Episode Details

Jordan Mechner, best known for the classic games Prince of Persia and Karateka, founded his own games development company in 1993 to create a point-and-click adventure game. This game, The Last Express, was released in 1997. With its fascinating aesthetics, the unusual World War I setting and real-time gameplay, The Last Express stands out as a unique game experience.

This conversation with Jordan was conducted by Christian Schmidt on Tuesday, August 13th 2019 via VoIP call. Gunnar and Christian, the hosts of Stay Forever, had previously covered The Last Express in episode #89 (in German) of the Stay Forever podcast. Stay Forever is Germany’s leading podcast on retro gaming.

Full interview transcript:

This transcript of the original interview is edited for clarity and better readability.

Stay Forever: Dear listeners of the Stay Forever podcast, in today’s episode we have a very special guest, and I am tremendously excited to talk to him; not only is he the creator of several highly esteemed and influential games classics such as Karateka, Prince of Persia, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, he is also one of the very few game designers who are at home in the art of movie-making, and indeed his games have from the beginning on been outstanding examples of a confluence of gameplay and cinematic technique. And this person if of course Jordan Mechner. Hello, Jordan!

Jordan Mechner: Hi! Thank you. Happy to be here.

Stay Forever: So happy to have you on the show! We’re meeting today to speak about one of your games in particular, and that game is The Last Express from 1997. We’ve covered the game extensively in a recent episode and we reached quite a few points where we wondered “Why was that particular design decision made?”, and so we decided to ask the person best qualified to answer these questions, which is you. I hope!

Jordan Mechner: Well, it’s my pleasure. I’ll be happy to talk about The Last Express. It’s a game that’s close to my heart.

Stay Forever: To put this into some context, can you outline what your role was for The Last Express and what responsibilities that entailed?

Jordan Mechner: Sure. I co-wrote the script with Tomi Pierce and founded Smoking Car Productions, a small game development company in San Francisco, for the express purpose of making the game. And so, for about four years, I was the game designer, director and also CEO of the company.

Stay Forever: Quite a few hats that you were wearing.

Jordan Mechner: Yeah, you can say that.

Stay Forever: So you’re saying “a small development company”. But to my understanding, the game grew to quite a size for a development team of that era.

Jordan Mechner: Yeah, it got a bit out of hand. It was a small company in the sense that we only had one project, which was The Last Express. But yeah, the size of that project really blew up past what I had imagined in the beginning. I think if I had had any idea how big it would get, I would have thought twice.

Stay Forever: Okay, we’ll come back to that. But let’s jump to the origin of The Last Express, because that story starts quite a few years earlier than 1997, and it starts with you living in Paris. Now, the last time we saw you, you were working at Brøderbund in California. How did you end up in Paris?

Jordan Mechner: It was a couple of years after Prince of Persia had shipped and I’ve been