For New Yorker
Jordan Mechner, The Last Express is the culmination of a
long career of combining his talents of creating a wonderful
story with a truly interactive entertainment title.
Jordan's fascination with computers began as a sophomore in high school when a friend got an Apple II. He began spending all his spare time at his friend's house until he could save enough to get his own.
By 1982, he had created some 50 games, mostly for his own amusement. However, he selected a favorite, Deathbounce, and sent it off to Broderbund Software, which was making a name for itself as a game publisher. Co-founder Doug Carlston was sufficiently impressed to call the young high school graduate and encourage him. Broderbund was in the process of releasing Choplifter, destined to become an all-time arcade classic. Carlston sent him a copy, and it was revelation to the young programmer. "Choplifter was the first game I'd ever seen that had emotion as well as action," Mechner said. "The little on-screen characters looked frightened, or they'd wave at the helicopters trying to rescue them. It gave me a whole new vision of the possibilities."
He began experimenting with computer animation, working on Karateka, a martial arts action/strategy game. To achieve lifelike action, he copied movements from specially shot film of a martial arts master. To heighten the movie-like effect, he used scrolling backgrounds and film techniques such as cross cuts. "I think I may have been the first to use cross-cutting in a computer game," he says. "Instead of keeping just one 'camera angle,' I would, for example, cut from the hero to a shot of an approaching villain and then back to the hero again to create excitement." He also wrapped the game in a suspenseful storyline: a young karate student returns to his village and must overcome obstacles and opponents to rescue his bride-to-be from the clutches of an evil warlord.
He hit the jackpot on his first try, and Karateka became an extraordinary success, eventually selling over 400,000 copies worldwide.
For the next few years, Mechner concentrated on getting his degree from Yale, graduating in 1985 with a major in psychology. After graduation, Mechner spent the next several months writing two screenplays in addition to starting work on Prince of Persia, an Arabian Nights action game with highly realistic animation. Once again, he worked from film clips and studied classic swashbuckling movies.
Prince of Persia received rave reviews, especially for its animation. One reviewer called it "the Star Wars of its field." Others hailed it as "superb", "fantastic", and "an unmitigated delight." With two hits under his belt, Mechner took time out for an intensive film course at NYU. Next, he moved to Salamanca, Spain, to learn Spanish in preparation for making a documentary in Cuba. After shooting the film, Waiting for Dark, he moved to Paris for post production work.
While he was temporarily focusing on film, he had not forgotten about computer games. He had also been outlining a sequel to Prince of Persia called Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame, which released with even more cinematics than its predecessors, reflecting recent advances in computer sound and animation.
Following the completion of Prince of Persia 2, Jordan formed his own game development group, Smoking Car Productions, headquartered in San Francisco. Smoking Car combined a variety of software development and film talents to begin developing the most ambitious project yet, The Last Express.
Available for release in April, The Last Express combines the rotoscoped live-action animation and real-time excitement of Prince of Persia with incredible exploration, puzzle-solving challenge and 3D visual splendor. The Last Express allows the player to move freely through a rich and detailed virtual world. The fluid, constantly-changing way that characters react to the player's actions- even to his mere presence as an observer- create a sense of real-time suspense and unpredictability that puts The Last Express far beyond traditional adventure games.