As Adam Derman once told me in a letter (about Karateka): “You dumb shit. The whole time, Mechner is aware that he’s strangling the golden goose. Meanwhile, Prince of Persia will go on to sell 2 million units and receive praise as “the first cinematic platformer” and “one of the greatest video games of all time”.

So it’s September 1990 and he’s playing gofer on a student film set fetching coffee. He’s already been rejected, but he’s hoping he can hang out around film students and learn something anyway. A full year after initial release, Mechner is at NYU. It’s like if Brian Armstrong took a year off from founding Coinbase to pursue acting, while Coinbase was already taking off.Įven once the game finally ships, Mechner worries it will flop, and continues to mope around. It would be crazy enough if this was a backwater origin story, but it’s happening in parallel with all of his greatest technical accomplishments.

Applies to NYU film school, gets rejected.

Drives out to Skywalker Ranch, meets George Lucas, fails to get his script acquired.

Takes 6 months off to write a screenplay.

In the course of making Prince of Persia, Mechner: It’s a dying shriek fading into darkness.

The fact that Mechner turns out to be deeply wrong about all this does nothing to diminish the death knell-quality of this whole project. He’s like a self-destructive Jeff Bezos, fully prescient, but choosing to pursue the worst possible market at the worst possible time. How “nobody knows how long the games market will be around”. He writes incessantly about how the games business is “dying up”. He already made a best selling video game in college, but is now filled with doubt, living with his parents, and trying to write a screenplay. Mechner begins the saga as an unlikely hero. With apologies to Kevin Kwok, they are all drastically inferior. Under lockdown alone, I’ve gotten through The Power Broker (Pulitzer), Isaacson on DaVinci (#1 NYT) and American Prometheus (Pulitzer). Least I sound like a rube for lionizing a video game designer’s diary, I promise I have read the “good” biographies too. I started at 10pm last night, stayed up until 2am to finish it, then until 4am to play Prince of Persia on an emulator, went to bed, woke up, and then immediately read the book a second time to write this review. It’s also flat out the best biography I’ve ever read. It is not a polished accounting, but merely his diary from the time he spent working on Prince of Persia, starting with his college graduation, and concluding 4 years later. Jordan Mechner’s The Making of Prince of Persia avoids this trap by being written in real time. Certainly, not after they’ve aged into has-beens reminiscing on the glories of their youth. People should not be trusted with writing their own legacy.

Prince of percia comic book