Long lost Prince of Persia master copy discovered

Jordan Mechner has found the original Apple II master copy for his breakthrough game Prince of Persia, bringing an end to a ten-year search for the game’s source code.

Three plastic 3.5″ disk boxes containing the game were discovered by Mechner’s father when cleaning away old clutter in his New York home.

Plans are now in place to convert the game’s code “into some kind of 21st-century-readable format”.

The original was written on Apple ProDOS disks.

“My dad called to tell me he was doing some spring cleaning and had shipped me a carton of old games and other stuff he’d found in the back of a closet,” Mechner wrote on his blog.

“The carton arrived yesterday. My jaw dropped when I saw what was inside. Three little plastic 3.5″ disk boxes nestled among them… which appear to contain the ORIGINAL APPLE II SOURCE CODE OF PRINCE OF PERSIA that I’ve been searching for, off and on, for the past ten years, pestering everyone from Doug Carlston to Danny Gorlin and everyone who ever worked at Broderbund, and finally gave up hope of ever finding.”

He added: “For all fifteen of you 6502 assembly-language coders out there who might care, I will now begin working with a digital-archeology-minded friend to attempt to figure out how to transfer the code into some kind of 21st-century-readable format.”