French – English
The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia, has just joined the association as an honorary member. He will also participate in the Support Committee for the National Video Games Museum.
He considers our initiative necessary and welcome, and offers us his support by agreeing to become an honorary member of the association. There is no doubt that the support of such a personality from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
Jordan Mechner was born in New York in 1964. A programmer since the age of fifteen, he was still a student at Yale when he developed his first games for Apple ][ . If publishers were not interested at first, the situation changed with Karateka, published by Brøderbund in 1984. Not only was it one of the very first fighting games, but the title impressed with the fluid animation of its characters and the presence of cutscenes; it sold more than 500,000 copies. Graduated in psychology in 1985, Mechner moved to California to work for four years on his masterpiece, Prince of Persia. Here again, the game demonstrates his passion for cinema. Years before motion capture became widespread, Mechner employed the technique of rotoscoping to create incredibly natural animations. His game will be translated into six languages, adapted for around twenty formats and will sell more than two million copies. It will give rise to a sequel, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1993), but above all will have a phenomenal descendant in the video game industry, from Another World to Assassin's Creed via Tomb Raider. In the meantime, Mechner concentrates on game design and no longer programs himself. Also in 1993, he made his first documentary, Waiting for Dark, and founded the studio Smoking Car Productions with which he made The Last Express (1997). Taking place in real time, this adventure game will unfortunately not enjoy the success it deserves due to the bankruptcy of Brøderbund. Mechner then distanced himself from the world of video games to turn to his other passion, screenwriting and directing. In 2003, his documentary Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story was awarded and even shortlisted for the Oscars. The same year, Ubisoft invited him to supervise Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which reinvented the classic with a time control system that would later be copied many times. This critical and public success creates a new franchise for the publisher and will be the subject of a film in 2010, one of the very rare successful adaptations of a video game in theaters. Since then, Mechner has continued to work for cinema, video games and comics.
![Karateka (Apple ], 1984) Karateka (Apple ][, 1984)
![Prince of Persia (Apple ], 1989)
Prince of Persia (Apple][, 1989)
The Last Express (DOS/Mac OS/Windows, 1997)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Windows/PS2/Xbox/GameCube, 2003)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (dir: Mike Newell, 2010)
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