Anime Herald Talks With Jordan Mechner

Note: Due to the time-sensitive nature of our coverage, this article will debut on the main Anime Herald site on March 22. We apologize for the inconvenience.

• Interview Date: 10/19/2024

• Interview Location: Anime NYC 2024

• Interviewer: Seth Burn

• Editor: Samantha Ferreira

Anime Herald: I’ve watched a lot of your videos about Karateka and Prince of Persia, and there’s a mystery I’m trying to solve. Your mom’s karate teacher provided most of the moves for Karateka. Your father helped out with some of the others, and your sister certainly [did].

Jordan Mechner: You’ve done your research.

Anime Herald: I have. Your sister kicked me in the nuts once when I came at her in a fighting stance. I deserved it, don’t get me wrong.

Jordan Mechner: (Laughs)

Anime Herald: Here is my question: How did you get the bird?

Jordan Mechner: This was before video and pause.

Anime Herald: Yeah, it was rotoscoping.

Jordan Mechner: Yeah. There were some nature documentaries. National Geographic or Wild Kingdom on TV. I would sit there and watch the way that the hawks flew, and do some quick sketches.

Anime Herald: Wow. So that was from sketching.

Jordan Mechner: Yes. I did not get to rotoscope that.

Anime Herald: I was wondering about that. That was the one mystery. Every other character was explained. Except that one. The one I hated the most. I hated that bird.

Tell me about the mirror in Prince of Persia, how that was born of necessity.

Jordan Mechner: This is one of my favorite development episodes in Prince of Persia. Actually, I tell this story in my graphic memoir novel, Replay. I think it encapsulates so much about game development at that time, and about the creative process in general. I meant for Prince of Persia to just stand on the traps evasion [aspect]. That was the gameplay. Try to get through the dungeon and not get killed by the traps. I thought that was going to be the game. My friend Tomi (Pierce), who I was sharing an attic with at Brøderbund Software in San Rafael, this was 1988, kept telling me, “You know, that’s not fun in itself. You need to have combat. You need to have fighting.”

I would explain that I had already used up all of the Apple II’s memory with all this smoothly animated, rotoscoped running and jumping and climbing. There was no room for a second character. But she kept insisting, “Combat, combat, combat!” Every time I showed her the latest cool trap I’d added to the game, she’d say, “What about combat?”

Finally, in desperation, I did a little programming trick, which was exclusive-OR’ing the character with itself one pixel over. That transformed the character, which was basically white with orange for the face, hands, and feet, into a shimmery black outline. It suddenly looked like a sinister shadow version of himself. The idea of jumping through a mirror and creating your evil shadow self and this becomes your enemy. This was a way to add a second character and enemy and conflict into the game without using additional memory.

Of course, once that shadow character was in the game, I realized that Tomi was 1,000% right. I went and reprogrammed a bunch of stuff to free up a little bit more memory so that there could be guards and swordfighting.

Anime Herald: And that helped create the narrative of the game.

Jordan Mechner: Absolutely. Although fighting the evil vizier’s guards is what you expect in that kind of story, the evil vizier’s henchmen. Somehow, it was that shadow man who gave the game its depth and its heart. The toughest enemy you’re fighting is an aspect of yourself. At the end, when the hero confronts the shadow man, you can’t defeat it. Every time you hit it, you yourself lose a health point. If you kill the shadow man, you kill yourself. The only way you can win the game is to reunite and find a way to merge these two halves together, so that when you confront the evil vizier it is as a whole person.

It is very Jungian. It began as a technical necessity that revealed an idea that was so strong and simple, I think I wouldn’t have come up with it otherwise.

Anime Herald: I love how your psych degree just slipped out there for a second. See, you did use it!

Jordan Mechner: Everything comes in handy. Whether you’re making a game or comic or graphic novel, everything you’ve read, everything you’ve done, you’ve seen, you’ve experienced, everyone you’ve known, it all bubbles up and you take from that richness and find places for it all in the story.

Anime Herald: This will be the last bit from Prince of Persia, but is there more of the story you would like to tell, particularly about the Witch and the crystal ball?

Jordan Mechner: Well again, in my memoir, Replay, it actually tells the story of how I moved to France as an American from New York eight years ago to start a new Prince of Persia video game project. Which, spoiler, the book is 320 pages, the project ends up getting canceled. It was going to be a sequel to the 1993 Prince of Persia, which ends on a cliffhanger with the evil witch watching the prince and princess in a crystal ball. Players will never see that game.

The good news is that out of the ashes of that canceled project came Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Also developed by a wonderful team in Montpelier where I now live. It’s a modern 2D Metroidvania remake of Prince of Persia. But that never released third episode in the original 2D Prince of Persia trilogy… is to be… whatever we imagine. That image of the witch and the crystal ball, that’s the frame that the 1993 game ends on. I had the pleasure to redraw and reinterpret that image in Replay, as a kind of way to evoke what Prince of Persia 3 might have been.

Anime Herald: My favorite line from Replay: “You are very strange. People don’t move to Montpelier to find work. French people leave France and go to America to find work.” You did the reverse commute.

Jordan Mechner: It’s very rare. In the south of France, people would expect you would go to Los Angeles to work in the video game industry. Not the reverse.

Anime Herald: Yes. 

Replay is the story of three different generations. If you would like to give your version of the story of Replay to our audience.

Jordan Mechner: Sure. Replay is the first book that I’ve drawn as well as written. I’ve done comics as a writer working with an artist. I’ve started sketching again as a hobby. This brought me back to my childhood first passion of writing and drawing comics, which began with Mad Magazine and caricaturing. I got sidetracked by doing video games and movie screenwriting for about four decades. Replay is the most personal, most intimate, and in some ways, the most ambitious project I’ve ever done. It’s the story of three generations of my family.

I’ve interwoven my own childhood, youthful memories of growing up in New York and making games on an Apple II. The development of Prince of Persia, its evolution through the Ubisoft years, and the Disney Bruckheimer movie version. A career path that brought me back to France. Which leads to the second narrative level of Replay.

My dad, who composed the music for Prince of Persia, came to New York as a child refugee in World War II. His family was Jewish, Austrian, and fled from Vienna in 1938 when the Nazis took over. They had to flee for their lives. My father was separated from his parents from age seven through ten and stuck in France, where they thought he would be safe. But France was soon invaded and occupied. For those years. For those years my dad was with his young aunt Lisa. She’s the heroine of this timeline of Replay. They had to hide and stay one step ahead of the Gestapo and try to find a way to get him out of France so he could rejoin his parents, who by then had taken refuge in Cuba. That’s the second level of replay.

The third is my own experience as an American moving back to Montpelier, to France for a video game project. Which, ironically I guess, the mirror image again. The shadow reflection of the journey my grandparents made. Of course, they were desperate to get out of Europe and get to New York to save their family, save their kids. I went back under much more comfortable circumstances to work with a great team on a video game project. And yet, the common theme of uprooting one’s two kids and making them go to school in a different language, in a different country, to become foreigners, across an ocean from home, in France specifically, had somehow repeated itself in both generations.

That’s why I called the book Replay. Replay, because that’s what you have to do in Prince of Persia, over and over again, to save the princess and save the kingdom. But also, Replay because of this feeling I often have of somehow repeating things from the previous generation. Unwittingly, the traumas of previous generations have a way of replaying one generation to the next. You could even say World War II was a kind of a replay of World War I. As in a video game, trying to replay it to win this time.

The theme of how history always has ripple effects into the future. The past is present even when we don’t realize consciously that it is. And also, in the creative life, the way we’re influenced by our past. Prince of Persia particularly had… we mentioned the shadow man episode… that game was influenced so much by things in my family’s past, but subconsciously in ways, some of which I didn’t even realize until I was writing and drawing Replay. There were some surprises in there for me.

Anime Herald: My favorite story from Replay is when they came for your grandfather and he explained, “I’m a doctor. The edict went out that doctors are to be left alone.” A brilliant bluff. Do you remember when you first heard that story?

Jordan Mechner: Yeah. In Replay, I drew a page where my dad is telling me that story in Chappaqua. I’m about eleven years old and he’s telling me this story that happened to him when he was seven in Vienna. How two Nazis came to take away his dad. By that time, he was old. I knew him as my grandfather. These stories… there’s not one moment where your parents tell you the story and that’s that. You kind of hear bits of them. The stories tend to get repeated. They come out at a family gathering, or around the dinner table. Sometimes, as in this case, on a walk. One thing I tried to capture in Replay was the layering of these memories. Where you can be told a story as a kid, and you hear the next part of the story as an adult. You're constructing a timeline in your head, which is chronological, but the way you hear about these stories is not necessarily chronological.

Anime Herald: Switching to a different part of the story of Replay, back in the day if you wanted to sell a picture frame, it was good to have a picture inside of the frame. One of your ancestral relatives picked up four pictures by a young artist in Vienna. That ended up saving your family years later.

Jordan Mechner: Yeah. This is one of those odd family stories that I’d grown up hearing. In 1938, everybody was desperate to get out of Vienna, but it was very hard to get a visa. The way that my dad and his father, a Jewish doctor, were able to be among the lucky, I think only 3,000 people were able to get a visa to get out of Austria that year, was thanks to an uncle who had discovered some watercolors in his basement he had purchased before the first World War. They were signed by Adolf Hitler. When he saw this, he was able to trade them with a local Nazi official to get visas for himself and his family to get to France. From France, he was able to arrange for boat tickets for my grandfather to get to Cuba.

I’d heard this story. I didn’t really know the details. I wondered, “what did those paintings look like? What were they paintings of? Were they landscapes?”

To draw Replay, I needed to do that research. I also needed to confirm that the story was really true. In doing the research, with the internet and the network of incredible historians and archivists, it’s amazing what you can find. I found photographs of those Hitler paintings. I could find that what he was painting were touristy postcard views of Vienna. Hitler before World War I was a young, aspiring artist. He applied to art school and didn’t get in.

Anime Herald: Twice.

Jordan Mechner: When that failed, he went into politics.

He had sold these paintings to a local frame shop. In the biography of the young Hitler, I found all of this confirmed. The name of the frame shop owner who had supported him. So, when I drew the frame shop for Replay, I was able to put the correct name. And also, in a footnote, there was the name “Joseph Feingold.” My dad’s uncle Joji was mentioned. He had been interrogated before leaving the country. So his story was recorded. It was known. More than my dad knew, more than my family had known, was in this book that I found researching Replay.

Anime Herald: My God. The sheer number of coincidences that had to happen for this to come to pass.

Jordan Mechner: I think that most children who are descendants of survivors, no matter which war or conflict or disaster it is that your parents or grandparents survived, the story of how they survived is a chain of incredible good luck and smart decisions and the kindness of strangers. If I had gone left instead of right, I’d be dead and you wouldn’t have been born. I think in every family you have this because we are, by definition, the children of survivors.

Anime Herald: Switching gears to an entirely different topic. Video game criticism. One of your tips is that all criticism is correct, it’s just unclear how.

Jordan Mechner: This applies not only to video games, but also to screenwriting as well. In any creative project, you are going to get notes. You’re going to get feedback from your friends and coworkers, or from the studio. Sometimes our reaction as artists or writers is “Ah! It’s so frustrating! They just don’t get it. They don’t see what I’m trying to do.”

My feeling is that if someone gives you a note, assuming they are sincere, there’s a reason. Sometimes the suggested fix that people give you isn’t the solution that you’re ultimately going to want, but… there’s something there. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. There’s famous examples in film making. The editing process of some of the great films of the ‘70s. The Godfather, for instance. The studio feedback was “It’s too long, it’s too slow.”

The fix was to go back in and add more scenes. That made the movie longer, but made it feel faster. What was missing was some of those moments that make you really care. At that point, once you care, you’re just as happy if the movie takes two hours and fifty minutes as if it was two hours and thirty minutes. It’s the same with games. You’ll get feedback. You’ll feel like “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to take that suggestion.” But behind that suggestion, there’s always something that’s worth listening to.

Anime Herald: You just gave the example of The Godfather, and we’ve talked about the mirror in Prince of Persia. Can you give another example where you took some criticism and were able to evolve and fix an issue with the project?

Jordan Mechner: Well, Replay was a very challenging book to structure. Because it’s three timelines woven together. At one point I thought that I’m just going to do three separate books. I’m going to do a book where I tell my story of making games in the 1980’s. I’m going to do a book where I tell the story of my dad as a child refugee escaping the Nazis. And a book of my grandfather's experience as a soldier on the western front in World War I. These were three separate stories of three different generations. But each one is a coherent story. And I tried. And I tried.

It was my first French editor, Louis Trondheim, who is also a great comics writer in his own right, who pointed out that by moving to France I had done the same thing my grandfather had done in the opposite direction. It’s so obvious once someone has said it, but I actually hadn’t thought of that as a motif to structure the book around. Once I had the idea of this kind of mirroring, suddenly the structure of the book clicked into focus. I had already done several versions, several ways of doing it, of weaving the stories together that didn’t work. It made me think it would have to be three separate books before I found the one that did.

Anime Herald: Is there anything else you’d like to share about Replay?

Jordan Mechner: In the US it’s published by First Second books.

Anime Herald: So now let’s move to Monte Cristo.

Jordan Mechner: In France, there’s such a great tradition of European graphic novels. As an American growing up on Mad Magazine I actually didn’t know about Hugo Pratt and his series Corto Maltese until I got to my 20s and traveled to France. My French friends showed me decades of incredible graphic novels that I hadn’t known about.

Mario Alberti is an Italian illustrator. His style is very loose and dynamic and influenced by American comics as well as European [comics]. I went to Mario with this idea to do a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo. The Alexandre Dumas novel is a story of love and betrayal, revenge, and redemption, set in the 17th century.

As a New Yorker, having been through 9/11 and everything that came after it. That dark period of the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo. When I read the Dumas original, I thought that this story is a great way to write about the present day. The themes are all there. The fear of an outside evil, which was for Dumas was Napoleon, and for America was Al Qaeda. Where this fear can be something that people in power can take advantage of to serve their interests.

The victims are innocent people that get in the way of all the money that can be made. The theme of an innocent man being accused, and of his enemies using the political context of the time to get him out of the way. My version is of a young American contractor coming home from Iraq. He’s been promoted at work and is going to marry his high school sweetheart. But his promotion threatens to expose a boondoggle. As with the Dumas original, three different people collude, with different motivations, to pack him to an offshore prison.

He comes back fifteen years later as the CEO of the Monte Cristo corporation. He has a fortune in offshore bank accounts. By this time, the three people who had conspired against him… one is a congressman who is married to his high school sweetheart. His coworker is now a hedge fund billionaire. The FBI agent is now the assistant deputy attorney general. These are now three highly placed people where he has to insinuate himself into their lives.

In this chess game, he needs to appeal to their greed and their vanity. Make them think he’s one of them. They think he’s some Eastern European/Russian oligarch. They don’t really know where his money came from or what his background is, but they are happy to benefit from his money. As with the original, he puts together a clockwork scheme to bring down his three enemies. In the process, he falls in love again and comes up against the tragic irony that you can’t take revenge without hurting innocent people. The hammer falls on the next generation, as well.

That structure comes from Dumas. It’s brilliant. It worked then, it’s worked in so many different areas and adaptations. This is a Monte Cristo that talks about the political context of today. It’s a heist story really. Of intrigue, and love, and family.

Anime Herald: It’s always great to combine two of the best genres. Heists, and revenge.

Jordan Mechner: I’ve always loved heist revenge stories. The Sting was one of my favorite movies.

Anime Herald: Mine as well.

Jordan Mechner: As with Replay, it was published first in France by Glénat (three books). Now, Magnetic Press, Mike Kennedy, are releasing it as a 320 page one shot. Mike did the Kickstarter for it a couple months ago. It’ll be shipping soon.

Anime Herald: Do you have any questions for us?

Jordan Mechner: Did you see the incredible Norman Rockwell Museum Mad Magazine exhibition?

Anime Herald: I liked Mad Magazine, but it was more my brother’s thing. I bought him a book about Mad Magazine. They’ve had so many great writers, in addition to the great artists. You’re clearly a Mad Magazine guy.

Jordan Mechner: Yeah. Mad Magazine was my passion before the Apple II computer came along and kind of took over my childhood.

Anime Herald: For the record, he paid for his Apple II with his money and his sister’s money. His money came from doing caricatures. I have no idea where her money came from, but I’m glad she helped you out there. Changed the course of history.

Jordan Mechner: I owe her one. I owe her and I owe my brother David, who modeled The Prince of Persia animation. In the Reader’s Digest parking lot. Hanging by his fingertips. And my dad, who composed the music.

Anime Herald: That’s wonderful. The family worked together.

Jordan Mechner: It’s great to put your family to work.

Anime Herald: Absolutely.

Jordan Mechner: Also, it saves on development costs.

Anime Herald: Well, here’s the thing. They must have been so proud of you. Making something. And then making something again.

Jordan Mechner: Thank you.