Full of his hopes, thoughts, fears, struggles, aspirations, setbacks, and successes. Old sketches and screen captures. Just reading about his workflow for the animation on Prince of Persia is fascinating.
Jordan has a way with storytelling.
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: https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54?feature=shared - Essential viewing for anyone interested in game development history.
It's not just that. It's anything creative, really. It can be a tech startup, it can be a book... you name it. The thing is that creators become blinded by their own perception as they lose the ability to see flaws.
The longer they work on a thing, the less they are able to understand that other people might not understand a lot of things. I experienced it myself few times with my coding projects. It's actually quite bad as you just cannot fix a problem as you do not see it. Even if someone points it out to you, it takes quite some time to admit it is a problem.
This is why having teams of people is useful. Single startup founders, game designers, writers... have inherent blind spots in their entire work.
The experience is more like discovering there was an extra book in a series you've read 20 times over. Except you were the original author!
It's why you can't escape a prison of your own making (literally or figuratively).
[1] https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-prince-o...
I found someone briefly showing on yt :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQW4M5azj_0?t=60
It was an unassuming 286 running DOS, but it had a modem and a couple bulletin boards in the phonebook.
Prince of Persia was one of the games we played the most. Paired with a Soundblaster and a small set of speakers, playing that game in a dark office was a great experience.
document.querySelectorAll('.col-50').forEach(d=>d.classList.replace('col-50','col-100'));
The music, even though was playing from the PC beep speaker haunts me to this day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcI8lQvX8Ng
Finally, after all these years I still remember running it with "prince megahit" to enable cheat mode so I'd be able to pass the levels using ctrl+l...
IIRC, Hercules cards were more pro-oriented (monochrome graphics, but higher resolution than their contemporaries), so I doubt anyone would bother to make a game port specifically for them.
If you ran the game on a Hercules, most likely it was the CGA version run on top of a CGA simulator [1].
[1] https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php
From some research it seems that hercules was actually supported:
https://www.dosbox-staging.org/getting-started/enhancing-pri...
and from
https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/Games/game_prince.php
> Intel 8088/8086 CPU, 512 KB of RAM (640 KB for MCGA/VGA version) Graphics support for Hercules, CGA, Tandy/PCjr, EGA and MCGA/VGA (320 x 200 max. resolution in 256 colours)
Notice that PoP was one of the few games I was able to play with that hercules monitor :|
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/196/prince-of-persia/specs/do...
They really upped the level and detailing on the art and the audio/music is quite good as well.
Design-wise they added a button to perform a forward jump which is really welcome.
1. [https://shot97retro.blogspot.com/2019/06/prince-of-persia-in...]
2. [https://www.mobygames.com/game/196/prince-of-persia/screensh...]
To be fair, he probably has better to do today than keep up with web technologies. I know I would.
I saved the page as mhtml and it was only 24.4 MB
You're supposed to read the entire left-hand column first, then scroll back up where it continues with "Presage had an excellent, seasoned lead Mac programmer..."
This works in print where you can guarantee that both columns fit on the page, but on the web it's just weird.
The columns are responsive, so a quick usability to fix is to make your browser window narrow enough that the other column goes away.
For those who wondered:
https://www.therage.ie/products/prince-of-persia-snes-japane...
