Jordan Mechner’s games moved like people because, frame by frame, they were people. For Karateka he pointed a Super 8 camera at a karate teacher; for Prince of Persia he videotaped his younger brother David running and jumping, photographed the television screen one frame at a time and traced the pictures into an Apple II. He did most of this on his own, starting as a teenager at Yale. “It’s a miracle that I actually graduated,” he told Retro Gamer. Then, at the height of his success, he stepped away from games, and has since spent as much of his working life on screenplays, documentaries and graphic novels as on programming. The journals he kept throughout, later published, are one of the few day-by-day records of how a 1980s game was made.
Fast facts
- Born: 1964, and grew up in New York.
- Education: Yale University; his own biography says he graduated with a BA in psychology.
- Games: Karateka (1984), Prince of Persia (1989), Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1993, creative director), The Last Express (1997), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003, designer, writer and creative consultant).
- Technique: rotoscoping, tracing animation from film of real people.
- Other work: the first screenplay of the film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), the documentary Chavez Ravine (2003), his published journals, and graphic novels including Templar and Replay.
From Super 8 to the Apple II
Mechner grew up in New York drawing, writing stories and comics, and trying to make animated films on Super 8. “I might have stayed on that path if I hadn’t stumbled on to computers,” he told Retro Gamer in 2013. He bought his own Apple II with money he had earned drawing caricatures at local fairs, and what hooked him was the colour: “Suddenly I could make games that were like little animated movies.”
His first attempts did not get far. An Asteroids-style game, Asteroid Blaster, could not be sold because Atari was cracking down on copies of its games, and its successor, Deathbounce, was turned down by Brøderbund. Doug Carlston rang to tell him it was “a little bit last year” and posted him a copy of the company’s hit Choplifter. That game, Mechner said, “blew me away”: it told a story instead of just racking up points.
Karateka
Karateka was the result, and Mechner made it alone, at 17 and 18, while at Yale. “It took two and a half years to finish,” he said, and everything had to fit in the Apple II’s 48K. Drawing the fighters by hand “just looked like programmer animation”, so he filmed the moves on Super 8 and traced them. He has described the footage in slightly different words: to Retro Gamer it was his mother’s karate teacher, to Wireframe in 2020 “my karate teacher”. He also filmed his father running and climbing onto the bonnet of a car to stand in for scaling a cliff. His father, a classical concert pianist, composed the game’s music.
Brøderbund published Karateka in 1984. Robert Cook converted it to the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit machines, and it sold, according to Retro Gamer, 500,000 copies across its formats. That was enough, Wireframe reports, to pay off Mechner’s college loans.
Prince of Persia
Mechner was 21, just out of college, when he started his second game. His idea, he said, was “to take the fluid action and presentation of Karateka and combine that with a puzzle solving game”, with the running and jumping of the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It took four years, from 1985 to 1989, in 6502 assembly language. This time he shot his brother on a VHS camcorder, froze each third frame on a video recorder, photographed the screen, painted the prints into silhouettes and fed them through a digitiser. He also wrote a level editor, meant to go on the disk for players as Lode Runner’s had; in the end, he said, “the only person who got to enjoy using it was me.”
The Apple II version sold slowly, about 7,000 copies in its first eight months or so by Mechner’s account, because the machine was fading. The conversions changed that. “It’s thanks to the various ports that Prince Of Persia survived and is still remembered today,” he told Retro Gamer, singling out the PC version, programmed at Brøderbund by Lance Groody with VGA graphics and music, and the Macintosh version. Computer Gaming World’s Charles Ardai called the game “the Star Wars of its field”. (See Prince of Persia for the full story.)
A step back
“After Prince Of Persia shipped, I felt burned out on making games,” Mechner said. He had been at a computer screen “from age 15 to 25”. He spent two years travelling, lived in Spain and France, wrote a screenplay and made a 16mm film in Cuba. Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1993) was made by a team of programmers and artists, with Mechner as creative director, working from Paris with his sketches and script.
The Last Express
The idea that brought him back came from a friend, Tomi Pierce, who began a story with “I was taking the night train to Berlin”. Mechner set his adventure on the Orient Express on the eve of the First World War, founded Smoking Car Productions in San Francisco, and went to Europe looking for the old carriages. The railway company, Wagons-Lits, had destroyed its pre-war archives, but a retired employee answered an advertisement: he and his friends had taken the floor plans and conductors’ manuals home to save them.
Actors were filmed against a blue screen over a 22-day shoot, and Smoking Car built, and patented, an automated rotoscoping process that turned the footage into something like “pen and ink drawing”, inspired by Art Nouveau. The story ran in real time, with about 30 characters moving through the train on their own timetables. Planned for 18 months, the game took four years. Computer Gaming World found it “one of the best adventures released so far this year” in July 1997, praising the “clever use of animation based on live-action footage (rotoscoping)”.
It did not sell. Retro Gamer blamed Brøderbund’s marketing department, which had left weeks before release, and The Learning Company, which bought Brøderbund and showed little interest in games. “By the time The Last Express shipped, I’d put every cent I had into the game, including my savings from Karateka and Prince of Persia,” Mechner said. “I don’t regret it, but I wouldn’t exactly advise it as a model for others to follow.”
Sands of Time and Hollywood
Mechner consulted only briefly on Prince of Persia 3D (1999). In the early 2000s Ubisoft, which by then owned the series, asked him to help reboot it. On Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) he was credited as game designer, writer and creative consultant: “I took what I learned from The Last Express and made my first real-time 3D game,” he told Wireframe. He then cut a trailer from the game, pitched it in Hollywood, and the producer Jerry Bruckheimer bought the film rights. Mechner wrote the first screenplay. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, directed by Mike Newell, came out in 2010 and, according to Wireframe, took more than $336 million.
Films had run alongside the games for years. His short documentary Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story won the International Documentary Association’s award for best short documentary in 2003, according to his own biography.
Journals, remakes and graphic novels
Mechner has kept a journal since college. “Journals can set your memory straight,” he told Wireframe. “Sometimes when you look back years, even decades, later, you can find a surprise.” In 1985 he was asking it whether there would “even be a computer games market two years from now”. He published the Prince of Persia years, 1985 to 1993, as The Making of Prince of Persia, first as a self-published e-book and later in an annotated, illustrated edition from Stripe Press, and the Karateka years as The Making of Karateka in 2012. The same year he directed a remake of Karateka, developed by Liquid Entertainment. He also brought The Last Express back on iOS, and playing it again for the first time in 15 years, he said, he found the phone “far and away my favourite way to play it”.
His graphic novels include Solomon’s Thieves, which grew into Templar, a 480-page story of the Knights Templar drawn by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland and published by First Second in 2013. He has lived in France since 2017 and has written Monte Cristo with Mario Alberti and Liberty with Étienne Le Roux and Loïc Chevallier. Replay (2023) is a graphic memoir that interweaves his grandfather’s First World War, his father’s escape from occupied France and his own years making games; it won the Château de Cheverny prize for historical graphic novels. In 2012 he also recovered the Prince of Persia Apple II source code from old floppy disks and put it on GitHub.
In March 2017 the Game Developers Choice Awards gave him their Pioneer Award.
Sources
- David Crookes, “In the chair: Jordan Mechner”, Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, pp. 90–95: birth year, New York, Super 8, the Apple II and caricatures, Deathbounce and Choplifter, Yale, two and a half years and 48K, his mother’s karate teacher, Robert Cook, his father’s music, 500,000 copies, starting Prince of Persia at 21, the level editor, the ports and Lance Groody, burn-out and travel, The Shadow and the Flame from Paris, Tomi Pierce, Wagons-Lits and the archives, 18 months and four years, 30 characters, the patent, Brøderbund’s marketing and The Learning Company, his savings, the Last Express iOS port, Templar.
- David Crookes, “Turning back time”, Wireframe issue 37, April 2020, pp. 18–23: Asteroid Blaster and Deathbounce, Doug Carlston’s call, “my karate teacher”, his father and the car, paying off college loans, four years on Prince of Persia, the VHS process, 7,000 copies, creative director of the sequel, Prince of Persia 3D, Smoking Car, the 22-day shoot and the patented process, The Sands of Time, the Bruckheimer pitch, the first screenplay and $336 million, the journals.
- Charles Ardai, “Good Knight, Sweet Prince”, Computer Gaming World issue 66, December 1989, pp. 46–48 and 64.
- Petra Schlunk, “Mystery Train”, review of The Last Express, Computer Gaming World issue 156, July 1997: “designed, directed, and co-written by Jordan Mechner”; Smoking Car Productions and Brøderbund; the quotes.
- CU Amiga, February 1992: Mechner “filmed his younger brother”.
- Jordan Mechner, “Biography”, jordanmechner.com (web, secondary): BA in psychology from Yale, Chavez Ravine and the 2003 IDA award, the 2012 Karateka remake by Liquid Entertainment, the patented rotoscoping process, life in France since 2017, the graphic novels. https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/biography/ ; “Replay” page: 2023, First Second and Delcourt, the Château de Cheverny prize. https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/books/replay/
- Wikipedia, “Jordan Mechner” (web, secondary): birth date and place; the years of Templar and Chavez Ravine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Mechner
- “2017 Game Developers Choice Awards To Honor Prince Of Persia Creator Jordan Mechner With Pioneer Award”, PR Newswire, January 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/2017-game-developers-choice-awards-to-honor-prince-of-persia-creator-jordan-mechner-with-pioneer-award-former-white-house-advisor-mark-deloura-with-ambassador-award-300398411.html
- Jordan Mechner, “Prince of Persia Apple II” repository, GitHub (source code): the recovered 6502 source, published April 2012. https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II