Jordan Mechner

Jordan Mechner (born June 4, 1964) is an American video game designer and former video game programmer who has also worked on writing and filmmaking projects. He began his career designing and programming the 1984 cinematic martial arts game Karateka for the Apple II while a student at Yale University. He followed that with the cinematic platform game Prince of Persia five years later; it was widely ported and became a hit. Both games used rotoscoping, where actors shot on film by Mechner were drawn over to create in-game animation.

In 1993, Mechner founded Smoking Car Productions to develop The Last Express, which required a large team and suffered budget overruns. Unlike his previous games, it did not sell well. Prince of Persia was revived by Ubisoft as a multi-game franchise, beginning with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2003. Mechner wrote the initial drafts of the screenplay for the 2010 film of the same name, directed by Mike Newell.

In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.