Video Rewind: Jordan Mechner: Pioneering game designer on creating Prince of Persia, Karateka, and a new graphic novel memoir

0:00Hi, folks. Aaron and I have been on the road this week recording some in-person episodes in Portland, Oregon with Ryan Coulter, co-founder of the James brand, and the wonderfully hilarious graphic designer Aaron Draplin. We're excited to bring you these episodes soon, and in the meantime, we're rewinding to one of our favorite episodes this year with Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner. You may have heard that we're publishing more video from our episodes, and you can now find a video version of this episode on YouTube. Just head over to dbtr.co.com to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Enjoy!

0:56of imaginary audience is out there and that's what I'm making all these things for. As a kid in the 80s, I fell in love with games on computers like the Apple II, Commodore 64, and later the Amiga and Macintosh. One of the very first games I played was called Karateka, which was inspiring for the realistic movements of its digital karate antagonists, even on an old black and green Apple II monitor. Our guest today, Jordan Beckner, created Karateka while an undergrad at Yale University in 1984, and it went on to be a commercial success. He followed it up with the game Prince of Persia. You just heard a clip from the soundtrack of the intro here, which Jordan's father composed and which Jordan invented a way to transpose onto the Apple II's tinny speakers before game soundtracks were widespread on the machine.

1:43Jordan documented the creation of the game in a wonderful published version of his diaries called The Making of Prince of Persia, and we spoke with him about how he taught himself the skills to build successful video games in a pre-internet era, why he journaled about his work process and what it taught him, and about his new graphic novel, Replay, a memoir recounting his own family story of war, exile, and new beginnings. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Willard. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed.

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3:14We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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4:21And now, back to the show.

4:28Jordan Mechner, welcome to the Design Better podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. It's a real honor. We were chatting a little bit before we hit record, and I didn't know your name at the time, but growing up, you were kind of a hero to me because I grew up in the 80s and 90s, started playing computer games back on the Apple II. It wasn't even a black and white monitor. like a black and green monitor. These are things I have to explain to my kids. They're like, what? What the heck? It doesn't make any sense. But playing Karateka, which I think many people called Karateka back then, loved that game.

4:59It was just so different from many of the other Apple games of that era. And then when Prince of Persia came out, my brothers, I have three younger brothers, and I just spent many, many hours playing, exploring that game. And again, it was a sort of paradigm shift because of the way that you created it. It just felt so fluid and realistic. and it was just a notch above many of the games of that era. So maybe we could kind of start back there because I'm certainly curious about how you taught yourself those skills to build successful games. And I did listen to a few shows that you were in and you mentioned copying games.

5:33To me, that's interesting because a lot of very well-known artists started copying art to kind of understand the fundamentals and basics and you kind of copied an Asteroids game, as I understand it, to get your starting point.

5:45Jordan Mechner:Yeah, I mean, I really learned programming while typing programs in BASIC from books and magazines into the computer and then running them and then modifying them, tweaking them. And then when I got serious enough about programming to want to really do an ambitious project in machine language with high-rise graphics, my first idea was to just basically knock off the arcade games that I enjoyed playing. There were Space Invaders and then there was Asteroids. That was the state of the art for games at the time when I was starting to learn the program games on the Apple II. So yeah, my first really ambitious project was an Asteroids knockoff.

6:22Jordan Mechner:And I hoped that I would actually get it published because the most successful game a couple of years before that had been Space Invaders, Apple Invader. And I don't know how they did it, but it was just like the arcade Space Invaders. And so I thought if I can do the same thing with Asteroids, that'll be my ticket. But yeah, what you said before, I think it's really natural starting out in any medium, especially when you're a kid, to just start by copying the things that you like. I mean, when I was six years old and starting to draw my first comics, I drew Batman and Robin and I drew Walt Disney characters.

6:54The things that I really liked and things that I dug, I wanted to be able to do that. Storytelling is a big part of what you've done from the beginning, too. Is that also something that you found your way into as a kid?

7:07Jordan Mechner:Yeah, I think storytelling is really the common denominator of all of the media that I've worked in. Making video games for sure, but also screenwriting, writing short stories. And now lately what I'm doing most is writing and now drawing graphic novels, comics, in a way that's bringing me back to the first thing that I tried to do as a kid, which was because I was 13 years old when the Apple II came along. So before that age, I didn't think about programming or making games just because there weren't any. I already loved comics and novels and short stories and movies when this new medium of video games came along.

7:43And so it took me a little while to realize that games weren't just fun to play,

7:47Jordan Mechner:that this actually was an audiovisual storytelling medium, like movies, like animation. So those things kind of converged. You mentioned, again, in this interview, which we'll link out to, but when you're making Karateka, that initially you had the idea that it would sort of be just like a one-on-one karate match to opponents. against each other, but then you realize at some point that building a story would make it much more compelling. What made you realize that? That was really an evolution over a few years from the Asteroids clone to Karateka. I mean, really all of that was in a period of two years from like 1980 to 82 when I started designing and programming Karateka.

8:26Jordan Mechner:But between the two, after Asteroids, I didn't get published for the reason that Atari kind of woke up to what was going on that all of these game publishers were ripping off their coin-op games and selling them on floppy disks. So their lawyers sent threatening letters, including to the publisher that I'd already signed a contract with that was going to publish my asteroids. And so they backed down as that was sort of an industry-wide shift. So I was like, all right, can't do the arcade games. I'll do an original game. And so the first original game that I came up with was called Death Bounce.

8:55Jordan Mechner:It was basically asteroids, but instead of shooting at space rocks that wrapped around the edges of the screen, you were shooting at these bouncing colored billiard balls. It was kind of a combination of asteroids and pool. I sent that to Broderbund, which was my favorite software publisher. They had published Apple Galaxian, which was one of the first full color high res machine language games, which had totally blew me away. And it was a bestselling Apple game at the time. So I sent them Death Bounce and Doug Carlston, one of the founders of Broderbund, called me back and said, you know, this is a very well-programmed game, but this kind of arcade style shoot-em-up game is a little bit last year.

9:35Jordan Mechner:The game that we're having the biggest success with right now, Choplifter, has a more engaging story. And he sent me a copy of Choplifter. Did you play it at the time? This was 1980. I did. Yeah, I love that. I love that game too. Yeah. Yeah. Super fun. Yeah. Choplifter, when I played it, it really impressed me because it had smooth graphics and you're flying a helicopter trying to rescue hostages it was basically a kind of a pixelated version of the hostage crisis that happened a few years earlier so you're flying this helicopter around in the desert trying to rescue these people and they were a little like eight pixels high but they were running and they would wave to you like hey come save me and if you missed them and they got squashed or blown up you kind of felt bad like oh he's counting on me and I didn't save him.

10:22And so that really impressed me that even though there were just pixels on

10:25Jordan Mechner:a screen, I was feeling, you know, emotionally engaged, you know, kind of a little attachment to these characters as if I were playing a movie. Plus the smooth scrolling was kind of a multi-plane scrolling effect. You have, of course, the Apple II version that was possible with 1982 technology, but still it felt cinematic to me. And so I thought, okay, we don't have to be copying arcade games. We can make games that are really using the fact that this is a computer because all the arcade games were oriented towards getting high scores, you know, to get an extra man, an extra ship. And the idea was to get people playing forever, just putting in quarters, addicted to the game.

11:00You don't want the game to ever end. You want to make as much money from it as possible.

11:04Jordan Mechner:That was the coin-op publisher's idea. But with a game on the Apple II, the customer has already bought the game on a floppy disk. And Choplifter was actually a self-contained experience. It was a story which could have an end. There were 64 hostages. And once you'd, I mean, if you got a perfect score. You rescued all of them. And then it said the end on the screen, not game over and go on to the next more difficult level, just the end as if you had successfully reached the end of a story. And so that kind of opened my eyes to the fact that you could have a game that would also tell a story at the same time and that would have a cinematic feel and that would engage players emotionally the way that an animated movie did.

11:41Jordan Mechner:And so Choplifter led to Karateka. That took me two more years to bring that game to completion. I was in college at the time. I was, I guess, 18 when I started and 20 years old when it shipped in 1984. And in the course of developing Karateka, it kind of started out like two guys fighting, you know, in karate outfits, fighting each other on a mat, getting points. And then it sort of became more and more story-based and all of the things that didn't contribute to the story, I kind of cut out along the way until it was just this very clean thing. You know, there was no score, there were no numbers, there were no extra lives.

12:17It's just, you're in this situation,

12:19Jordan Mechner:your true love has been kidnapped by the evil warlord who's taken her to his mountain castle, and you have to fight your way into the fortress, save her, and be reunited. That's the story. And by the time it was finished, I had kept doubling down on that cinematic aspect, using rotoscoping to create the animation. My dad composed music for the game. Most Apple II games at that time didn't have music, but he would play the music on Steinway piano, and then I would transcribe the note values into bite values. There was cross-cutting and scrolling, and so it was really like a little interactive animated movie.

12:53What you're describing is amazing. It's kind of hard for maybe younger folks to understand how little what you're describing that you're doing was documented. There weren't so many books or there was no web that you would go get to learn this stuff. So you're figuring this out on your own, clearly a very passionate and curious person. Also fascinating that your dad's involved and want to talk about that. But I don't know, could you tell us a little bit about like what you were like at this age and then what success early on did for you or did to you? Because I mean, that is also very unique to be so devoted and so successful at a young age.

13:39Jordan Mechner:I mean, I was a freshman in college at this point. And, you know, like most 17, 18-year-olds, I was kind of worried about what I was going to do in life and was I going to be successful at it. So I had always wanted to tell stories and make animated movies. And, you know, I had grandiose fantasies of becoming a film director, like George Lucas or Walt Disney. But then I would think, but that's completely unrealistic. What are the odds that I would ever succeed in that? You know, I should do something more practical. And programming seemed like a skill that, well, at least I could get a job doing that.

14:13Jordan Mechner:But I wasn't really interested in programming for its own sake. I'd never been a particularly technical kind of kid. I didn't really know how a radio worked or how a car worked or any of that. I was more into art and drawing and telling stories and writing fiction. That was kind of my passion. And so the computer came along and it just hooked me because the computer was a way to make interactive animated movies, whereas the animated movies that I was making with Super 8 Film at the time weren't really impressing anybody. They certainly wouldn't impress any adults. You could see that a kid had made it.

14:48Jordan Mechner:But when I made games on the Apple II, because it was so new, the technology was so new and the art form was so new, I felt like my games were approaching the quality of what I saw in computer stores at that time, selling games on floppy disks in Ziploc bags, which progressed over the next couple of years to cardboard boxes. So this feeling of being on the forefront of something new was exciting to me. And because I was in college, I sort of had all of these other influences. Like I read very widely. Like I was into classical music. I was into art and art history and then world history, politics.

15:23Jordan Mechner:I was pretty voracious in what I was reading. And I was obsessed with movies, by the way. So at the time that I was in college, programming these games, Death Bounce and Karateka, instead of going to classes, the other thing I was doing instead of going to classes was seeing movies, like hundreds and hundreds of movies at the college film societies, which we would project on 16 millimeter film. So I think that if Karateka was different from other games on the Apple II at that time, it's partly because my influences were so different. I mean, I had played the other Apple II games that were out there, but programming in itself and other kinds of games like tabletop games and strategy games, that wasn't really where I was coming from.

16:02Jordan Mechner:I was more interested in movies and film. And the visual look of Karateka was informed by Japanese woodblock prints. Like I knew about Hokusai and the Mount Fuji print. And I literally stole his Mount Fuji and kind of in a low-res pixel form, you know, that's the background of Karateka. You would not be the first nor the last to lift the hook side of Mount Fuji. Yeah. Getting back to my dad, I think that's interesting too because he was even further from the world of video games than I was. I mean, he was European. He was born in Vienna in 1931, and he was a research psychologist before becoming an entrepreneur.

16:38Jordan Mechner:You know, he was a classical pianist. He had done oil painting. He played chess. He was very much from that old world. And so here, you know, his son has this Apple II computer, which is this new thing. But, you know, he sort of got right away that this was something new. So when I would come home for the school breaks, I would show him what I was doing and he would look at it. And although he never played a game in his life and still hasn't to this day, he actually contributed many ideas. For example, he was the one who said, this is like a little movie, but it doesn't have music. Wouldn't it be more dramatic if you could add music to it?

17:08And my first answer was like, yeah, it would be. That would be nice. but look, the Apple II has this little tiny speaker and all I can do is make it click. And I have to freeze the animation to get a click out of it. The technology is not really there yet. And he said, well, but your game has beeps, you know, and the beeps all have different tones. It was like, yeah, because if you toggle the speaker at different frequencies, you can change the pitch. So he said, well, if you play a series of beeps of different pitches, that's music, right? And so we kind of worked on it and figured out the values from zero to 255 that correspond to the notes.

17:39and then he actually composed the music for Karateka.

17:49And his references were Wagner operas, you know, with the leitmotif approach, where you have a love theme and a hero theme and a villain theme. So while I was ripping off Asteroids and he was ripping off Wagner, all of these influences combined, and I think the fact that they were such weird and diverse sources of inspiration kind of combined to create something that was new at the time. That is very cool. Super cool. And while we're still on the topic of your early career, let folks know that you journaled a lot of what you did, creating both Karateka and Prince of Persia. And that's actually, I first got to know about you.

18:23I think it was actually on John August's podcast, who's a screenwriter. He mentioned this book, The Making of the Prince of Persia. And it's just a wonderfully done book. Lots of like illustrations and photos and screen captures of your work. Obviously for me, there's a lot of nostalgia, which is part of what attracted me, but just also kind of getting a peek into your creative process as you sort of evolved as both a game designer and later getting into film and your graphic novels. Just really wonderful. And you don't often get that with a lot of artists. I mean, one person that comes to mind who did something somewhat similar is Brian Eno.

18:57He has a, it's called, I think, a diary with swollen appendices. And it's a journal, like of his day-to-day work. It's really good. Yeah, it's worth checking out. And he talks about working with U2 and, you know, many of the other artists he's done for Working For. So there's some similarities there. But what caused you to think of like, man, I should journal what I'm doing from a very young age or just kind of stumble upon it?

19:19Jordan Mechner:I mean, keeping a journal is something that I had sort of done off and on throughout my childhood and early teenage years. But I always, at a certain point, I would look at what I'd written and then I would just be embarrassed and I would throw it out. Because like when I was 13, I was like, oh God, I don't want to read this juvenile stuff that I wrote when I was 11. And so I had stopped and started. I don't really know what made it stick. This journal that I started a few months into my freshman year of college, but I'm sure, you know, a big thing was that my roommate, Ben Normark, was keeping a journal.