The Swan Song of the Apple II: Prince of Persia

The son of a world-famous psychologist and a programmer—born into a well-off family in New York—Jordan Mechner lacked no opportunities to explore the boundaries of his creativity. Other young people his age could only dream of shooting amateur films with a Super 8 camera, while Mechner could write screenplays and draw storyboards for short films and animated movies and then seriously attempt to produce them. Not all of his interests revolved around creative activities: he was also an avid board game player, enjoying games such as Monopoly, card games, and chess, and a film enthusiast, particularly fond of the works of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, Disney animated films, and movies starring Bruce Lee. His first contact with video games took place in arcades, when he came across a Tank cabinet. Atari's game did not make a strong impression on the young Mechner, who was then a teenager. To him, video games were just machines that coexisted with pinball tables and essentially provided entertainment in a different way. Seeing a video game did not change his aspirations for the future, namely becoming a filmmaker and entering the world of film production.

This firm conviction, however, was not destined to last long and was shaken to its foundations just a few years later. After a first encounter with computers during his second year of high school, through limited use of a PDP-11 in class, Mechner had the chance to come across an Apple II owned by one of his classmates. Unlike the bulky minicomputer at school—which did nothing particularly interesting and was practically inaccessible—the Apple II was a machine the young man could touch, open, and study. Above all, it was a machine capable of doing interesting things, mostly games, since in Mechner's limited experience the only available software was entertainment-oriented.

It did not take long for Mechner to want a computer of his own to use independently, and it had to be an Apple II, because other computers of the time did not have comparable graphics capabilities, either in resolution or in the ability to display color images. Mechner, who had spent years drawing sketches and writing film plots, felt he needed a machine that could help him put on screen what had so far remained in his imagination and confined to his notes. Spending the savings he had earned by "producing and selling comics inspired by Mad Magazine and drawing caricatures at local fairs," in his final year of high school Mechner bought an Apple II with 16 KB of memory and began doing what many aspiring game programmers had done: he started to become familiar with programming through listings published in magazines.

The next step was trying to learn 6502 assembly programming through trial and error. It was not that Mechner was completely inexperienced or lacked basic knowledge—he had attended school courses and others organized directly by IBM, during which he learned the rudiments of BASIC and APL—but from the very beginning his approach to programming and game creation was very spontaneous. In the early 1980s, substantial documentation was available for aspiring Apple II programmers, but Mechner ended up teaching himself, and his first training ground was creating games directly inspired by those he had at hand.

Mechner: "The first really ambitious project I did was a game called Asteroid [Blaster] . That was my attempt to do for Asteroids what a game called Apple Invaders had done for the other most popular coin-op game of the time. I figured that if Apple Invaders was a big hit because it was exactly like the coin-op game, then I could do the same thing for Asteroids ."

After completing the development of Asteroid Blaster, Mechner sent the software to Hayden Software. Unfortunately for the young programmer, his project arrived too late: the era of successful unlicensed cloned games was coming to an end. After an initial contact that had raised some hopes, Mechner waited for a long time in vain for a response from Hayden Software. Without completely losing heart, he started working on a new project, once again inspired by Asteroids, but trying to introduce some variation: instead of asteroids, colored balls appeared on the screen, bouncing off the edges of the monitor, which explained the game's title, Deathbounce.

For his new project, Mechner decided to try his luck with Broderbund, a choice that would prove particularly fortunate. Unlike Hayden Software, which had left the programmer in a long limbo without concluding anything, Doug Carlston personally took the time to call the young developer. The company was still very small, and Carlston handled everything himself, from game development to evaluating publishing proposals. During the call he praised the game's smoothness and technical quality, while also pointing out the lack of real innovation in terms of gameplay. A few days later, along with the official reply to the Deathbounce submission, Mechner received a copy of Broderbund's new bestseller, Choplifter, and a joystick so he could try it properly. The experience turned out to be a true epiphany for him.

Mechner: "It's extremely well-done — I'd say the best Apple game I've seen. You're in a helicopter. Mission: rescue hostages. Choplifter inspired me to write a 3D animated adventure; an ambitious undertaking, for sure. It'll be quite a challenge, and a lot of work."

Unable to shelve Deathbounce once and for all—and the countless other projects he had in mind—especially since Carlston himself had suggested a few changes that might have made the game publishable, Mechner went on to develop new ideas, including that of creating a karate fighting game. It was July 7, 1982, and in the span of just one month the initial concept turned into a structured project, complete with a name, Karateka, some twenty pages of sketches for the game screens, and a combat system based, of course, on the joystick he had received as a gift from Doug Carlston.

Contact with Broderbund and with Choplifter had given Mechner fresh motivation. In particular, the young developer was struck by the cinematic approach of Dan Gorlin's game, which told a story whose context was explained in the manual, while the actual action unfolded directly in the player's hands, in the role of a helicopter pilot on a rescue mission. The smooth, pleasing, and functional graphics and, above all, the final sequence were a clear signal to Mechner: it was possible to do much more than the games he had seen up to that point. It was possible to create new kinds of gameplay and offer players experiences that seemed to go beyond simple entertainment. Unlike many titles of the era, conceived as potentially endless, Choplifter had a structure with a clearly defined beginning and end: a game could last just a few seconds or at most a few minutes and always ended with the fate of the sixty-fourth United Nations delegate, either dead or rescued. Not by chance, the words "Game Over" were replaced in the game by "The End."

For Mechner, this was an unmistakable sign.