Jordan Mechner — Designer

United States · Born 1964 · Broderbund / Smoking Car Productions · Game Designer, Writer

The creator of Karateka and Prince of Persia, whose rotoscoped animation brought a film-like fluidity to home computer games, and who later wrote films and graphic novels.

Jordan Mechner was born in New York City on 4 June 1964. While a student at Yale he designed and programmed Karateka (1984) for the Apple II, animating its fighters by tracing film of his karate instructor, and it reached number one on the Billboard software chart. Prince of Persia (1989) took more than three years and used the same rotoscoping technique to give its acrobatic hero unusually lifelike movement. Sales started slowly but grew as it was converted to around thirty platforms. Mechner designed and directed Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1993), then founded Smoking Car Productions to make the CD-ROM adventure The Last Express (1997), which did not recoup its budget but earned a cult following. He returned to the series as designer and writer of Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) and wrote early drafts of the 2010 film adaptation. He has since worked largely as an author, including the graphic novels Templar and Replay, a family memoir. He received the GDC Pioneer Award in 2017.