Jordan Mechner

Jordan Mechner was born in New York City on 4 June 1964 into a family of European Jewish immigrants. Still a student at Yale, he wrote and programmed Karateka for the Apple II in 1984; five years later came Prince of Persia, whose running, jumping figure was animated by filming his own brother on Super 8 and tracing the frames — rotoscoping brought into games, and the ancestor of every fluidly animated platform game since. Prince of Persia was ported to almost every machine of its era and became a franchise that is still in production, with The Sands of Time in 2003 and The Lost Crown in 2024. He received the Game Developers Conference Pioneer Award in 2017, and now writes graphic novels; Replay won the Cheverny prize for historical graphic novels in 2023.