Got some stuff done today, but not as much as I needed to. No matter. It’s going well.
Big relief to finally have the princess and the title sequence in place. I keep forgetting no one has seen this stuff yet. It’ll blow them away. It totally transforms the game. It was worth spending all that time on.
July 24, 1989
Fourteen hours at the office. The last two were the most productive.
Two more days to fix as many bugs as I can.
Lance is puttering away on the IBM conversion.
July 25, 1989
Quit early today, eight o’clock. I actually got quite a bit done. Crossed half a dozen bugs off my list, and spent some time with Lance. The version I leave for QA tomorrow won’t be perfect, but it’ll be the cleanest yet, and substantially complete. Two weeks of good work after I get back should do it.
I’m seriously psyched for this river trip. It sort of crept up on me. For weeks I didn’t think about it at all, then I was wishing I hadn’t gotten myself into it in the first place, then I was just resigned to it. I didn’t realize how much I needed a vacation until just now. I took a real look at the pictures in the brochure for the first time… and now I’m yearning to go. I can’t wait.
Saw the retouched box illustration, finally. The triumph of Sophie K. There’s some kind of bright green garment now covering up the exposed skin. It looks like someone painted it on in a hurry, which he probably did. Oh well. There are battles you win and battles you lose, and in the big picture, this one is pretty meaningless. Still, it pisses me off. It was better before.
Now that the packaging is safely completed (or almost), it might be a worthwhile political endeavor to try once again to switch marketing managers – to the equally evil, but more competent, Latricia T.
Who cares. We’ll sell a million of ‘em anyway, despite marketing’s obstructive incompetence. All I should be worrying about is finishing it and making it good.
Virginia Giritlian called. She’s got a new boss, Jim Alex, and wants to try to set up In the Dark with him as producer. I said sure.
Virginia is really a sweetheart. Every time she gets a new job she tries to sell my script all over again. And she’s not even my agent any more. “It’s the script that never died, for me,” she said. But I push this out of my mind, to concentrate on the tasks at hand.
Brian wants to set up a Mac version. I wish Roland could do it. The truth is, Mac is the conversion that’s closest to my heart. It’s the one that would allow me to play my own game at home. And Mom. And Ben. And most everyone else I know outside the computer games industry. But officially, Mac has a 5% share of the games market, or something like that.
July 26, 1989
Left a stack of disks three inches high on my desk for Brian. Eleven for sales, three for QA, plus seven more. Hope they work.
I played the whole game straight through for the first time ever, start to finish, cheat keys turned off. Made it with seconds to spare (my hour ran out while I was fighting the Grand Vizier).
You know what? It was fun!
There’s a level of tension generated when you know you can’t cheat, which is completely absent from the normal playtesting I do. By the time that final battle rolled around, I had a solid hour invested, and damned if I was going to lose!
Still a few bugs – two weeks of work, like I said – but it’s a game, and a damn good one. I’m content. I’m ready to go river rafting.
The package mechanical looks good. I asked Brian to tell them to make my name bigger.
Should I bring this notebook on the river trip? It might be good to have. Other people bring cameras. So why not bring the book?
Then again, this is a vacation. This journal is like a tether. It keeps bringing me back to myself. And letting other people see me writing in it, I’ve come to feel, is kind of rude. It shuts them out. It undermines the bonding process that’s part of the reason to go on a trip like this one.
I’ll leave the notebook home. Instead, I’ll just pay attention.
August 2, 1989
Back from six and a half days out of time.
Doug drops me off at my front door. I let myself in and take a twenty-minute shower as hot as I can stand. Inventory my collection of scrapes and bruises. Healing nicely, as far as I can tell. Very tan in the face and arms and legs. Six days’ beard growth. Lingering nausea from the choppy flight back in a five-seater from Salmon to Boise with forest fires raging below. Sand washed out of my hair, teeth brushed, nails cleaned, and I’m back.
I could have stayed in SF and kept working and the week would have flashed by like any other week. Instead, I went to another planet and it didn’t cost me anything but a chunk of money out of the bank and seven days out of the calendar.
Note to self: If you ever get half a chance to do something like this again, do it. Do it at the drop of a hat.
August 4, 1989
Brian’s on vacation.
More controversy over the package design: Dianne Drosnes saw it and threw a fit. So Bill McDonagh put it on hold until Doug got back.
Doug glanced at it first thing yesterday morning and said: “Looks fine.” Today a bunch of irate women put a message on the LAN to Doug, Bill, and Ed Auer complaining that it’s sexist and offensive.
Doug wrote a two-page response to cool them down. It looks like we’re in business again, though this cost us a week. The whole thing is ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with the package design.
Tech Support is crazy about the game. Everyone thinks it’ll be a megahit. I keep getting asked if I’m going to do a sequel. The first one isn’t even done yet.
David is back from Japan.
August 5, 1989
Got an idea for POP 2. A ripoff of Ladyhawke.
That’s how you know the end is in sight, when you start thinking about the sequel.
August 7, 1989
Finally got down to work and fixed a couple of long-standing bugs. What I need to do is keep this up for a few more days.
Got a speeding ticket on the way home. I was so clearly guilty, I didn’t even try to plead with the officer. One of these days I’ll get one ticket too many and my insurance will go up to $3,000 a year.
Robert’s MG has broken down. With only three weeks left to finish his game, he just said “I don’t have time for this,” and left it at his mom’s house in LA. Now he’s riding his bike to work.
To meet my own deadline, allowing one week for copy protection, I need QA to sign off on the game within the next ten days. If I fix all the bugs by the end of this week, that leaves me a few days to fiddle with it and put in stuff like the mouse. (There has to be a mouse – I promised Tomi.)
August 8, 1989
Woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t know why I was awake. It was a quarter past one, just an hour after I’d fallen asleep. Half a minute later, the bed began to shake. The room was shaking. I lay there half asleep as the shaking went on and on, and suddenly the adrenaline hit and I was scared shitless. I realized the building could fall down and I could die.
Later I found out it had only lasted 30 seconds. It felt like longer.
5.2. Epicenter, San Jose. Five percent chance this is just a precursor to a bigger quake within the next few days.
An encouraging day. Cathy (Brown) saw the game for the first time in months and was as thrilled as I could hope for. Oliver delivered a bug report that was reassuringly thin.
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This game is going to be a hit. All I have to do is finish it.
Weird weather. Lightning storms, flash floods, forest fires all over the West, and now this quake. It’s like signs from God. But what does it mean?
Why do I feel so sad tonight?
August 9, 1989
Slowly bu
t steadily, I’m fixing bugs. The only new things left to do are the Vizier walking, the Princess embracing, and… the mouse.
August 10, 1989
A very productive day. Fixed a few of the very nastiest bugs I’d been dreading facing for months. Now, suddenly, it seems very close to finished.
Saw the sell sheet mechanical. Pretty exciting.
Met Andrew Pedersen, clean-cut young marketing guy just hired a couple of weeks ago. I like him.
August 13, 1989
Today I finally put in the mouse. I’m glad I did. It’ll probably take another full day to get it perfect, but it’s worth it. People are going to love it. Tomi will be thrilled.
August 14, 1989
Brian is back from vacation.
Put in the last two princess animations today (“Embrace” and “Send”). Only Jaffar, the Grand Vizier, remains.
Oh, and I talked to George. Good things are happening. His Texasville documentary is shooting in two weeks. He wants me to visit him in Texas once it starts.
Virginia called to say she is trying to set up In the Dark for $3 million with her new boss, James Alex. She’s all excited.
August 16, 1989
Full lunar eclipse.
A productive day. Put a disk into QA. Got the Vizier footage I’d shot with Robert over the weekend developed, and put in the Vizier walking. It looks OK. A relief, actually. That was the last thing I’d been wondering if it would be good enough. From now on it’s all downhill. Finishing what I’ve started, cleaning up, fine-tuning.
(Keeping my fingers crossed. No sinister new bugs, please. No disk crashes or corrupted data. Just another seven days of clean work, and a QA signoff at the end of it. Please, no nasty surprises.)
Robert is in deep panic about finishing his game. He did, however, put in a hilarious decapitation sequence this afternoon, in which the C-Generation knocks off your head and it bounces around the room while you stand there, convulsing and headless.
I called Tomi in Paris and told her about the climactic battle with Shadow Man. She was thrilled.
Thank God for this game. It’s the only area in my life where I feel sure that my efforts are doing good, not harm. It’s good, and it’s mine, and thousands of people are going to be glad it exists. How many things can you say that about?
August 19, 1989
Today was brutal. It was just me in the empty building, Saturday from 9 am to 8 pm. Didn’t talk to a soul all day, except Peter LaDeau and a pal of his, briefly.
I must have spent six hours fiddling with those Vizier arm-raising shapes. It was a big mistake thinking I could shoot it without a cape and draw the cape in later. I’d forgotten what a slow and tedious process hand animation is, and how hard it is to get decent results. But it turned out OK, considering.
The main thing is, it’s done. The opening scene with the Vizier and the princess is over. Finito. Now all that’s left is details. Text. Fiddling. I could putter about for days; but whatever changes I want to make, I’d better make before 8 am Monday.
After months of restraint, I’m starting to let myself get excited. This game is hot. It’s going to go over very, very well. If I’m wrong about that, then I don’t know anything and I should get into a different line of work. The only questions in my mind are:
1. how much of an Apple II market is left? And
2. will we be able to get the IBM version out fast enough to cash in?
It’s a great game. It’s the best I can do. After three years of work, I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. If I had to make it better, I don’t know where I’d start. I’ve given it everything I have. All I can do now is let it go, and hope for the best.
And help Lance get the IBM version done.
And make sure that Mac, Atari and Amiga versions get under way.
And Nintendo, for whatever my efforts are worth.
There’s still a whole page of things to fix. And another round of QA testing. And copy protection. It ain’t over yet.
But it sure is getting close.
August 20, 1989
A full working Sunday, but I didn’t quite finish everything. The creative part is done. What remains now is technical stuff, housecleaning, including the tedious task of cleaning up two more double hi-res digitized text screens. (I got the first one done today.) I’ll try to get the disks into QA before 4 pm tomorrow.
Tomorrow I’ll play the game all the way through a couple of times on the IIc, looking for bugs and trying to get a feel for the whole thing.
August 21, 1989
*sigh* I left work today, tired and burnt out, hoping the disk I was carrying would be The One. I went home, booted it up, and…
Those weird bugs are back. The ones that only show up the very first time you boot the disk, and only on certain machines, and then only sometimes. Obviously there are some zero-page locations that aren’t getting initialized. It looks like $06 (opacity) is one of them. That carries a sinister echo of the bizarre bug that’s been keeping the 3.5” version from running. In that case, after hours of confusion, Roland and I finally tracked it down to that same location, $06, which contained (I seem to remember) a 42. When I get in tomorrow I’m going to go over that code with a magnifying glass.
Shit.
August 22, 1989
The disks are in QA. All of ‘em.
Brian is thrilled. He immediately started hitting me up about doing a sequel.
For Brian, it’s done; but secretly, I’m still surreptitiously fixing tiny little bugs that no one will notice. I’ll slip the fixes in when we do the copy protection, Roland and I will test the hell out of it, and nobody will know the difference.
Tina came in today and I showed her her screen debut. I think she was kind of starstruck by the idea that it was her up there.
It was Robert’s first time meeting Tina face to face (not counting the virtual meeting I’d staged onscreen). After she’d left, we just sat there looking at each other, until Robert said with a sigh:
“It’s just the ephemeral beauty of an 18-year-old.”
I said: “Yes, but she’s 18 years old now.”
There was nothing more to say.
Should I start on a sequel? I could whip it out in five or six months this time, with Lance doing the IBM programming concurrently. I could even write a screenplay on the side… split my time, 50-50. (Uh… sound familiar?)
I don’t have time to think about this. I’ve still got (officially nonexistent) bugs to fix. Tomorrow Roland and I start on copy protection.
Ship It!
August 27, 1989
Roland and I stayed till midnight at the office both Friday and Saturday. We’ve been having a blast putting weird stuff into the copy-protection. Taking us back to our hacker roots. Today I’m going to stay home and test the hell out of it on my IIc to make sure none of what we’ve done interferes with anything.
QA signed off on the demo disk Friday, but it’ll be a fight to get Them to let us sneak it by the 12th.
August 28, 1989
Struck up a conversation with Peter Blacksberg, whom I’d seen around but never talked to, outside the Art Dept., where he was making signs with directions to his upcoming wedding. Out of the blue he suggested dinner.
Smart, nice guy, and pleased to discover a fellow smart person. He gave me some helpful advice about Broderbund. He’d heard the story of Brian yelling at Leslie in the scheduling meeting, and suggested I try to avoid identifying myself too strongly with Brian. “Be nice to Leslie. Maybe she’ll think ‘Well, Jordan’s a nice guy, even though his product manager is an S.O.B., so let’s try to get his project signed off.’”
His comment forced me into awareness that Brian’s temper may be doing me more harm than good, and that I should take care to build relationships with o
ther people at Broderbund too. Like Latricia and Sophie. And Bill. And Kevin and Leslie.
As far as I’m concerned, POP is ready to go out to HLS for evals. If QA comes to the same conclusion within the next couple of days, everything is beautiful (as Brian would say).
But until I’ve talked to Bill tomorrow and gotten his word, I’m not counting on it.
It was good spending the evening with Peter Blacksberg. It got my mind off POP and onto new things. Made me realize how much I’ve damped down my curiosity about the world, these last few months, in the interest of efficiency. It’s time to start rekindling it… looking for new people, places, friends. I shouldn’t just rush on to the next project with tunnel vision. I should relax, take a look around.
August 29, 1989
Oh, Lord.
At 10 pm tonight, I was happy. QA signed off on POP today. Brian talked to Bill, Bill talked to Leslie, and we actually got it out a day ahead of schedule. Everyone was ecstatic. Congratulations from all sides. I went to the gym, left phone messages with some friends, cooked up some spaghetti. Everything was beautiful. I was thinking I’d take the day off work tomorrow.
Then I decided to boot up the game on my IIc and play it through one last time, just for the hell of it.
It’s that God-cursed IIc VBLANK routine Roland and I stuck in at the last minute. It works, but it screws up the joystick. I’d checked it on the IIc downstairs, but like an idiot, I’d only checked it in keyboard mode.
There’s no way around it. I’ve got to tell Kevin and Brian, and send new disks down to HLS to replace the ones we sent today. It’ll be anticlimactic and embarrassing, and Brian, Bill and I will lose face. The only redeeming factors are (1) it was me who found it, and (2) it’s something I can easily fix.
Shit. Oh well. It could have been worse.
I got paid for POP today. The $4,000 “development fee” Ed Bernstein agreed to four years ago in lieu of an advance. Good thing, too. My bank account’s been running pretty low.
Alan Weiss is all excited about doing POP as a Nintendo title. Henry Yamamoto is interested too. This may actually happen.
The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 Page 9