgs did much of that but also the environment our creations live in is much different now. It was a huge task just to get our programs to run at all not very long ago. When I first started coding I was working on some code for a VLSI problem and I spent like a month just figuring out how to get the problem to fit on disk (not main memory, but on disk!). Now there are similar things that run on a laptop [0]. And it's not like I'm unique in having to come up with crazy solutions to problems tangent to the primary problem in this space. [1] Now the infrastructure for our code is amazing and the machines that execute them abound in resources, especially in the cloud. Now that the yoke has been cast off it makes sense more time is spent on the solution the actual problem you set out to solve in the first place. [0] [LINK] [1] How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations [VIDEO]
If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend watching the "War Stories" video on the making of Prince of Persia: [VIDEO] On a related note, I also highly recommend the "War Stories" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: [LINK]
I have watched the creator explaining to us in great detail how he came up with so many tiny details that made it a perfect game for its time! Just watch it yourself, you will be in awe! [VIDEO]