5 HN users recommended this documentary4 months2020–2026score 5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Repeatedly called essential viewing for game development history and clever work under memory constraints.
In an Ars Technica War Stories episode, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner describes how he made the game on the Apple II, fighting hardware memory limits and the platform's decline. It covers the rotoscoped animation and the engineering tricks involved.
“Essential viewing for anyone interested in game development history.” (HN, 2025)
> "For the first time I felt what it's really like to play Prince of Persia when you're not the author and don't already know by rote what's lurking around every corner." This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions. I remember seeing the following short but extremely interesting documentary about makings of the game as well: [this video] - Essential viewing for anyone interested in game development history.
If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend watching the "War Stories" video on the making of Prince of Persia: [this video] On a related note, I also highly recommend the "War Stories" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: [link]
I have watched the creator explaining to us in great detail how he came up with so many tiny details that made it a perfect game for its time! Just watch it yourself, you will be in awe! [this video]
Creator explains the tiny details that made the game
> no more engineering for engineering’s sake I'm not sure many successful engineering orgs did much of that but also the environment our creations live in is much different now. It was a huge task just to get our programs to run at all not very long ago. When I first started coding I was working on some code for a VLSI problem and I spent like a month just figuring out how to get the problem to fit on disk (not main memory, but on disk!). Now there are similar things that run on a laptop [0]. And it's not like I'm unique in having to come up with crazy solutions to problems tangent to the primary problem in this space. [1] Now the infrastructure for our code is amazing and the machines that execute them abound in resources, especially in the cloud. Now that the yoke has been cast off it makes sense more time is spent on the solution the actual problem you set out to solve in the first place. [0] [link] [1] How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations [this video]
Example of crazy engineering around memory constraints
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