"Who's Going to Read This?": On the Development Journals of Karateka and Prince of Persia, and on Keeping a Record

There is probably almost no gamer of the age that warrants a regular health checkup by now who does not know Prince of Persia. It came out in 1989, so to younger gamers it may be an unfamiliar game. If you were asked to pick the greatest games, it would almost certainly land in the top 100 even if not at number one; its main series kept appearing through the seventh console generation; in 2025 a spin-off, The Rogue Prince of Persia, came out; and although it underperformed at the box office, there is even a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal—so might we not call it an IP that still holds its vitality?

Of the Prince of Persia series, Jordan Mechner took part directly in developing the first and second games, and since game development back then was not so large in scale, his effort is contained in them almost in full. The Prince of Persia development journal is a book based on the development journal Mechner kept while making Prince of Persia 1 and 2.

Some readers may already remember seeing this book. The cover might have been blue, or it might have been black—but the backstory of the Prince of Persia development journal needs explaining first. The journal came to be published not only because Mechner had kept his journal so well at the time, but because the first book began as a self-publication. In Korea, Jang Hee-jae took an interest in this book, got Mechner's permission, and carried out a domestic translation. Run through crowdfunding—an unfamiliar thing by the standards of the time—the project blew past its target of 1.2 million won (small by today's lights but a fairly large sum then) to reach 3.66 million won, and was even written up as a case of a successful funding campaign. Goodfunding, the service that hosted the campaign at the time, no longer exists.

Clockwise from top left: the first original edition, the Goodfunding Korean translation, the U.S. 30th Anniversary Edition, and the Neukkimi Inneun Chaek Korean translation.

I'll confess there is a reason it is hard for me to review this book objectively: I took part in the funding work around that time. By a strange turn, Jordan Mechner happened to be presenting his experiences at a classic-games session of GDC, held in San Francisco that year, and I went with a book I had ordered in advance from Amazon and had delivered to a San Francisco friend's place (the lodging I'd booked couldn't receive deliveries), got it signed, and used it for the funding. He wasn't the quickest to reply, but fortunately the communication wrapped up, the book came out safely, and it was later reissued with a new cover by the publisher Neukkimi Inneun Chaek. If you have a black Korean-language cover, you probably took part in the funding; a blue cover would be the later edition from the publisher. There is also an epub version on Dipia, excellent even by today's standards of quality. Because the e-book market had not yet fully settled, it was released at first only on Apple's iBooks and only later on domestic services—but it was a meaningful piece of work that folded in, as photos and videos, development materials from the time that the book itself could not hold. The Prince of Persia development journal, brought out this way by the pooled efforts of many people, was—as I recall—probably the only one in Asia translated solely into Korean.

Domestic publishing contracts, especially for foreign books, are mostly on a five-year basis, and after five years they usually go one of two ways: pay more to extend the contract, or let it go out of print. This contract term is one reason that, in today's publishing market especially, if you don't buy a book when it comes out you end up unable to get it. The Prince of Persia development journal went out of print in just that way, and as with many good books, it was not rare to see it listed at a premium of over 50,000 won in used bookshops.

Around the time the Prince of Persia journal was published, we talked about how nice it would be if it sold well and the Karateka development journal (published in 2012) could come out too—but that did not actually happen. And only in 2026 did the Prince of Persia and Karateka development journals, which the game-book specialist publisher Starbeez had been steadily preparing all along, finally come out.

Since it is a book made from a diary whose original already exists, one might think it does not differ much from the edition published in 2013; but in the interim Mechner donated the materials he had used in developing the games to The Strong museum in the U.S., and a 30th Anniversary Edition was newly published with Mechner's annotations added to those materials and the diary. Thanks to that, the Korean edition of the Prince of Persia journal published this time is based on the 30th Anniversary Edition, adding Mechner's additions explaining the circumstances of the time, extra visual materials that let you see that era, and the 30th-anniversary essay at the back.

The newly published Karateka and Prince of Persia development journals. The covers use those of the original games.

So, now that a quarter of the twenty-first century has passed, what we can gain from a diary spanning 1982 to 1993 is, frankly, hard to say. Since it is the development journal of a developer who made a masterpiece, you might expect it to hold some important secret of game development—but if you read this book with that aim, you will probably be disappointed.

Something often handled in the software-development field is the retrospective. The word "retrospective" is not used only in software engineering, but it tends to have taken hold here in Korea as Agile development methodology was introduced. To me at least, as a programmer, the word wasn't all that familiar before then; the retrospective done in software engineering has more the sense of a methodology for looking back on past work and reviewing it so as to do the next work better. There is one good piece of culture in the American game industry: the postmortem. As you'll feel right away from the word, it is a medical term, and this too, like the retrospective, aims to organize and share what was done well and badly in development after a game is finished. A postmortem has no fixed format, but there is still a form shared to some degree: along with an overall description of the project, you organize three to five things the project did well and three to five things it did badly. This form wasn't so much proposed by anyone in particular as it was the format that used to be posted on the American game-development site Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), and conferences and published magazines mainly used it too. Postmortems written this way were published under the title Postmortems from Game Developer, and in Korea under the title Seonggong-euro Ikkneun Geim Gaebal Story [Game Development Stories That Lead to Success].

The cover of Postmortems from Game Developer.

In Korea, from the late 1990s and especially up to the mid-2000s, Western game-development theories were imported in quantity, and as the postmortem culture came in with them, the Korea Game Industry Agency translated the postmortems published on Gamasutra into Korean, while domestic game developers also wrote and shared postmortems of their own. This culture influenced not only Game Development Stories That Lead to Success but also the way postmortems of domestic games were additionally included at the back of the Korean-translated Widaehan Geim-ui Tansaeng [The Birth of Great Games]; the later volumes 2 and 3 then came out with domestic games only. Beyond that, there are cases like the Mabinogi development completion report, which was disclosed only internally at Nexon.

The Mabinogi project completion report, exhibited at the 2019 exhibition 게임을 게임하다 /invite you_. Its contents are not disclosed to the public.

The part most worth considering about such postmortems is that, just as that word "autopsy" suggests, the postmortem is a document written after a project ends. In fact, in a game market that has shifted toward online games, people used to joke, "Our game isn't dead yet—how can we do an autopsy?" Organizing what was done well and badly by reviewing things after a project ends is meaningful, but often only surviving projects get the chance to do such a postmortem, and a review done after the events are over inevitably carries bias.

In this sense, the record that is a development journal is an important source for grasping the circumstances of the time, in that it is the product of whole decisions written out in a state of not knowing the future. We know the future, but back then it could not be known.

At GDC 2012, Daniel Cook, a developer at Spry Fox, once made the radical argument to leave a diary instead of a game design document. The idea is that since the design will change anyway, you should write down reactions to ideas and your own thoughts—and I remember being struck by it at the time. Because it can leave a record of what intent lay behind a decision—something a postmortem can miss—this guidance lets you look back on the circumstances of the time more accurately than memory.

In that respect, RPG no Tsukurikata: Hashino Katsura to "Metaphor: ReFantazio" [How to Make an RPG: Katsura Hashino and Metaphor: ReFantazio], released in 2025 by Japan's Chikuma Shobō, is a book worth noting as a new type of archiving, hard to find among books published so far. Written by the Japanese writer, critic, and manga-story author Sayawaka—who interviewed developers inside Atlus over the period the game was being developed, starting from around when Metaphor: ReFantazio, before it earned the name Metaphor, had its development announced under the project name "PROJECT Re-FANTASY"—the book is also a singular attempt at a midpoint between development journal and archive.

The Karateka and Prince of Persia development journals, unlike postmortems, contain the records of the time almost as they were, and so are excellent records for examining the mood and society of that era. That is true on the archival side. Even so, I do not want to place the value of these journals simply in being records of the time.

We know what became of the game industry by 2026. Around the time the game industry's growth faltered once in the 1980s United States, Mechner—then a college student—bombs an exam, skips class, sometimes does no development at all, and agonizes over whether to do film work or computer work. He sometimes dreams that he will become a millionaire through games, looks at how other games did and optimistically figures he too can sell that many, gets disappointed with the results, and goes on making games all the same.

The Apple II version of Prince of Persia didn't sell well, but it caught on as it was converted to other platforms. Thanks to that, we gained a decent IP in game history, and we get to read this development journal like this. The reissued Prince of Persia journal, befitting a 30th Anniversary Edition, adds period development materials and photos beyond Mechner's own materials—giving gamers who recall that era the pleasure of seeing the game's backstory, and letting young readers guess at the development environment of the time. But setting aside talk of the archive or of game-development knowledge and experience, these journals will offer you comfort too, in that they make you feel how, for anyone, master or not, pressing on along your own path while unable to know the future is a hard time.

Books and Articles Mentioned

• Prince of Persia development journal (2026, Starbeez)

• Karateka development journal (2026, Starbeez)

• Widaehan Geim-ui Tansaeng [The Birth of Great Games], vols. 1–3 (2011–2013, Hanbit Media)

• Seonggong-euro Ikkneun Geim Gaebal Story [Game Development Stories That Lead to Success] (2004, Acorn) — Korean edition of Postmortems from Game Developer

• RPG no Tsukurikata: Hashino Katsura to "Metaphor: ReFantazio" (2025, Chikuma Shobō)

• "Want Innovation? Throw Out the Game Design Document" (2012, ThisIsGame, https://www.thisisgame.com/articles/31448)