← Design Better
Design Better
Video Rewind: Jordan Mechner: Pioneering game designer on creating Prince of Persia, Karateka, and a new graphic novel memoir
00:24:57
We speak with Jordan Mechner 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.
Loading summary
Transcript24 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi 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 YouTube to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Enjoy.
- [00:37]
B
For an artist, it's important to have your own internal metric of success, which is why am I doing this? What do I want to achieve or what do I want to communicate? If something works, it can bring delight to an audience of millions or an audience of hundreds. Whatever I'm making, I'm always making it for one person. I don't know who, but this kind of imaginary audience is out there and that's what I'm making all of these things for.
- [01:03]
A
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, Jordan documented the creation of the game in a wonderful published version of his diaries called the Making of Prince of Prince 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 Wooler.
- [02:11]
C
And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better. Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. You get four episodes per month rather than just two. All are ad free and you get invited to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com that's designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. It's just seven bucks a month and it supports not only your personal growth, it also supports your design community. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription right now, just shoot us an email@subscriptions the curiosity department.com and we'll help you out. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Design Better is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio and now back to the show.
- [03:45]
A
Jordan Mechner, welcome to the Design Better podcast.
- [03:47]
B
Hi. Thanks for having me.
- [03:49]
A
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 with its it wasn't even a black and white monitor, it was like a black and green monitor. These are things I have to explain to my kids. They're like, what? What the heck? Doesn't make any sense. But playing Karateka, which I think many people called Karateka back then, loved that game. It 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. That just felt so fluid and realistic and it was just a notch above many other 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 to 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 asteroid game, as I understand it, to get your starting point.
- [05:01]
B
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 res graphics. My first idea was to just basically knockoff 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 to program games on the Apple ii. So yeah, my first really ambitious project was an Asteroids knockoff. 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 6 years old and starting to draw my first comics, I drew Batman and Robin and I drew Walt Disney characters. The things that I really liked and things that I dug, I wanted to be able to do that.
- [06:16]
C
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?
- [06:24]
B
Yeah, I think that 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. And so it took me like a little while to realize that games weren't just fun to play, that this actually was an audio visual storytelling medium, like movies, like animation. So those things kind of converged.
- [07:11]
A
You mentioned again in this interview, which we'll link out to, but when you're making Karateca, that initially you had the idea that it would sort of be just like a one on one karate match, two opponents against each other. But then you realized at some point that building a story would make it much more compelling. What made you realize that that was.
- [07:29]
B
Really an evolution over a few years from the, the Asteroids clone to Karateca? I mean really all of that was in a period of two years from like 1980-82, when I started designing and programming Karateka. But between the two, after Asteroids 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 back 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. It was basically Asteroids, but instead of shooting at space rocks that wrapped around the edge 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. It was one of the first full color, high res machine language games which had totally blew me away. And it was the best selling Apple game at the time. So I sent them Deathbounce. And Doug Carlston, one of the founders of Broderbund, called me back and said, this is a very well programmed game, but this kind of arcade style shoot em up game is a little bit last year 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?
- [09:03]
A
I did, yeah. I love that. I love that game too. Yeah, yeah. Super fun.
- [09:06]
B
Yeah. Choplifter, when I played, really impressed me, you know, because it had smooth graphics, you know, you're flying a helicopter trying to rescue hostages. It was basically a kind of a pixelated version of the hostage crisis that had happened a few years earlier. So you're flying this helicopter around in the desert trying to rescue these people, and they were little like 8 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 was counting on me and I didn't save him. And so that really impressed me that even though there were just pixels on 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, it was kind of a multi plane scrolling Effect, 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. You don't want the game to ever end. You want to make as much money from it as possible. 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. And so Choplifter led to Karatega. 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, you know, there was no score, there were no numbers, there were no extra lives. It's just you're in this situation, you know, 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, you know, 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 you know, he would play the music on Steinway piano and then I would transcribe the note values into byte values. There was cross cutting and scrolling. And so it was really like a little interactive animated movie.
- [12:10]
C
What 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.
- [12:56]
B
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. Like, and programming seemed like a skill that was. Well, you know, at least I could get a job doing that. But I wasn't really interested in programming for its own sake. I'd never been a particularly technical kind of kid. Like, 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. 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 at computer stores at that time. Selling games on floppy disks in Ziploc bags, which progressed over the next couple of years to cardboard boxes. And 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. 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 Balance and Karateca, 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. 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. I literally stole his Mount Fuji and kind of in a low res pixel forum, you know, that's the background of Karateka.
- [15:36]
C
You would not be the first nor the last to lift the Hokusai Mount Fuji.
- [15:41]
B
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. You know, he was a classical pianist, he had done oil painting, he played chess. You know, 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. Like, 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? And 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, the beeps all have different tones. I 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 0 to 255 that corresponded to the notes. And then he actually composed the music for Karateka. And 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.
- [17:27]
C
That is very cool.
- [17:28]
A
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. I 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 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 get that with a lot of artists. I mean, one person that comes to mind who did something somewhat similar is Brian Eno. He has what'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 YouTube and many of the other artists he's known 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 did you just kind of stumble upon it?
- [18:35]
B
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 Ed 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, and he had been doing that for a long time. And I saw he was writing in his journal at the end of every day. That impressed me. And so I thought, oh, that's real discipline. And he's been doing it for a long time. So he has this record of high school and all of the things he thought and felt and how his friendships evolved. And so I was like, all right, I'm going to do it, too. And I think on the first page, I was like, all right. You know, my goal is to basically just keep it up and to not throw it out, to not destroy it when I get fed up with it. And I never thought I was going to show it to anybody. I certainly never thought I was going to publish it. This was just something I was doing for myself. I mean, it was about 20 years later by then I was much older, and I felt distant enough from my teenage self that I was like, you know, it was just coincidence that the period when I started keeping this journal coincided with creating Karateca and then Prince of Persia, you know, on the Apple II, which by that point, 2010, I realized, okay, this is actually sort of a piece of a period in computer history, in video game history, that's gone. And so this is a valuable record of that time and how these games were made, and also just what the world was like, what the industry was like, and that it could maybe be interesting for young game developers, but also for anybody in a creative field to read. Because I was always interested in reading journals by creators. There aren't that many of them at this time. In the 80s, when I was in college, when I was making Karateca or by then I was doing Prince of Persia, I remember reading Steven Soderbergh's journals of the making of Sexualized and Videotape. He was young, too. He was, you know, an indie filmmaker who had just had this big success, and he published his journal of the making of the movie with all of the things that go wrong and all of the frustrations and the pain. And, I mean, I devoured that because I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to be an independent filmmaker and make a movie like Sexualized and Videotape. So to see how he did it and also what he'd been up against, that was just gold. Such valuable information. I mean, There are other journals. Michael Palin of Monty Python kept journals and you can find them. And they're great because he goes from just before Monty Python to doing Monty Python to having this be this huge, insane success and how that changed all of their lives. And then all of the people are in there. So I just love this. It's just raw information, you know, it's not like a biography where somebody kind of is interpreting their life and shaping it in such a way that, you know, then I learned this lesson and the journal is just like what they wrote while it was happening at the end of the day. And it's unfiltered. So, you know, it was pretty easy to make the decision to take. I mean, not all of my journals, but the parts that were about game design and, you know, filmmaking and sort of my creative evolution and publish them.
- [21:45]
C
One thing that's interesting about journaling is that it sort of creates a facsimile of yourself where you can look at it and it is you. And also it doesn't feel like you because the self is constantly evolving. I wonder if, looking back at those journals, if there was anything that you learned about the way that you learn or the way that you make that you might not have seen had you not journaled.
- [22:13]
B
Oh, absolutely. And it's an ongoing learning process. I mean, I think I started learning from my journals while I was keeping them because, like, sometimes I would.
- [22:23]
C
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. Once you do, you'll get access to every full length episode, all ad free monthly AMAs with inspiring people in design and tech and recordings of all our past AMAs. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription, just email us@subscriptionsecuriositydepartment.com and we'll help you out. Your support makes design better possible. Invest in yourself and the design community by subscribing@designbetterpodcast.com clients want it all. A slick looking site that can run their business and scale with their success. Well, WIX Studio is built just for that. Plan out your client's whole site in seconds with AI powered site mapping and wireframing. Then when everyone's on the same page, you can jump into the creative stuff. Starting off in Figma or in WIX Studio Editor with super precise layout tools like Grid Stack and Flexbox. Go above and beyond the brief with no code, animations, custom CSS and built in business solutions make your whole vision responsive in just a single click. It's super easy and there's zero need to break a sweat when clients grow fast. A dynamic CMS with global design settings and reusable assets lets you turn one page into hundreds, design smoother and deliver sooner. Go to wix studio.com that's wix studio.com DesignBetter is supported by MasterClass three years ago I took up guitar and have been studying every week with a teacher. It's brought up a lot of questions for me about how to pour my creativity into the music that I'm learning. So I took Tom Morella's Masterclass and it's opened my mind to how a guitar is can make some amazing sounds. Tom's band Rage against the Machine is a total inspiration to me and now I know how he approaches his music creatively. It's really inspiring me. I'm jumping into other masterclasses soon. I can't wait to learn how to tell a great story with Big Short and Moneyball author Michael Lewis and how to apply the principles of improv to your life with Amy Poehler. With Masterclass you can learn from the best to become your best. They have plans Starting at just 10 bucks a month, billed annually that will get you unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs, designers and more. You can turn your commute or your workout into a classroom with audio mode. You can listen to Masterclass lessons anytime anywhere. Masterclass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. So you should head over to masterclass.com designbetter to see the current offer that's up to 50% off@masterclass.com designbetter masterclass.com designbetter it also makes a great gift.