American author, game designer, graphic novelist and screenwriter Jordan Mechner is best known as a pioneer of cinematic storytelling in the video game industry and as the creator of Prince of Persia, one of the most successful and enduring video game franchises of all time. His other games include Karateka, The Last Express, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Mechner began his career as a video game creator in the 1980s in high school in Chappaqua, New York, on a 16K Apple II computer bought with his earnings producing and selling Mad Magazine-inspired comics and drawing caricatures at local fairs. He developed and programmed his first game Karateka, while a student at Yale University. Inspired by his film studies and vintage Disney animation, Mechner developed a rotoscoping process to capture Super 8 film footage of his friends and family members, a first step toward the motion capture technology widely used in today's video games. Karateka was published by Broderbund in 1984 and became a #1 bestseller. One of the first games to combine arcade action with realistic animation and cinematic storytelling, it created a new template that other early fighting games would follow

After graduating from Yale, Mechner upgraded from 8mm to VHS to create the rotoscoped animation for his next game Prince of Persia. Inspired by the 1,001 Nights tales he had known as a child, Mechner completed Prince of Persia for the Apple II in 1989. Published by Broderbund and subsequently adapted onto nearly every computer and console platform of the 1990s, Prince of Persia is recognized as a major influence in the development of the action-adventure video game genre.

In 2001, Mechner joined forces with Ubisoft to reinvent his decade-old, best-known classic for a new generation of console gamers. Developed at Ubisoft's Montreal studio with Mechner as game designer, writer, and creative consultant, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a breakout hit of 2003. Its success relaunched Prince of Persia as a global franchise including toys, graphic novels, LEGO sets, and over 20 million games sold to date

In 2010, Mechner became the first game creator to successfully adapt his own work as a feature film screenwriter with Disney’s Prince of Persia produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, and Ben Kingsley. Mechner received screen story and executive producer credit. With box-office receipts of $335 million worldwide, Prince of Persia set the record for the world's highest-grossing video game film adaptation until 2016.

A lifelong journal-keeper, Mechner has published his game development diaries from the 1980s -- The Making of Karateka and The Making of Prince of Persia -- along with Prince of Persia's Apple II source code — lost for 20 years, then found in 2012 on a set of 3.5" floppy disks. Mechner's books include the 2013 New York Times best-selling, Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel Templar, a swashbuckling adventure about the historical Knights Templar, illustrated by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland.

Mechner's work as an author, screenwriter, and filmmaker, along with his video games, reflects his passion for deep historical research and world-building, and interest in time and memory. In this Podcast, game designer, graphic novelist and screenwriter Jordan Mechner shares his experience as a multihyphenate, the ups and downs of the creative process, how to make production constraints work in your favor -- and his experience creating Karateka, Prince of Persia and other projects.

For more show notes, visit www.allanmckay.com/244.

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