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 on the Apple ][. Although publishers did not show any interest at first, the situation changed with Karatekapublished 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 cinematics, selling over 500,000 copies.
After graduating in psychology in 1985, Mechner moved to California to spend four years working on his masterpiece, Prince of Persia. Once again, the game bears witness to his passion for cinema. Years before motion captureMechner uses the rotoscoping technique to create incredibly natural animations. His game was translated into six languages, adapted to some twenty formats and sold over two million copies. A sequel will follow, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1993), but above all had a phenomenal impact on the video game industry, from Another World à Assassin's Creed via Tomb Raider.
In the meantime, Mechner concentrated on designing games and no longer programmed them himself. Also in 1993, he made his first documentary, Waiting for Darkand founded the studio Smoking Car Productions with whom he produced The Last Express (1997). Set in real time, this adventure game unfortunately failed to achieve the success it deserved due to the bankruptcy of Brøderbund. Mechner then distanced himself from the world of video games to turn to his other passion, scriptwriting and directing.
In 2003, his documentary Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story won awards and was even shortlisted for the Oscars. The same year, Ubisoft invites him to supervise Prince of Persia: The Sands of Timewhich reinvents the classic with a time-control system that will be copied many times over. This critical and public success created a new franchise for the publisher and was made into a film in 2010, one of the very few successful theatrical adaptations of a video game. Since then, Mechner has continued to work on films, video games and comic strips.
