Jordan Mechner finds original Prince of Persia Apple II source code in a box

The last time I went through a box of old stuff, I found a dusty candle, a bunch of empty CD cases, and a broken bit of a Bionicle. More importantly, I didn’t find the disc I was actually looking for, although I found it later in the back of a cupboard so that ended happily.

When Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner goes through boxes of old stuff though, he finds cool things like the game’s original Apple II source code. Obviously Jordan Mechner’s life is not only way more interesting, but also way more accomplished than mine.

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Jordan Mechner at his Apple

“My Dad (yep, the same guy who composed the music for the original Karateka and Prince of Persia)called from New York to tell me he was doing some spring cleaning and had shipped me a carton of old games and other stuff of mine he’d found in the back of a closet,” wrote Mechner over on his blog.

“The carton arrived yesterday. My jaw dropped when I saw what was inside.”

“No, I don’t mean the stacks of Spanish Drosoft versions of POP and Karateka (though those are cool too, especially if you have an Amstrad computer with a cassette player). I mean those three little plastic 3.5″ disk boxes nestled among them… which appear to contain the ORIGINAL APPLE II SOURCE CODE OF PRINCE OF PERSIA that I’ve been searching for, off and on, for the past ten years, pestering everyone from Doug Carlston to Danny Gorlin and everyone who ever worked at Broderbund, and finally gave up hope of ever finding.”

Best part? As soon as he works out how to transfer the code from 3.5-inch Apple ProDOS disks, he’s going to release it to the public so everybody can make Prince of Persia clones. Then I can write my own code to a flash drive, and hopefully, one day I’ll find it in a box and feel really interesting and accomplished too.