Jordan Mechner
A Yale undergraduate with an Apple II and a movie camera built Karateka in 1984, and it sold. Mechner shot actors on film and traced over the footage frame by frame, an animation technique called rotoscoping, and the result moved unlike anything else on the machine: characters that walked with weight, stumbled, and took a punch as though a body were involved. Five years later he did it again and did it better. Prince of Persia became a hit, was ported to nearly every platform of its era, and turned into a franchise that produced a Disney live-action film in 2010 and an ongoing series of games from Ubisoft.
He is one of the reasons games began borrowing from cinema at all, and the influence is easier to see in what came after him than in his own small catalogue. Prince of Persia 2 followed in 1993. Then in 1997 came The Last Express, the one that never turned into a franchise and the one that people who have played it will not stop talking about.
Games are only part of the story. Mechner left programming behind and worked as a screenwriter, graphic novelist and filmmaker, directing the documentary Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story in 2003. For a designer whose released output is this short, the size of the dent is remarkable.
Movies (1)
Games (4)
Where to start with Jordan Mechner
Prince of Persia is the one to play, and it is still legible: no tutorial, no map, and a clock that does not care whether you are ready. Modern players bounce off the difficulty, which is fair, but the animation is why it mattered and the animation still reads.
Karateka deserves ten minutes as an artifact rather than as a game. It is where the technique starts, and knowing that makes everything after it make sense. Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame is the bigger, more colorful, less elegant sequel.
Then play The Last Express. It is the strangest thing he made and the one that has aged best, an adventure game that trusts you to miss things, and it is why his name still comes up among designers. Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story is the documentary he directed and the odd one out here, worth finding once you are interested in him rather than in his games.
Jordan Mechner on CrossBinge
- Companion guide: Broderbund: Prince of Persia, Myst and the Early Software Age