'Prince of Persia' creator Jordan Mechner on telling stories in 48k or less(theverge.com)
theverge.com
'Prince of Persia' creator Jordan Mechner on telling stories in 48k or less
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/27/2980806/prince-of-persia-jordan-mechner-narrative-games
5 comments
"It's often in pushing against a constraint that the best ideas arise."
As an example: We created Opera Mini targeting the Java ME-capable phones that were available in 2004.
The flagship device of the Java ME platform at the time was the Sony Ericsson K700, with its 176x220 screen and relatively speaking amazing Java performance, enabled by its quite talented developers in Lund, Sweden. (A bunch of the same people are now working in leading roles on their Android-based devices, as I understand it.)
But Sony Ericsson never really captured much market share outside of the nordics (and Russia. And The Arab countries). Everywhere else was sort of Nokia country.
So we also ran decently on the Nokia 3510i with its 96x65 pixel display. And with much worse performance (but still with an amazing improvement over the built-in browser).
...
Anyway, these days Opera Mini has 170M+ monthly active users and we have a quite nice browsing experience on Android (with opengl es hardware acceleration) and iOS.
Pretty neat for something that started at like a 60 kB download.
The flagship device of the Java ME platform at the time was the Sony Ericsson K700, with its 176x220 screen and relatively speaking amazing Java performance, enabled by its quite talented developers in Lund, Sweden. (A bunch of the same people are now working in leading roles on their Android-based devices, as I understand it.)
But Sony Ericsson never really captured much market share outside of the nordics (and Russia. And The Arab countries). Everywhere else was sort of Nokia country.
So we also ran decently on the Nokia 3510i with its 96x65 pixel display. And with much worse performance (but still with an amazing improvement over the built-in browser).
...
Anyway, these days Opera Mini has 170M+ monthly active users and we have a quite nice browsing experience on Android (with opengl es hardware acceleration) and iOS.
Pretty neat for something that started at like a 60 kB download.
Yes, I found that part very inspiring too. Gem of a quote
Can't emphasize this enough.
WTF! I thought Mechner is taking $48,000 to tell some story.