1989's Prince of Persia, by Jordan Mechner, featured superbly realistic animation when such things were a rarity in computer gaming. Now, two decades later, he's published the original footage of his little brother leaping to and fro, from which each frame was traced and digitized.
Jordan began his pioneering work while still an undergraduate at Yale University. Dissatisfied with the stilted movement of characters in computer games, Jordan borrowed the technique of rotoscoping that he had learned about in his history of cinema class. In 1983 he began experimenting by filming his karate instructor, Dennis, doing a variety of martial arts moves. Then he traced images from the film and used a Versawriter graphics digitizer tablet to copy the images onto the computer. On March 19, 1983, Jordan finished a test of this to see if it would work in a game he was developing, and in his diary he recorded his excitement: “When I saw that sketch little figure walk across the screen, looking just like Dennis, all I could say was “ALL RIGHT!”” Jordan’s game Karateka (1985), a Japanese-themed karate game, became the best-selling title in the country and Jordan had established himself as a video game designer even before he had graduated
Here is Ben Kingsley, villain of the movie version of Prince of Persia, being wrong about experimental rotoscoping footage.
Today a future without schools. Instead of gathering students into a room and teaching them, everybody learns on their own time, on tablets and guided by artificial intelligence. Flash Forward: RSS | iTunes | Twitter | Facebook | Web | Patreon | RedditIn this episode we talk to a computer scientist who developed an artificially […]
Where are our petabyte drives? Brian Hayes takes us through the reasons storage is “stuck” in the low terabytes. The tl;dr is that we got such exceptional capacity growth in the late 90s and early 00s we don’t need much more right now, so the focus since then has been on SSDs, networking, interfaces, etc, […]
Amélie Lamont, a former staffer at website-hosting startup Squarespace, writes that she often found herself disregarded and disrespected by her colleagues. One comment in particular, though, set her reeling — and came to exemplify her experiences there.
This tiny computer isn’t just cutest thing we ever did see, it’s actually incredibly powerful too. If you play your cards right, you can program Raspberry Pi (no relation to actual, delicious pie) to control physical objects on your command.You’ll just need a Raspberry Pi (duh) and a few courses to learn how to use […]
Sometimes a round of drinks ends in late night karaoke, body shots, and waking up to a tiger in your hotel room. We get it. It happens. The important thing is that we never put ourselves in danger of a dreaded DUI or worse, put others in danger too. Take the guesswork out of it […]
Surfing the web today is packed with all sorts of perils–hackers, annoying trackers, ads, you name it. Luckily, there’s still a way to protect yourself and ensure anonymity when you’re web browsing: it’s called TigerVPN.We want to feel safe whenever we browse the internet, and this innovative software helps immeasurably. Whenever we want fast, private web access […]
