Stripe is bursting with side quests these days. In addition to providing the “financial infrastructure to grow your revenue” that we all know and love, they run a print magazine and a publishing company. Scrolling through the website of the latter and feeling jealous of their stunning visuals, I stumbled on a book about videogames. Or rather, one videogame in particular. Having played the first level of Aladdin on the SNES and enjoyed the movie adaptation of Prince, I thought I might give it a read.
The journal entry form made it an easy read, and the concision of each note reminded me—for my own practice—that you don’t have to write a novel for every entry to build a compelling narrative or get meaningful content onto the page. I found Mechner’s attention to craft, especially now in an era where the love of the game has dried up in the shadow of grifters and generic fortune-seekers, inspirational. A random sample:
The PC version is maybe 50% of what it should be. I can’t even tell these guys what to fix… it’s a million little things, and they’re just not up to the hassle. That kind of attention to detail is why the Apple version took me two years. This version is probably the best I’ll ever get out of them. Oddly enough, this makes me more psyched to do the new game. It reminded me why I’m good at this – of what I can do that others can’t, or won’t.
His discussions of money are bizarre and interesting. Either things are very different now, or I have underappreciated the value of intellectual property and the amount of work people will do for you with the promise of an eventual commission. Likely both. In particular: he makes a chunk of change selling the right to port his games to other platforms. Modern game engines abstract away much of this process, and even without this help there are only three desktop platforms and three consoles worth thinking about—strictly less than in his day. But I will keep in mind the value of an agent shopping your work around, should I ever decide to do something like screenwriting, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of working on a personal creative project within the bounds of a corporate partner (as he does with Prince of Persia via Broderbund).
It’s a thoroughly Bay Area book as well. To interpolate a seasonally-appropriate phrase: reading this, I am presented with a narrative of events from his time but in this place. It’s trippy: he eats at Marin Joe’s! I suppose I should have assumed from the general vibe of that restaurant that it had been there forever. To top it all off, there’s this lovely paragraph:
Man, it’s great to be back. When I got into my rented car and hit Highway 280, I laughed out loud, I was so thrilled. The trees, the colors, the quality of the sunlight… San Francisco is the most beautiful city on the planet.
Should Mechner ever feel compelled to release a sequel from the period in which Prince was being adapted to a feature film, I would immediately give it a read. For someone so in love with both making games and writing films, I’m sure it was a crowning acheivement.