Jordan Mechner releases original Prince of Persia source code

After finding the original Prince of Persia Apple II source code in a box last month and working out some way to extract the info from three Cretaceous Period 3.5″ disks, Jordan Mechner has released it to the public.

“Let me begin to count the ways I’ve been lucky with this: The box was found. The disks were intact. Prince of Persia and I happened to have a high enough public profile that people of Jason [Scott, digital archivist] and Tony [Diaz, Apple II collector]’s caliber (and dozens of others who contributed their expertise via IRC, skype and twitter from around the world) cared,” Mechner wrote on his blog.

Prince of Persia Apple II screenshot

“In the bigger picture, our timing was lucky. The 1980s and the Apple II are long enough ago to be of historical interest, yet recent enough that the people who put the data on the disks are still with us, and young enough to kind of remember how we did it. Roland Gustafsson, author of the special 18-sector RWTS routines that had made our disks super-efficient in 1988 (and unreadable to anyone but us), was able to get on IRC in 2012 and explain what he’d done to Discferret kids who weren’t born then.”

“For all these lucky reasons, our archaeological expedition was crowned with success.”

Jordan Mechner at his Apple

Now you can grab the code from Githuband make your own Prince of Persia clone, then back it up to a flash disk and lose it, and find it again in a box 22 years later, and feel the same way Mechner did.