Creator Jordan Mechner has found the long lost original Apple II master copy of his classic Prince of Persia. It had been lost for ten years.

The 3.5″ disks of the original game were discovered by Mechner’s father (composer for the original Prince of Persia game) while doing some spring cleaning in his New York home. Mechner’s father sent him a junk box, filled with old computer stuff, completely unaware of what was inside.

“My Dad called from New York to tell me he was doing some spring cleaning and had shipped me a carton of old games and other stuff of mine he’d found in the back of a closet. The carton arrived yesterday. My jaw dropped when I saw what was inside,” Mechner wrote in his blog. “I’ve been searching for (Prince of Persia), 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.”

Plans are now in place to recover the code and find some way to read it on modern machinery. Mechner may have some trouble, armed only with a Macbook Air.

He promises to post the results on his blog the moment he extracts something usable.