How Jordan Mechner gave himself permission to tell his family story in Replay, a must-read graphic novel

Jordan Mechner, known as the creator of Karateka, Prince of Persia and The Last Express, has cultivated a multidisciplinary career: video games but also movies, documentaries, and graphic novels.

His latest work, Replay: Memories of an Uprooted Family, marks his first time as writer as well as illustrator, and it's also a very personal story. Replay is an autobiography and, as such, offers very interesting insights into the creation of Karateka, Prince of Persia, the video game industry in the 80s and even a AAA Prince of Persia reboot developed by Ubisoft Montpellier but sadly cancelled in 2019.

But Jordan's life is interlinked with the life of his own family, based upon his grandfather's memoirs: Hundreds and hundreds of pages Mechner digitised on WordPress and later turned into draws, because "drawing you can express things that you can't say in other ways".

The graphic novel released last year in French, and has just been published in Spain by Garbuix Books. In a recent presentation in Madrid, Mechner explained the memories of his grandfather, Adolf, are a "gift", but it took him a while to realise it.

Jordan Mechner tells this story to honor what his parents and grandparents went through

His Jewish family, fled Austria during the Nazi occupation. Most of his cousins didn't survive. Both his grandfather and his father, Francis Mechner (still alive and a renowned psychologist) had to leave everything behind. An anecdote that perhaps saved their life is that Mechner's grandfather happened to have bought some of Hitler's earlier paintings, which he used to "buy" their way out of Austria.

Meanwhile, Jordan, born in New York in 1964, spent all his childhood under the same roof and had the luxury to devote his life to the arts, something every gamer should be thanful for.

For a long time, Jordan had doubts about "having the right to tell this story", until he gave himself permission because "part of the reason my parents went through what they did is for their children to have a normal life".

"No matter what situation we live in, we dont chose it. We have to the most out of what we have. I have been incredibly lucky and the best way to honor them is to do the only thing that I know".

As for that cancelled Prince of Persia reboot (which, according to Mechner's own book, was later transformed into a different IP before being cancelled completely) Mechner believes "all unmade projects are in a cloud, and it's best to leave them there. It is best to leave a little bit of mistery and play the games that we have".

Special thanks to Madrid in Game, a video game campus, for organising this special talk with Jordan Mechner on the occasion of the release of Replay's Spanish print.