Book Review: The making of Prince of Persia

I recently finished reading this ebook (spoiler: a big dissapointment), and as usual here is a small review.

Review

Making of Prince of Persia book cover

Title: The Making of Prince of Persia

Author: Jordan Mechner

This book is... mostly dissapointing from a game developer perspective. Really few sketches, photos or other vmaterials than the author's text diary itself. The book feels just digitalized, without adding anything else. It also contains pure memories, which is good regarding no rewriting of history, but also becomes boring many times as the writing is not very thrilling (he was young, etcetera).

The main issue is that as Jordan wanted to be a film screenwriter it drifts off a lot from the game creation to his personal life stories, and after Prince of Persia 1 gets released, it's even more accentuated. You then only get glimpses of royalties obtained from PoP1 while he "sometimes" designs and coordinates PoP2, and in the last chapters the beginnings of The Last Express.

If you're searching for coding techniques this is not for you. If you want a written documentary of how developing and designing games was in the early 90s, then it might interest you a bit. And of course if you loved Prince of Persia then will somehow enjoy the book... at least the parts regarding the game itself.

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