A prince from a foreign land.

Jaffar. The Princess. Swords. Spikes & flames. Leaping and hanging off perches.

For a certain vintage and certain half-generations, these are evocative words. They conjure old images from what was often the first experience (at least mine) that a video game could be fantastical, have both action and a narrative.

This was the 1989 game Prince of Persia. It then went on to become quite the franchise, including a flashy Hollywood adaptation starring Jake Gyllenhall, but it will always be PoP the game for me (I actually played more of Prince of Persia 2 with its vibrant colours and more sophisticated graphics).

All of this swirled back into my radar in the most unexpected and charming way recently, when I stumbled upon this video from Jordan Mechner , the creator of the original Persian prince, or as one gushing commenter said, “You are Prince of Persia’s DAD?! ?????? ?? literally in love with your game! ??”.

In this archive from around 35 years ago, we see the VHS recording of the ‘model’ he used to craft most of the Prince of Persia’s distinctive physical actions and body language.

See The Leaps.

These clips are amazing to watch, because they suddenly give human form to an animation memory from my childhood. Animation I never once would have contemplated had a human boy behind it. Now years later, I wonder how hard it would have been to rotoscope (trace out animated sequences from a video clip) from this VHS footage.

As it turns out, this human is his younger brother, who aged 15, was asked to model as a young man traversing an alien land.

There is a wonderful rabbit hole to go down here. Vignettes from Mechner’s youth, linked to the creation of the game. How it all began with an Apple II and a video camera ; how it was a whole two years into the development of the game before Jordan’s friend Tomi finally convinced him that swordfighting would make a great addition to the game (that kind of combat wasn’t in the plan till then!) ; how he now did not have his brother around to model for the swordfighting / fencing sequences, so he tried it out himself, saw it wasn’t great, then ‘stole’ from a scene in the classic 1938 film “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.

Another great behind the scenes clip is the video for the game’s finale, where he filmed a colleague’s daughter in her prom dress with the game’s producer.

See The Hug.

Oh, but he also used his Dad (two years earlier) for another game.

“Dad, you think you could…?”

These and more are great glimpses on Jordan’s social feed from his new graphic novel ‘Replay’, which has a much more epic scope than ‘merely’ the making of the Prince of Persia. Its best described by him,

“The story of how Shadowman was born, and Prince of Persia became a running-jumping-swordfighting game, is told in my graphic novel memoir REPLAY – interwoven with my dad's childhood odyssey as a 7-year-old Jewish refugee in Nazi-occupied France, 50 years before he composed the music for Prince of Persia.”

The book released recently in English. (Jordan has been living in France since 2017, and has also co-created a modern retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, which looks promising!).

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