Jordan Mechner's old journals

[Norbert]

I don't think this URL has been mentioned on this forum yet:

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/

Basically, if you want to read the tale of how PoP came to be, you can read all about it there. It starts off with PoP being just an idea Jordan has and it ends when PoP2 is more of less ready and he starts working on The Last Express. Warning: it takes several hours to read everything. Personally, I liked reading the first 2/3 of the text. The last 1/3 was mostly about him traveling; not that interesting. Some quotes:
June 24, 1989: "Everybody is convinced POP is going to be a megahit."
July 15, 1990: "It's agonizing watching Prince fight for life."
It's interesting to read about how "Shadow Man" was seen as the main opponent, how Jordan learns to stand up for himself, that Ed Badasov (who was his product manager) made up the working title Prince of Persia, how Jordan was working on movie scripts (Birthstone, In the Dark, Bird of Paradise, and so on), how he was checking out the girls, and so on. There were actually a lot more ups and downs during the development of PoP than I expected and it took a long time before the game actually became popular (it got good reviews, but Brøderbund didn't market the product well enough). I will add a link to these journals on the Web Links page of popot.org.

[Norbert]

No longer freely browsable on his website.

To browse it freely, access is still available via the Internet Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140907150 ... -journals/
This also allows you to read the (at times insightful) comments people had been adding over the years.

[Norbert]

He's currently adding his 1993 journals, which include PoP2 stuff.
The first part (January-March) is already online.
The rest follows the coming weeks.
https://www.jordanmechner.com/library/1993-journals/