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Wired correspondent Gus Mastrapa was on the scene in Los Angeles to witness the recovery of a piece of gaming history.
LOS ANGELES – Jordan Mechner saved everything.
He saved all the videotape he took in October 1985 of his brother running and jumping around their old neighborhood, footage that he rotoscoped into the animations for his Apple II game Prince of Persia. He saved all of the meticulous journals he kept of the production process, documenting each tiny step of the creation of the landmark hit game.
When he was working on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2002, the new game’s programmers wanted to add Mechner’s classic to their PlayStation 2 update as an Easter Egg, and asked if he had the source code.
No problem, Mechner thought. I saved everything.
The finished Apple II game was easy to find on the internet, but the source code – the original program that Mechner had written himself on his old Apple II – was nowhere to be found. Mechner looked everywhere, asked anyone who might have ever had their hands on it, to no avail.
A decade later, Mechner’s dad sent him a box of old stuff that was buried in one of his closets. There, stuck in between in piles of still-shrinkwrapped European editions of Prince of Persia and covered in dust, were floppy disks that read: “PRINCE OF PERSIA Source Code (Apple). ©1989 Jordan Mechner (ORIGINAL).”
Disks: found. But what about the data?
When Fox Mulder, X-Files agent, had a technical problem, he called in his cadre of geeks, The Lone Gunmen. Mechner followed his lead and dialed up his own personal geek squad, calling them to his Los Angeles home one Monday morning in April.
To Them, It’s Just Old Stuff
Jordan Mechner’s house is nestled at the base of the Hollywood hills on one of those Los Angeles streets so verdant and well-maintained that you’d never know that the smoggy grime of Hollywood Boulevard was mere blocks away.
A white pickup truck pulls up and parks on the street; enter vintage computer collector Tony Diaz. He made the 80-mile drive up from Oceanside to help Mechner mine his old floppies for their lost treasures. From the bed of his pickup, he unloads crate after crate of old Apple II computers, drives and cable. He’s brought everything that might possibly be necessary today. If those disks have information on them, he’s going to extract it.