In the world of computer gaming, Jordan Mechner is a legend: the designer of groundbreaking titles like Karateka (1984), Prince of Persia (1989) and The Last Express (1997). But while his work in game development has kept him occupied since the turn of the 1980s, comics were his childhood love. He began writing them professionally in 2010 with Before the Sandstorm, a Disney Press anthology tie-in to the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time movie, and followed that up with the First Second-published historical adventure Templar (2013; art by LeUyen Pham & Alex Puvilland) and a pair of likeminded series for the French market, Monte Cristo (Comix Buro/Glénat, from 2022; art by Mario Alberti) and Liberté! (Delcourt, from 2023; art by Étienne Le Roux & Loïc Chevallier). But those were all warm-ups for the 320-page Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family. Initially published in French by Delcourt in 2023, the book will be released in English this week from First Second; it is by far Mechner's most personal work in any medium, telling the story of multiple generations of his family, including incidents from his own life. It is also Mechner's first solo longform comic, which he wrote, drew, colored and lettered (with some additional font work by Michael Tension).
I spoke with Mechner from his home in France over Zoom about reconnecting with comics, the influence his early love of the medium had on his work in gaming, and the unique challenges of capturing his family’s history.
-Jason Bergman
JASON BERGMAN: It feels a little weird to interview someone so well known for video games for this website. But comics were your first love! Is there a world where you went straight into comics instead of getting sidetracked by computer games?
JORDAN MECHNER: It was really an accident of timing that I was just the right age when the Apple II came along - about 13. If I’d been a little older or a little younger, I might have just kept on with my childhood passion of drawing comics.
I learned from The Making of Karateka [a 2023 interactive documentary from the games developer Digital Eclipse] that you bought your first Apple II with money you made from doing caricatures. Is that right?
It’s true. Starting when I was 9, I would set up a booth at the local “community day” fair in Chappaqua [a suburb of New York City] where I lived, and draw people's caricatures. I also wrote and drew my own parody of MAD magazine, “Kooky" magazine, and printed and sold it in the school yard, along with “Kooky Stickers” - my knockoff of Wacky Packages. I had all those things going up until 1977, when I discovered computers.
In those days, would you say MAD or similarly silly comics were your primary inspirations? Like the MAD of the '70s, maybe National Lampoon?
I was a little young for National Lampoon. MAD was my favorite. I would go to the St. Mark's Comics store in the city and browse back issues of MAD. That was a big part of my introduction to cinema as well, reading MAD satires of early '70s movies like “A Crockwork Lemon” or “The Odd Father” before I was old enough to see them in the theater. My first comics heroes were MAD artists like Mort Drucker and Jack Davis. Also Al Hirschfeld, who published amazing caricatures in the Sunday New York Times. I studied their styles and tried to imitate them.
Did you ever consider comics as a career, or once you got a computer you were just completely taken and off and running?
If you'd asked me at age 12, I’d probably have said that my dream job would be comics artist or animator. Becoming a novelist or film director was something I thought about too. I’d never been one of those kids who were good with technology, building HAM radios and computers from kits or things like that. But I had a friend a few years older who was. It was at his house that I saw my first Apple II. And I realized this computer was good not just for playing games, but that I could program my own games on it, which was essentially making little interactive animated movies. I had a better shot at making something cool with a computer than I did with the cel-drawn Super 8 animated movies I was struggling to make at the time. That's what got me hooked on programming. The idea that I could make a game, and if it was good enough, I could get it published, and adults wouldn’t know that it was a kid who made it.
Did you consider art school? I know you went to Yale, but even then you didn't study art or technology.
I never had a formal education in any of the creative fields I was passionate about. At Yale, I majored in psychology. Most of my time and energy (that I probably should have spent studying) went into my side projects: going to the movies, thinking about filmmaking, and programming computer games. I took an introductory computer science class, but I was more interested in the games I was developing on the Apple II outside of class, and trying to make those games more cinematic. For me, programming was a tool, not an end in itself. Yale encouraged the ideal of a liberal arts education for its own sake. I took courses in psychology, history, art history, science, because college was a rare chance to get that kind of well-rounded education. I figured the technical and craft aspects of making games and films were things I would end up having to learn on the job, one way or the other.
I went back and I was playing Karateka recently, and you can really see the illustrative influence. I was a kid when that game came out, and compared to other games of the day, Karateka looked like nothing else. It comes from a completely different point of view, and now that I look back on it, must be from your interest in art and your interest in comics in particular. Do you see that when you look back on the game?
In retrospect, I do think one thing that made Karateka stand out was that it was inspired by cultural influences that were different from what most other game programmers were looking at. Like Hokusai’s woodblock prints, and Kurosawa's films, which I was just discovering as a film buff in college. The cinematic storytelling in Karateka, with the cross-cutting and scrolling, owed a lot to silent films like Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon. Those early films were shot with a stationary camera, in profile, with characters moving from left to right as if they were on a stage. The kind of dynamic cinematic editing with camera moves and close-ups that we have today hadn't been invented yet. It struck me that computer games were a new medium, like silent film had been 80 years earlier. The visual and artistic vocabulary was limited by the technology that was just starting to evolve. So there were lessons and inspiration to be drawn from silent films, as well as comics. 19th century Japanese prints had strong, simple compositions like comic book panels. My dad composed the music for Karateka—within the limits of the Apple II, which could basically only play beeps and buzzes—based on a leitmotif approach that came out of the classical music tradition. There’s a theme for the hero, a theme for the villain, a theme for the love story, and they interweave to tell the story through music. All of those influences fed into Karateka.
The other thing about Karateka, is that most games of the time were done where the gameplay and the visuals came out of technical exploration. Designers would learn a language and then figure out what they could do with it, and design gameplay with what they could do. I get the impression that you came the other way around, where you had visuals and storytelling in mind, and you had to figure out how to do it. You did things that nobody else was even thinking about.
The technical limitations of the Apple II were also a spur to creativity. Many decisions in Karateka and Prince of Persia were born out of necessity. On the Apple, you could really only have two colors plus black & white (I used blue & orange). I think part of the reason those games are visually pleasing and harmonious, and stand the test of time today, is because of that limited color palette. Strangely, in drawing Replay, I also ended up using three palettes, each one two colors in addition to black & white. That strict graphic convention makes it easier for the reader to follow the jumps between the different timelines, and also recalls the simplicity of the early Apple II games.
We’ll dive into Replay in a minute, but I do want to jump forward a bit. You do Karateka, you do Prince of Persia, more games. Then you go off to do the Prince of Persia movie, and then there’s the movie tie-in graphic novel. Was that your first published comics work?
Yeah, wow you did a big jump there!
Yeah, we just jumped 20+ years.
In between there was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time [a 2003 Prince of Persia sequel on which Mechner was game designer and story writer]. And before that, The Last Express.
Another very illustrative game.
Last Express was very much inspired by European comics. It’s the first game I did that had dialogue, a large cast of characters and a more nuanced, multi-layered, adult story compared to the fairly simple storylines of Karateka and the first Prince of Persia. As a kid growing up in New York, I didn’t know about Hugo Pratt or Corto Maltese, or Moebius. That whole incredible tradition of European comics hadn’t been on my radar until in my early 20s; I spent a year in Paris, and French friends showed me what I’d been missing. The Last Express was like a real-time, interactive animated comic book. After that, I did Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with Ubisoft in Montreal. At that point it had been 12 years since the original Prince of Persia. We reconceived the story and characters and gameplay for Sands of Time, knowing that a lot of our audience might be too young to remember the first 2D game. And the movie came out of that.
Which led to you writing your first graphic novel.
And then you worked with LeUyen and Alex again on Templar.
Seeing LeUyen and Alex's work on Prince of Persia really sparked my desire to write an original graphic novel, with them as illustrators. That was Templar, a big, ambitious, 480-page full-color book that took us almost four years [an early segment of the book was published individually as Solomon's Thieves by First Second in 2010]. LeUyen and Alex had two kids in the course of it. It was a wonderful project. It reconnected me to a medium that I'd loved, but hadn't created in since I was a kid. Around the same time, I started sketching and drawing from life. Alex had a cabinet full of Moleskine sketchbooks, and he gave me a blank one. Alex's sketchbooks, and also Joann Sfar’s, which are amazing, really inspired me. I started carrying a sketchbook around with me and drawing in streets, cafés, airports, nude live-drawing workshops, even on the Prince of Persia movie set. I didn’t start out with the intention of eventually drawing a graphic novel. I just drew what I saw, as a kind of daily practice and artist diary. Over the course of 15 years, and filling a few dozen notebooks, the idea sort of snuck up on me that maybe I could draw as well as write.
More recently you've done Liberté! and Monte Cristo, neither of which has been published in English, but which I have 'read' through Google Translate.
Oh wow.
Mario Alberti did incredible work on our modern Monte Cristo [i.e., a modern riff on Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo]. We're going to release it in English. The same week Replay comes out, on March 19 or a week later, Magnetic Press is going to announce a Kickstarter for an integral graphic novel of Monte Cristo [now scheduled to launch on March 26]. In French it’s three volumes, the English edition will be a single book of about 210 pages.
I really enjoyed it, despite the translation hoops I had to go through.
Thank you for making the effort! I could have sent you an English PDF, because I actually write in English and then translate into French. It's kind of funny and odd for me as an American seeing my last few books, Liberté!, Monte Cristo and Replay published first in France, where I live, and then the English version comes out a whole year later. Monte Cristo and Liberté! are being published in French as trilogies, one volume at a time. We’re up to book two of Liberté!, so the English version will probably be in 2025 when the trilogy is complete.
Templar, Monte Cristo and Liberté! are all these really interesting stories set in different time periods. And you have this line in the intro to the collected Templar, where you say, “One of the perks of making up stories for a living is that it offers an excuse to read lots of books in the name of research.” Is that what drew you to each of those stories? Diving headfirst into a completely different time period and learning everything and creating an original story?
Yeah, it's interesting where stories come from. With Templar, I started by researching the Knights Templar as a backstory or MacGuffin for a contemporary thriller that I was writing as a screenplay. (This was before The Da Vinci Code.) And I discovered that the true story of the trial of the Templars in the 14th century was incredible - actually more fascinating and more resonant with our own time, in post-9/11 America, than whatever that other thing was I’d been writing. So I ended up going deeper into that medieval period, and that became a new book, Templar. I often find that real history sparks my imagination, makes me want to know more. It’s interesting that even my video games have been set in exotic places or historical periods: Karateka in medieval Japan, Prince of Persia in a Thousand and One Nights world of ancient Persia, The Last Express in early 20th century Europe. For me, part of the appeal of reading and learning about a historical episode is that it actually happened. That there are useful things we can learn from it. The challenge of building a new adventure story and characters around it that also respects the real history, is a great motivation for me to dig into the research and find out as much as I can. I've always loved the research part of writing.
I assume in the case of Replay, you had to do tons of research about your own family before you even started. Was your approach different from other projects or was it all similar in that phase?
Templar and Monte Cristo were adventure stories set against real historical events, with fictional characters. The great difference in Replay was that I was telling the story of what happened to my family, to my father and grandparents, and also telling a part of my own life. So it was very important to me to stick to what happened. I had the great gift of having my grandfather's memoir. My grandfather, Dr. Adolph Mechner, grew up in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, survived World War I as a teenage soldier, then World War II as a Jewish refugee. In the 1970s, when he retired from his medical practice, he spent three years writing his autobiography. It was four looseleaf binders of typewritten pages, filled with photos, letters, postcards, newspaper clippings, documenting his life and also the whole 20th century that our family lived through. I was a kid when this incredible document landed in our house. It was 1978, the same year I got my Apple II. So that was a treasure trove and great starting point for research for Replay. I’d heard my grandparents, my great-aunt Lisa and my dad telling these stories as I was growing up. My dad is 93 now and has an incredible memory. I was able to ask him questions about his experience as a child refugee in occupied France during World War II, while I was writing and drawing Replay. And to show him the pages and ask him if I’d gotten it right. I also read books, looked at newsreel footage and archives, and traveled to the places I was going to draw, as much I could. My dad remembered things from his point of view as a 7-to-9-year old, but I needed visual references and other perspectives to fill out the historical context.
When you started breaking down the project, did you ever consider sticking to a single story, like just your grandfather's life? Was it always going to be your grandfather's, your father's, your story—and to a certain extent, your children's—all weaved together?
That's a great question. There's actually a page in Replay where I’m in my brother's house in 2016, first floating the idea of maybe someday doing a graphic memoir about Papi’s story. My brother asks me: “Why not tell your own story?” At first I thought I’d have to choose one or the other, or do three separate books. My grandfather's story would be one book, my dad's would be another, and then my own memoir of making games in the '80s maybe a third. But as I started trying to outline it, it became apparent to me that telling my grandfather's story as a standalone book was problematic. The reader naturally wonders: Who’s telling this story? How do we know this is true? I realized that to earn the right to write and draw someone else’s story, to depict events I wasn’t actually present for and have it really connect, I needed to reveal myself as well. Which in a way was more difficult. I think I would have preferred to not expose so much about my personal life, especially the more recent stuff. It's more comfortable to tell a story about things that happened 20 years ago, or 80 years ago. But my father and grandfather were so open about sharing things they went through, some of which were very traumatic - more traumatic than anything I’ve experienced in my own life. I owed it to them to bring the same level of candor. By telling my own story, I earned the right to tell theirs. Really, you can't ever tell somebody else's story. You can only tell your own. Part of my story was growing up as an American kid with a father and grandparents who’d experienced these terrible events in Europe, and told me about them. How did that family history filter into my own life, how did it affect me? It was when I put all those things together that the structure of Replay really clicked into place.
I want to talk for a second about that family history, because there were several moments in the book where my jaw was really on the floor. You mentioned having to tell your own story, so people know it's true. And I think that's valid, because I made note of a few moments that stood out to me. Like how your grandfather wasn’t able to get out of Europe because of the quota for Romanian visas, even though he wasn't from Romania, but Czernowitz was given to Romania after World War I.1 Or your father's childhood, specifically when he was strafed by a German plane, or that harrowing quote where he says, “The trenches made wonderful playgrounds when the soldiers weren’t in them.” And then your grandfather's sister is studying art in Vienna at the same time as Adolf Hitler, and later finding Hitler paintings in their basement, using them to get French visas. These are incredible stories! Did you grow up with all of these? Or were some of these revelations to you?
The Hitler paintings were a family story that I’d heard around the dinner table growing up. That my dad and grandfather got out of Vienna in 1938 just in time to avoid Kristallnacht, thanks to Uncle Joji—Josef Feingold—finding some watercolor paintings in his basement that were signed Adolf Hitler. And he parlayed those into two visas to France. That story sounds almost too perfect. Family legends sometimes have a way of getting embroidered over the years. So I researched young Hitler's life, when he was an aspiring, struggling artist in Vienna before World War I. And I found out the story was true. A picture frame shop owner named Samuel Morgenstern bought watercolors from this young painter, Hitler, to put in his ornate Biedermeier frames, because it’s easier to sell frames with pictures in them. Uncle Joji was a regular customer, and he bought four of them. Even my dad hadn’t known that detail. The coincidence that my grandfather's sister Else was also an art student in Vienna in 1911, at the same time as Hitler, never struck me until I was drawing Replay and structuring the story. I put that in the book, that moment of realization.
Another one of the plotlines of Replay is the story of you moving to France for a video game project that gets canceled. I’m well acquainted with that, and it happens all the time. But these things aren't usually talked about publicly. And as I was reading the book, I was taking notes and searching my brain trying to remember if that game had ever been announced in any capacity. Was it?
No, the Prince of Persia project that I moved to Montpellier for in 2016 was never announced. I've had several French journalists and others remark that reading Replay, they were surprised to learn this project had existed, and surprised that it was canceled after two years of development, despite having seemingly everything going for it. You’ve worked in the gaming industry, so you know how common that is. Most fans, gamers, only hear about projects once the publisher announces them. Which generally doesn’t happen until they're fairly close to being released, and they want to start building buzz. The public doesn’t realize what a big percentage of budgets and person-hours goes into projects they never hear about.
You talk in the book about how you and the team did all this research on historical Persia; did any of that make its way into the just-released Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown [a 2024 video game developed by Ubisoft Montpellier]?
It did, through the team. The Lost Crown is a different project, but many people involved worked on both. The extraordinary talent that's in Montpellier, the team's desire to do a new Prince of Persia game, is a big part of what sparked both the project I came to France for in 2016, and The Lost Crown. The research into Persian mythology and culture that we did for the unannounced projects is something the Lost Crown team was able to use and build on. In 2019, roughly about the same time that I was starting to write and draw Replay, the Ubisoft Montpellier team was getting started on The Lost Crown.
Getting back to Replay, for me, the thematic pinnacle of the book is the scene at your Passover Seder, where you tell the story of your father leaving the U.S. during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that really resonated with me. I’m Jewish, my grandparents had to flee Germany, and I've tried to explain to people before that as Jews, we’re always conscious of where the exits are, that we always have an escape plan. But I've never quite read it laid so bare as the way you did it in this book. Was that intentional on your part? Is that something you want people to come away with?
Passover was an especially resonant holiday for us because of the experience of the exodus from Europe that my parents and grandparents' generation had lived through. Even as kids, around the dinner table, the Seder was an occasion not just to retell the biblical Exodus story, but also the family stories of the Anschluss and the flight from Vienna in 1938. I remember my dad telling that Cuban Missile Crisis story at a Seder when I was a kid. It’s a true story. And my friend Patrick in Montpellier reminded me that I’d retold it at a Passover in my apartment in San Francisco in the '90s, while we were making The Last Express. Which is such a perfect expression of what Passover is - a set of stories that's told and retold by each generation, stories becoming nested within other stories, gaining resonance from the multiple layers. And Prince of Persia itself was of course inspired by the One Thousand and One Nights, which has that same structure of stories told within other stories, like the Haggadah. So it felt very natural to use that in the book, and to put three Seders together in a triptych, because it’s exactly what Replay is about.
Did the experience of creating Replay have an effect on you as a person? Do you feel like this has helped you connect more with your family's history?
I did most of the work of writing and drawing Replay in 2020 and ‘21. I was in France when COVID lockdowns started - separated by an ocean from my dad and the rest of the family in New York. So the book was a great excuse to talk on the phone a lot and ask questions. I really enjoyed those conversations with my dad. Some of my questions were technical, like about the Luftwaffe pilot he was friends with when he was 9 years old in Le Touquet during the occupation. Did he wear his uniform when he came over to the house? What kind of cap? Did he wear a belt with a pistol? I wanted to know those details to draw the scenes accurately. Often, reminiscing would trigger other memories, and spark conversations that were more philosophical, or that deepened my understanding or feeling about certain things.
I'm really happy to be able to share this book with my dad. At 93, I think it means a lot to him to see his childhood adventures put on paper, retold in this form by his son. I also enjoyed writing and drawing Replay purely on a day-to-day level, getting to revisit these places and episodes in my imagination. With my grandfather especially, I felt that researching Czernowitz and World War I to draw those scenes brought me closer to him. I can picture his experience more concretely now than I could just hearing his stories as a kid. Even drawing my own story, some recent events and losses that were painful, I found cathartic and in a way healing to revisit them within the bigger picture and timeframe of several generations. Not to say that writing and drawing a book needs to be therapeutic, but having come out the other end of Replay, I do feel more at peace, and reconciled to certain things.
Do you think you'll write and draw another book on your own?
For sure. Replay started as the culmination of about 15 years of sketching, drawing from life as a daily practice. At first for pleasure, but it became more than that. It was rediscovering a mode of expression that was primary for me as a kid. Now that I've got it back, I can’t imagine stopping. I don't necessarily plan to do another autobiographical book, or write about my family again. I love fiction, adventure stories and historical adventures, and I love collaborating as a scriptwriter with other artists. I expect I’ll continue to mix it up and work in different mediums and genres as I always have. But writing and drawing comics - definitely.
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The post “I’ve Rediscovered A Mode Of Expression That Was Important To Me As A Kid”: A Talk with Jordan Mechner appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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