The creator of “Prince of Persia” tells his life and career in comics

Pioneer of video games with karate (1984) and especially Prince of Persia (1989), game designer Jordan Mechner traces his life and career in repetition, a comic released before the summer. A story that intertwines with the turbulent fate of his father and his grandfather, Austrian Jews who fled their country during World War II.

“A comic strip is a way of reliving the past,” the author told BFMTV. “J’ai grandi avec ces histoires sur leur arrivée aux Etats-Unis. Mon grand-père me racontait ces choses qui s’étaient produites avant ma naissance en Europe de l’autre côté de l’océan. Elles semblaient me si lointaines. .. Until now.”

These stories shaped his imagination and fueled his passion for video games. “Since I grew up with these stories, I’ve always been fascinated by history and bygone times,” she insists. With repetitionGo back in time as the hero of Prince of Persia.

“It was a discovery to immerse myself in his world,” he explains. “repetition it evokes the dream of replaying the most difficult episodes of our lives, like in a video game. Time is at the center of video games, but also of comics. They are trades where the matter of work is time.”

In line with “Maus”

All his life, Jordan Mechner has waited to tell this story. “I knew that one day I would find the right way to format this.” But you can’t do that in a video game. “I couldn’t have done it any other way than in the comics. In a comic, you can tell things in a very simple way.”

“Drawing my grandfather on the Russian front during World War I would be difficult in a video game. In the comics, I can easily draw him and then mix my grandfather’s voices with my own. You can’t do that in a movie. It would seem forced. , whereas in the comics it happens naturally.”

In line with maus by Art Spiegelman AND Me René Tardi, prisoner of war in the Stalag IIB by Tarditwo comics about the memory of the Second World War and the difficulty of the survivors to transmit it, repetition confronts the memories of Jordan Mechner’s joyful childhood with the hectic lives of his ancestors.

“I was wondering how to mix my daily life with these stories of immigrants and wars,” he explains. “To tell their stories, it was also about being the kid who hears those stories, showing that I existed because of what they had been through and because they had survived.” And to add:

“It’s probably a common sentiment among descendants of immigrants, but it seems like our problems aren’t much compared to what they went through. When they were kids, my grandfather and father were in danger. For a long time I felt that whatever I did , , would never matter the same.”

“Prince of Persia” next in series?

While exploring the major events of his life, Jordan Mechner discovered an unsettling connection between the story told by his video games and that of his grandfather: “When I started programming on the Apple II at age 14, in 1978, my grandfather finished writing his autobiography. at the same time.”

Jordan Mechner also unknowingly coded Prince of Persia an element that had marked his grandfather’s life several decades earlier. “There are things in history that repeat themselves,” discovered this self-taught man who learned to draw only as a child.

You’ve put your past in order, but you still don’t know what the future will hold. his creation Prince of Persia could be reborn from its ashes and experience a new adaptation on the screens: “I think that now we should make a streaming television series, like games of throne. It would be more suitable than a feature film.”

A new open-world game with current technologies would also be interesting, but Jordan Mechner can’t talk about it: “Even though I’m the creator of the original game, I can’t control everything,” he says, before adding: “We often announce games when they are already very advanced.”

Jordan Mechner dedicates his time to comics. The screenwriter has many projects: a modern version of Monte Cristo for Glénat and an evocation of Beaumarchais’s past as an arms dealer, author of The Marriage of Figaro, during the American Revolution for Delcourt. “Now that I’ve taken command, I’m not going to give up.”

Replay, Jordan Mechner, Delcourt, 320 pages, 29.95 euros.