Found a fascinating read: Jordan mechners development journal from 1986.

Some excerpts:

He spent most of a day trying to get vhs video (taken on a $2000 video camera) into the computer. He ended up photographing every single frame with a photo camera, waiting for the prints to be developed, and then scanning the stills.
Wow.
Today: $150 Flip camcorder, 5 minute usb transfer, done.

Orignially, he planned to have no enemies in the game, since there wasnt enough memory for two figures with different animations.
The enemy was created by xor-ing the hero’s animation, so it was black with a white outline

When he started on it, nobody was sure if by the time it came out there would even be a video games market. Likewise, by the time he was about to finish, the original platform it ran on, the Apple II, was declining, so he needed to port to DOS immediately.

He alternated between goofing off for weeks, and doing nothing but work and sleep.

Back then, games were expected to sell for years, not weeks like now. That prince of persia only started to sell well a few months after its release was perfectly normal back then. By the time he made real money from it, he had already moved on to other projects, switched careers and written it off as a learning experience.