After having been deemed lost for several decades, developer Jordan Mechner has recently released the full source code to the original Prince of Persia from 1989. Gamasutra reports that the source code was rediscovered by Mechner’s father, who came across a tray full of old discs, games, and three floppies on which the code was stored. More information is available after the jump.
The game was developed between 1985 and 1989, and initially only released for the Apple II. The recovered source code has now been released for free through Github. Mechner also released a document written by him in 1989, that was meant to aid other developers in porting the game to different platforms. As for the reason to publish the code, Mechner states that he did it “because it was a piece of computer history that could be of interest to others, and because if we hadn’t, it might have been lost for all time.”
His name is Mechner, not Mercher. 😉
Woops ^^ Thanks for pointing that out – fixed!