I love this breathless re-telling of the story of Jordan Mechner recovering the original Apple II version of the Prince of Persia source from ancient archived floppies: The Geeks Who Saved Prince of Persia’s Source Code From Digital Death.
Having safely obtained the Quadris data, Tony Diaz hands the disk off to Jason Scott. Whereas some might be happy just to have played a long-lost videogame, Scott has posterity to think of. A full magnetic read of the floppy will guarantee that there’s nothing else on there, no deleted data from another lost project.“We’re like Indiana Jones,” Mechner says. “We just ran into the tomb, grabbed the idol and now we’re running out. We got the golden idol!”
Mechner keeps handing disks to Diaz, and more golden idols keep spilling out. Like many computer kids of his day, Mechner used old floppies and rewrote them with new data. One of them used to hold part of Roberta Williams’ early Sierra On-Line adventure game Time Zone. Now, Mechner says, it holds the only copy of one of his earliest games.
I remember those days. Only, for me, those old floppies were the Fred Fish disks, and it was an Amiga, not an Apple II.
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